Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco in 2008
Born	(1939-07-30) July 30, 1939 (age 77) Kingston, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Film director, actor
Spouse(s)	Polly Platt (1962–1971) Louise Stratten (1988–2001)
Children	Antonia Bogdanovich Sashy Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich (Serbian: Петар Богдановић, Petar Bogdanović, born July 30, 1939) is an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic and film historian. He is part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola. His most critically acclaimed and well-known film is the drama The Last Picture Show (1971).

Bogdanovich also directed the thriller Targets (1968), the screwball comedy What's Up, Doc? (1972), the comedy-drama Paper Moon (1973) and the drama Mask (1985). His most recent film, She's Funny That Way, was released in 2014.

Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, the son of Herma (née Robinson)(1904-???) and Borislav Bogdanovich (1899-1970), a painter and pianist. His Austrian-born mother was Jewish whose family moved from Vienna to Zagreb, Croatia in 1932, while his father was a Serbian Orthodox Christian; the two arrived in the U.S. in May 1939.

In the early 1960s, Bogdanovich was known as a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich showcased the work of American directors such as Orson Welles and John Ford—whom he later wrote a book about, based on the notes he had produced for the MoMA retrospective of the director—and Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan. Bogdanovich kept a card file of every film he saw between 1952 and 1970, with complete reviews of every film.