Peter Bogdanovich, legendary director and The Sopranos actor, dies at 82

The Hollywood Reporter

An iconic director, film scholar and actor, Bogdanovich died early this morning of natural causes. He became an A-list director with 1971's The Last Picture Show, which earned him two Oscar nominations, and went on to direct well-regarded films What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. Later on, Bogdanovich became prominent as an actor, from playing other characters on The Simpsons and 8 Simple Rules to playing himself on Moonlighting -- starring his ex-girlfriend and The Last Picture Show star Cybill Shepherd -- and How I Met Your Mother. Bogdanovich most famously recurred on The Sopranos as Dr. Elliott Kupferberg, Dr. Melfi's therapist. He discussed being part of The Sopranos world, including directing a 2004 episode, just last year on the Talking Sopranos podcast. As a film scholar, Bogdanovich spent more than an hour interviewing Sopranos creator David Chase. "Well, it started when I did a guest shot on a show called Northern Exposure, for which the showrunner was David Chase, the guy who conceived The Sopranos," Bogdanovich told The Film Stage in 2018 of getting involved with The Sopranos. "He saw (my) dailies, and he said to me, 'Have you acted before?' And I said, 'I started as an actor – at 16 I was acting professionally! Why?' And so I had a couple days in Seattle playing myself for an episode, basically, and I met him there. And then seven years later he calls me and says, 'We’re doing a second season of a show called The Sopranos. We’ve got a therapist character who’s having so much trouble with Tony Soprano that she needs a therapist, and we were wondering if you could do that.' I told him I’d love to. So he said, 'Come on down and meet the writers,' and so I went on down and met the writers, auditioned, and got the part. They wrote me into sixteen episodes, and I loved it! I also directed one of the episodes – one that I wasn’t in. It was great fun – David wrote it (with Matthew Weiner), and I loved doing it." In 2020, Bogdanovich helped kick off Turner Classic Movies' first podcast, The Plot Thickens: I’m Still Peter Bogdanovich. In recent years, Bogdanovich had a recurring role on Epix's Get Shorty as the elderly father of Ray Romano's character.