Still Alice writer/director Richard Glatzer dead at 63
By Nick Bond
Richard Glatzer, one-half of the writing/directing team behind one of the award season’s most acclaimed films, Still Alice, has died at the age of 63.
Along with his husband and creative partner Wash Westmoreland, Glatzer wrote and directed the award-winning drama, in which Julianne Moore plays a brilliant academic who quickly succumbs to early-onset Alzheimer’s at just 50 years old.
The film’s moving story mirrored Glatzer’s own real-life situation: he battled ALS, or motor neurone disease, with his condition deteriorating rapidly as he and Westmoreland made and promoted what was to be his final film.
Unable to attend the February 22 Academy Award ceremony to watch Moore earn her first Oscar for the film, Glatzer watched the telecast from his hospital bed.
Moore today shared a simple message in Glatzer’s memory, tweeting: ‘I love you Richard’, while Westmoreland paid a heartfelt tribute to his late husband:
I am devastated. Richard was my soulmate, my collaborator, my life. A true artist and a brilliant man. @stillalice pic.twitter.com/hSRriYMjhe
— Wash Westmoreland (@Washmoreland) March 12, 2015
Glatzer and Westmoreland had worked together since their first film collaboration, the 2001 gay porn industry satire The Fluffer. The pair married in September 2013.