French screenwriter Gerard Brach, who penned Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Quest for Fire” and “The Name of the Rose” and nine of Roman Polanski’s features, died Sept. 9 in Paris of cancer. He was 79.
In a nation where the writer-director is king, Brach stuck to scripting, providing the written templates for well-regarded visual stylists.
He worked often with Polanski, writing screenplays for his early films “Repulsion,” “Cul de sac,” “The Fearless Vampire Killers” and “The Tenant” up to later films “Tess,” “Pirates,” “Frantic” and “Bitter Moon.” For Annaud, he also wrote “The Bear” and “The Lover,” and worked with Marco Ferreri “Bye Bye Monkey,” Michelangelo Antonioni on “Identification of a Woman,” Andrei Konchalovsky on “Maria’s Lovers” and “Shy People” and Claude Berri on “The Two of Us,” “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Spring.”
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Brach stepped behind the camera only twice, in 1970 for “La maison,” starring Michel Simon, and a year later for “Le bateau sur l’herbe,” starring Jean-Pierre Cassel. Neither film made much of a commercial dent.
Brach, who was born in the Paris suburb of Montrouge, contracted tuberculosis at age 18 and spent five years in a sanatorium, reading voraciously and investigating the surrealism movement that would influence his work.
He worked as a production assistant in the 1950s, then as a publicist at 20th Century Fox from 1959-1962.
In 1963, Polanski asked him to write “La Riviere de diamants” for the omnibus film “The World’s Greatest Swindles” and a three-decade partnership was born.
Brach, who had agoraphobia from the early 1970s on, rarely left his Paris apartment, resulting in a mystical insularity some believe is reflected in his writing.
Annaud is currently in production on Brach’s final screenplay, the French-language “Sa majeste Minor,” (His Majesty Minor), lensing in Spain.
