Beloved film director Justin Hardy has died at the age of 61, has family has revealed, weeks before the release of his latest film
Justin Hardy has died aged 61(Image: Family handout/PA Wire)
Beloved film director Justin Hardy has died at the age of 61. The director had just completed a follow-up to his father Robin’s cult classic film The Wicker Man.
His new film Wrath Of The Gods is also set to premiere at FrightFest in Leicester Square on August 28. He died on Friday after suffering a heart attack, his devastated family have said.
They released a statement via PA, saying: “Our family is devastated to share that Justin Hardy passed away last night. He was so full of life right to the end, and incredibly energised to be working towards premiering his latest film this month.
“We are all so proud of him and heartbroken he won’t be with us at his premiere. He was a man of family, of boundless creativity, and of devotion for everyone he held dear.”
Robin Hardy was best known for the 1973 folk horror classic The Wicker Man. The film starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland sees a police office sent to the fictional Scottish island of Summerisle to deal with a case of a missing girl.
Justin’s brother Dominic told PA his sibling will be remembered as someone “with an incredible appetite for life”. Throughout Justin’s career he directed series and films including The Bill, Princes In The Tower, Trafalgar Battle Surgeon, The Relief Of Belsen, Spanish Flu: The Forgotten Fallen and London’s Burning.
He has received nominations for an Emmy and a Bafta. As well as being a director, he had began teaching screenwriting at University College London. Dominic went on: “He really became a filmmaker his own right, one who always brought the productions in under-budget, who got extraordinary performances, and who had a wonderful sense of narrative.”
He added: “I told him this repeatedly over the years, but I admired his work because it was profoundly humanist and always moved me to tears. We had a father who made a film that has a huge legacy, but Justin made hundreds.”
The brothers had released a documentary together in 2024. The production, titled Children Of The Wicker Man, detailed their complicated legacy with their father’s magnum opus. It saw him sacrifice his family life for a film that bombed at the box office before later becoming a cult classic.
Before their dad’s death in 2016, Robin had revealed he wanted to make The Wicker Man a trilogy. It came after he released The Wicker Tree in 2011.
The brothers were contacted about a potential third film after their dad’s death. Dominic said they saw this as the “impetus to close the chapter on the films”.
“After Children Of The Wicker Man, Justin was also going in a new direction and looking forward to writing more scripts,” Dominic said.
They then decided to wrap up their father’s film trilogy. And now, the Wrath Of The Gods, which was inspired by a concept discovered in a recently unearthed script written by Robin and stars Game of Thrones’ Francis Magee and Norwegian actress Christiane Schaldemose, is set ot be released.
The production follows a woman isolated on an island where she is “torn between the ghosts of the past and the gods of the present” before being forced to confront “dark family secrets lurking in the shadows”.
Dominic praised Justin’s work on the film, saying “he did an incredibly beautiful job” on it. He siad: “When he showed the final version to me, I said, ‘Now you have made a film with a capital F. It is your film. It is your vision’, and it settles the legacy of our father, who had invented a massive thing of the same name, but Justin made something humanist telling an important story.”
Justin is survived by his wife Larissa, and children Sam, Ludo, Nico and Summer.
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