British director Donald Cammell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1934, came from a wealthy shipbuilding family. He began his career as a painter and by the mid-'60s was celebrated among the "Swinging London" crowd. He made his foray into the film industry when he wrote the script for The Touchables (1968), a painfully pretentious--and, seen today, terribly dated--tale of a rock singer kidnapped by four beautiful female fans. He followed that up with Duffy le renard de Tanger (1968), about an aging hippie who helps two brothers rob their rich father. His directorial debut came with Performance (1970), about a London gangster who hides out in the house of a strange rock star. The now cult-classic film starred Mick Jagger in one of his earliest dramatic performances. Cammell's Génération Proteus (1977) was intended to be a comedy, but the studio for some reason decided to turn it into a bizarre sci-fi thriller, which didn't really satisfy anyone, Cammell least of all.
He didn't make a film for ten years after "Demon Seed", when he directed the atmospheric White of the Eye (1987), about a serial killer. His final film as director, Wild Side (1995), was a thriller that was extensively re-edited by the producers. Cammell was so incensed with the result that he had his name taken off the credits, and it was credited to the non-existent "Frank Brauner".
In April 1996 a despondent Cammell committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
