MICHAEL CIMINO, born on this date (d: 2016) was an American filmmaker. One of the New Hollywood directors, Cimino achieved fame with The Deer Hunter (1978), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Born in New York City, Cimino began his career filming commercials and moved to Los Angeles to take up screenwriting in 1971. After co-writing the scripts of Silent Running (1972) and Magnum Force (1973), he wrote the preliminary script for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), which became his directorial debut, and one of the highest-grossing films of its year.

The critical accolades for co-writing, directing, and producing The Deer Hunter in 1978 led to Cimino receiving creative control for Heaven’s Gate (1980). The film became a critical failure and a legendary box-office bomb, which lost production studio United Artists an estimated $37 million. Its failure was widely credited with Hollywood studios shifting focus from director-driven films towards high-concept, crowd-pleasing blockbusters. In recent decades, Heaven’s Gate has been dramatically reappraised, being named by BBC Culture as one of the greatest American films of all-time, and by critic Robin Wood as “among the supreme achievements of the Hollywood cinema.” His final feature film was The Sunchaser, released in 1996. Up until his death, he continued to work on films that were ultimately never made.

in the early nineties, Cimino began to present as a woman with the aid of a wig seller and cosmetologist named Valerie Driscoll. Working with Driscoll, Cimino went by the name of Nikki; their sessions, Driscoll told Elton, took place in the course of a few years, through 1996, when she closed her wig shop. During their visits, Cimino told her that he was “a caregiver to an elderly couple in Beverly Hills and lived in their guesthouse.” Driscoll refers to Cimino as Nikki, by the pronouns “she” and “her.” In public, Cimino continued to appear as Michael through the end of his life; in private, Cimino’s gender identity seemed fluid. “I think she was questioning herself, what she was doing,” Driscoll said. “ ‘So now what? Should I just go back to being Michael?’ ”

Cimino died in July 2016, at age 77, at his home in Beverly Hills, California. No cause of death has ever been disclosed to the public.