Bill Gold, the artist whose work includes posters for Casablanca, A Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist, has died at the age of 97.
The Brooklyn-born illustrator died peacefully at his home in Connecticut yesterday, according to a family representative.
His career in Hollywood spanned a remarkable 70 years. Recruited into Warner Bros' advertising department in 1941 at the age of 20, his first posters were for the James Cagney musical Yankee Doodle Dandy and classic wartime romance Casablance.
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In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked with classic filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Elia Kazan, designing iconic artwork for hits including A Streetcar Named Desire and Dial M for Murder.
As his reputation grew, Gold became one of Tinseltown’s most esteemed movie artists, founding his own company and working on quintessential 1960s films including Bonnie and Clyde, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cool Hand Luke.
The end of the Golden Era did not slow down Gold’s output. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s he was busier than ever, working on everything from A Clockwork Orange to Clint Eastwood westerns to Fiddler on the Roof to groundbreaking horror The Exorcist.
His credits also include Bond flicks Diamonds Are Forever, For Your Eyes Only and Never Say Never Again.
Throughout his career, Gold was guided by the “less is more” philosophy, says The Hollywood Reporter.
“We try not to tell the whole story,” he once explained. “We try to tell a minimum amount of a story, because anything more than that is confusing.”
By the 1990s, he began to cut down his workload, but still produced posters for major movies including Unforgiven, The Bridges of Madison County and Mystic River. His final project was the 2011 biopic J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover, directed by Gold’s old friend Clint Eastwood.
“He respected the film, he respected the story, and he always respected what we were trying to accomplish,” Eastwood once said of Gold’s work.
“The first image you have of many of your favorite films is probably a Bill Gold creation.”
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