“It has a positive feeling for life, an admiration for the characters’ abilities to go on after a horrendous experience and go on in a quiet way. For all its harrowing moments, Cimino considered it a hopeful work. The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, including best picture and best director. Streep’s then partner, John Cazale, also starred though his bone cancer was at an advanced stage, Cimino hid his illness from the studio and managed to get all the actor’s scenes filmed before he died. He was a masterful, intuitive director of actors, ensuring a consistency of performance from a cast that included Robert De Niro alongside relative newcomers Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken, who won an Oscar for his performance as the most sensitive member of the group. “In a strange way, the mills become a symbol of life,” he explained. The backdrop of the steel mills was crucial and evocative. The early scenes showing a raucous wedding party that spills into the deserted streets, followed by a haunting early-morning hunting trip, were especially fine, and proved that Cimino had a talent for expressing theme and emotion in visual terms.

These controversies could not overshadow the strength of the film-making, or the wealth of elegiac material that explored the men’s friendships with uncommon patience and tenderness.

Michael cimino actor