Toronto-born Sidney J. Furie has enjoyed an incredibly distinguished career that has spanned more than five decades. Having dabbled in every genre, Furie has directed films starring Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Robert Redford, Diana Ross, Michael Caine, Peter O'Toole, Rodney Dangerfield, Barbara Hershey, Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, Laurence Olivier, and countless others.
He directed the first two feature-length fiction films ever made in English Canada, A Dangerous Age (1957) and A Cool Sound from Hell (1959), both independently financed, before emigrating to London in 1960. In 1961, he directed five feature films in a single year, before finally scoring his first box-office success with The Young Ones (1961), starring "British Elvis Presley" Cliff Richard. The critical and commercial success of Furie's 1963 British New Wave film The Leather Boys, a kitchen sink drama starring Rita Tushingham and Dudley Sutton, delivered him to the attention of high-powered producer Harry Saltzman, who hired him to direct the groundbreaking film The Ipcress File (1965), which won the BAFTA award for Best Picture. Michael Caine became an overnight star because of the film's success. The film also screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Furie then emigrated to Hollywood to direct Marlon Brando in The Appaloosa (1966) and Frank Sinatra in The Naked Runner (1967) for Universal and Warner Brothers respectively. Paramount Pictures, then under the aegis of the new Gulf+Western management regime, hired Furie in 1967. Furie would work as a Paramount filmmaker for the next eight years. Beginning in 1968, he directed five films for the studio. His box-office hit Lady Sings the Blues (1972) was nominated for five Academy Awards, and was Paramount's second biggest money-maker that year behind only The Godfather.
In 1981, he directed The Entity (1983), a cult classic that was named by Martin Scorsese as the fourth best horror film ever made, ranking ahead of both The Shining and Psycho. He was assigned to direct Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in 1987, but was challenged by substantial last-minute budget cuts and a script he could not change (engineered personally by Christopher Reeve). Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he returned to his native Canada to helm a series of films, often direct-to-video pictures, ranging from the war drama Going Back (2001) to the Canadian-British co-production Global Heresy (2002), a comedy starring Peter O'Toole and Joan Plowright. Other career highlights include The Boys in Company C (one of the first Vietnam War pictures about combat soldiers, later to provide the basis for Full Metal Jacket), the underrated action epic Hit! (1973), and the Iron Eagle series. He has also maintained dual citizenship between the U.S. and Canada. In 2010, he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Director's Guild of Canada.
