Nine Academy Awards, including best picture, went to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor in 1988, made possible by an independent British producer willing to gamble on international auteurs that mainstream studios passed over. Jeremy Thomas, who spent five decades backing directors other financiers would not touch, died peacefully at his home in Oxfordshire, England, on September 11, 2026, surrounded by family. He was 77.

Thomas was born in London in 1949 into a family already steeped in British cinema. His father, Ralph Thomas, directed the long-running Doctor comedy series, and his uncle, Gerald Thomas, directed every entry in the Carry On franchise. Jeremy Thomas took a different path, starting out on the cutting-room floor before founding his own company, the Recorded Picture Company, in 1974. Two years later he produced his first film under its banner, Mad Dog Morgan, an outlaw drama shot in Australia and directed by Philippe Mora Irish News.

Across the 1980s Thomas built the reputation that would define him: a producer who backed a film for its vision rather than its commercial safety. He made a trilogy with Nicolas Roeg, Bad Timing, Eureka, and Insignificance, and produced Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, starring David Bowie. Then came Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, which swept nine Oscars including best picture, the first of five films the two men would make together, among them The Sheltering Sky, starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger, Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty, and The Dreamers.

Thomas did not soften his instincts after the Oscar. In 1996 he produced David Cronenberg's adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Crash, whose Cannes premiere set off a public uproar and a screening ban from the Westminster City Council licensing committee. "I remember everything; it's indelibly marked in my mind," Thomas said of the reaction years later. Asked what he took from the experience, he put it more bluntly: "You want to know the moral of making a film like Crash? Wear a seatbelt."

In 1998 Thomas stepped to the other side of the camera just once, writing and directing All the Little Animals, starring John Hurt and Christian Bale, which screened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. He produced Jonathan Glazer's directorial debut, Sexy Beast, in 2000, and co-founded the sales and finance company Hanway Films. The festival that had made and unmade his films also trusted him with its own judgments: Thomas sat on Cannes's main competition jury in 1987 and returned in 2004 to preside over the Un Certain Regard jury.

Recognition followed the shape of his career, institutional more than commercial. The European Film Academy gave him its award for Outstanding European Achievement in World Cinema in 2006, and he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2009 New Year Honours Irish News. In 2019 he gave his personal archive, spanning Mad Dog Morgan through Ben Wheatley's High-Rise, including 35mm prints, production material, and posters, to the BFI National Archive, where it is catalogued as the Jeremy Thomas Collection. Two years later, filmmaker Mark Cousins followed him to the Croisette for the documentary The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, tracking a pilgrimage to Cannes that Thomas had by then made 45 years running. Even as the archive was being catalogued, Thomas kept adding to it, producing Miike's First Love, Jerzy Skolimowski's Oscar-nominated EO, and Viggo Mortensen's The Dead Don't Hurt in the years that followed.

Thomas kept working to the end. His last produced film, Werner Herzog's Bucking Fastard, starring the real-life sisters Kate Mara and Rooney Mara, premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival in September 2026. At the festival's press conference, Herzog said it was Thomas who had suggested casting the sisters as the film's onscreen sisters, an idea that finally unlocked a project the director had carried for roughly four decades, and called him "one of the dinosaurs of film production" Screen Daily. Thomas had also produced Takashi Miike's Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, which was awaiting its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Variety.

Thomas never ran a studio and rarely chased a hit. His currency was a director's trust, built one uncompromising film at a time across more than 80 credits and five decades, from an Australian outlaw picture to a nine-Oscar epic to a Venice competition premiere in his final year. What remains is the work itself: the Roeg trilogy, the films made with Oshima and Bertolucci, Crash and Sexy Beast and High-Rise, an archive he handed to the BFI so the prints and posters would outlast the deals that produced them, and the directors, from Bertolucci to Herzog, who kept finding reasons to call him back for one more picture.