Jeremy Thomas died on Friday, September 11, at his country home in Oxfordshire. He was 77. His team said in a statement that he passed peacefully, surrounded by family and loved ones, according to reports carried by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

If you know one Jeremy Thomas credit, it's probably The Last Emperor. His 1987 collaboration with Bernardo Bertolucci swept the Academy Awards that year, taking home nine Oscars including best picture, and picked up the BAFTA for best film too. It was one of five films Thomas made with Bertolucci over 17 years, a partnership that anchored a career built on backing directors other financiers wouldn't touch.

He founded Recorded Picture Company and later co-founded HanWay Films, and across more than 80 features he produced work by Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast), David Cronenberg (Crash), Christopher Hampton (A Dangerous Method) and Nagisa Oshima (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence). The list of directors he worked with reads like a syllabus for anyone who cares about films that don't play it safe: Jim Jarmusch, Werner Herzog, Terry Gilliam, Richard Linklater, Karel Reisz, Takashi Miike, Matteo Garrone, Jerzy Skolimowski, Ben Wheatley, Wim Wenders. Several of those were repeat collaborations that ran across decades, not one-off jobs.

From the cutting room to Cannes

Thomas was born in London in July 1949, into a family already deep in the business. His father Ralph Thomas directed more than 40 films including the Doctor series, and his uncle Gerald Thomas directed every Carry On picture. Jeremy started in the cutting rooms straight out of school, working on The Harder They Come and Family Life before editing a Ken Loach TV short in 1973. He'd wanted to direct. He ended up producing instead, and his first credit was 1976's Mad Dog Morgan, shot in Australia when he was 27.

Recorded Picture Company's first release was Skolimowski's 1978 horror The Shout, which competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes and won the Grand Prix. Cannes stayed a fixture of his working life. In 2021 he was the subject of Mark Cousins' documentary The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, built around his own trips to the festival over the years. He also appeared recently in Luca Guadagnino's Joie De Vivre, a documentary about Bertolucci that premiered in Venice.

Speaking at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August 2025, Thomas talked about the industry he'd watched change around him. "I was at the tail end of the golden age of cinema, when films made money in the cinema before VHS was even thought about," he said. "And to continue working, to continue being relevant, I have to mutate. And that's a fact, and I accept it."

He was still working right up to the end. Herzog's Bucking Fastard, which Thomas produced, played in competition at Venice this year, and Miike's Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, another of his credits, is set to have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14.