British filmmaker Justin Hardy has died at the age of 61, just weeks before the release of his new film.
Hardy suffered a heart attack and died on Friday night, his family has confirmed.
He was the son of Robin Hardy, director of 1973 cult classic movie The Wicker Man, and was due to release his new film, Wrath of The Gods, on August 28.
In a statement, they said: ‘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.’
They added: ‘He was a man of family, of boundless creativity, and of devotion for everyone he held dear.’
Speaking to PA, Dominic Hardy said his brother Justin would be remembered as someone ‘with an incredible appetite for life’.
After reading history at Oxford University, Hardy went on to study film at Bournemouth and then scriptwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Throughout his 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 was also nominated for an Emmy and a Bafta, and in recent years had been teaching screenwriting at University College London.
‘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,’ Dominic said.
Reflecting on his brother’s career, 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.’
Robin Hardy’s folk horror classic The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodward, Sir Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland, sees a police office sent to the fictional Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate a missing girl.
In 2024 the brothers released the documentary Children Of The Wicker Man, which detailed their complicated legacy with their father’s magnum opus, which saw him sacrifice his family life for a film that bombed at the box office before later becoming a cult classic.
After its initiallly catastrophic reception, Robin abandoned the family – saddled with debt – and left for the US in 1974.
‘It was a very sad time. Because, apart from everything else, I’m going: “Well, where’s Dad? Are we going to see him tomorrow? Are we going to see him next week?” And my mother said: “I have no idea. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know how to reach him,”,’ Hardy toldMetroof the turbulent time in 2023.
Before his death aged 86 in 2016, Robin Hardy had spoken publicly about his desire to complete The Wicker Man trilogy after he released The Wicker Tree in 2011.
After he died, the brothers were contacted and asked about plans for the third film, which Dominic said they then saw 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. Releasing later this month, Wrath Of The Gods 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.
It follows a grieving woman who returns to Hel Island to bury her later husband after he kills himself, but finds herself ‘torn between the ghosts of the past and the gods of the present’ after the locals turn on her for being a symbol of bad luck and evil.
When children start disappearing, the island is forced to reckon with its dark history of familial abuse and the sinister forces of the sea, according to Screen Daily, on the threequel’s launch at the Cannes Film Festival market in May.
‘He did an incredibly beautiful job with Wrath Of The Gods,’ Dominic, an art historian at the University of Quebec in Montreal, said of his brother’s final work.
‘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.’
When the brothers last caught up in London a few weeks ago, Justin told Dominic: ‘I really love writing projects like this and if I could write things like this for the rest of my career, that would be great.’
‘It’s just so sad that that’s not going to happen,’ Dominic added.
‘We’ve lost him and we’ve lost that larger-than-life presence looking over us all. But I think the fact he made Wrath Of The Gods and made something new was a great satisfaction to him.’
Justin Hardy is survived by his wife Larissa, and children Sam, Ludo, Nico and Summer.
Wrath Of The Gods will premiere at FrightFest in London’s Leicester Square on August 28.
