The director who had a heart attack and blamed it on Madonna: “I am fucking angry”
Judging by the amount of on-set feuds between actors and directors, as well as the sheer amount of filmmakers who have garnered rather difficult reputations, there’s no denying that making a movie is a stressful experience. You only have to watch movies about filmmaking to glimpse an understanding of the myriad of issues that can come to infect a production – look at François Truffaut’s Day for Night or Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep.
It seems as though making a film can drive some directors to breaking point, and for one legendary filmmaker, it was the demands placed upon him by Madonna (so he claimed) that he blamed for his heart attack. It was 1999, and the singer-turned-actor was cast in The Next Best Thing, starring alongside Rupert Everett as a pair of best friends, Abbie and Robert, who decide to raise Abbie’s baby together after she gets pregnant.
The film was initially going to be directed by Tom Ropelewski, who also wrote the screenplay, but in the end it was the Oscar-winning filmmaker John Schlesinger who signed on to the project. It would be his last film before he died in 2003, and unfortunately, it was terrible. It’s hard to believe that someone as celebrated as Schlesinger made The Next Best Thing, which earned five Razzie Award nominations, winning one for Madonna.
Schlesinger rose to prominence in the 1960s with the kitchen sink dramas A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar, with the latter becoming one of the most heralded British films of all time. He went on to make other acclaimed films like Darling and Far From the Madding Crowd, although it was Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, that earned him an Oscar.
He went on to make more acclaimed films over the coming years, like the pioneering queer film Sunday Bloody Sunday. However, by the 1990s, the filmmaker seemed to have lost his spark. Receiving bad reviews from the likes of 1993’s The Innocent and 1996’s Eye for an Eye, The Next Best Thing was the final nail in the coffin, leaving Schlesinger not only on the receiving end of negative reception, but also in a hospital bed.
Shortly after wrapping up production on the film, the director, who was in his mid-70s, had a heart attack. According to the New York Daily News, Schlesinger wrote letters during his stay in the hospital that detailed how Madonna was, to his belief, one of the reasons for his poor health.
He wrote, “I am fucking angry with [producer Tom Rosenberg] being influenced by Madonna. I do not for one moment think that their behavior has not added to the reasons I have ended up here.”
Additionally, Frederic Raphael – a screenwriter who penned Schlesinger’s Darling (winning an Oscar for it) and Far From the Madding Crowd – shared a letter to the director in his memoir, Last Post, which detailed the uncomfortable production. “You were no longer a director with whom it was a privilege to work. You worked for them and they had you know it.”
“There’s a nasty, twisted donnée in the mastering of a one-time master by two quasi-stars who take their pleasure in the knowledge that he has a job only because they chose him,” Raphael wrote to Schlesinger. It seems as though The Next Best Thing was a very unfortunate final production for Schlesinger, who would pass away just three years later.
