When The Last Emperor won all nine Academy Awards it was nominated for in 1988, including Best Picture, it was the first Western feature film allowed to shoot inside Beijing’s Forbidden City, and it had been put together by an independent British producer. Jeremy Thomas died at his home in Oxfordshire on Friday, September 11, 2026, surrounded by his family. He was 77.
A film family
Thomas was born in London in 1949, the son of the director Ralph Thomas, who made the Doctor in the House comedies, and the nephew of Gerald Thomas, director of the Carry On films. He started as a film editor before producing his first feature in the 1970s. In 1983 he produced Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, with David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, the start of a career spent backing directors that big studios found difficult.
The Last Emperor and after
The Last Emperor told the life of Puyi, the last emperor of China, and its success made Thomas one of the most powerful independent producers in the world. He worked with Bernardo Bertolucci again on The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha, and with David Cronenberg on Naked Lunch, Crash and A Dangerous Method. He went on to produce Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, keeping one foot in Asian cinema for his whole career. He produced Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer’s first feature, which brought Ben Kingsley an Oscar nomination for his terrifying gangster Don Logan, Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise and Terry Gilliam’s Tideland and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. In all he made more than 80 films. Gilliam said Thomas loved making movies.
Champion of British cinema
Thomas served as chairman of the British Film Institute in the 1990s and was a long-time supporter of independent film-makers in Britain and Europe. He kept working until the last days of his life. His final film, Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, was due to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14, three days after his death.
Thomas spent fifty years proving that a producer working outside the Hollywood studios could make films on the largest scale. The Last Emperor remains one of only a handful of films to win every Oscar it was nominated for.