Henry Jaglom, the iconoclastic filmmaker whose improvisation-heavy dramas stood apart from studio norms for five decades, has died at 87. His daughter, filmmaker Sabrina Jaglom, said he passed at home in Santa Monica on September 22 with family present. Jaglom’s path ran through acting and the Actors Studio to an intimate, self-financed cinema that favored conversation, rehearsal-like staging, and ensembles drawn from friends and theater circles.
Early features included A Safe Place, which paired Jack Nicholson with Orson Welles, a collaborator and confidant who later became the subject of Jaglom’s published lunch tapes. His credits spanned Tracks, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, Sitting Ducks, Always, Last Summer in the Hamptons, and Festival in Cannes, films that charted relationships, artistic ego, and the business of show business with a talky, actor-forward style.
Born in London on January 26, 1938, to a Jewish family that fled Nazi persecution, Jaglom was raised in New York after his parents resettled in the United States. Before directing, he appeared on screen and worked in the cutting room; accounts from colleagues credit him among the editors brought in to shape Easy Rider, a landmark of the New Hollywood era.
He cultivated on-camera performances that blurred rehearsal and final take, often casting partners and friends and encouraging improvisation that divided taste but gave his work a distinctive cadence. He also wrote for the stage and, through the book of taped conversations with Welles, helped illuminate the late director’s final years.
Jaglom’s influence rested less on box office than on persistence: maintaining a decades-long pipeline of personal features through shifting markets, and giving actors roomy, sometimes messy spaces to play. In later years he explored heritage and identity in projects tied to family history. He is survived by his children; previous marriages to actors Patrice Townsend and Victoria Foyt ended in divorce.
