William Friedkin is an Academy Award-winning American movie and television director, producer, and screenwriter born in Chicago, Illinois. He is best known for directed The Exorcist and The French Connection in the early 1970s.
After seeing Citizen Kane as a boy, Friedkin became fascinated with movies and began working for WGN-TV right after high school. He started his directorial career doing live TV shows and documentaries. In 1965, he moved to Hollywood and two years later released his first feature film, Good Times starring Sonny and Cher. In 1971, he released The French Connection, a gritty cop film starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider and shot in a visceral, documentary style. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Friedkin followed up with 1973’s The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel about a little girl possessed by the Devil. It revolutionized the horror genre and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. A now overly confident Friedkin directed Sorcerer, a remake of the movie Wages of Fear, that came out around the same time as Star Wars. It was received negatively by critics and performed poorly at the box office. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his films received lackluster reviews and modest box office returns, although, his crime film, To Live and Die in L.A., starring William Petersen and Willem Dafoe, has become a critical favorite.
