Mel Stuart, an
award-winning documentarian who also directed Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, has died.
He was 83.
His daughter, Madeline Stuart, said he died Thursday of cancer at his home in Los Angeles.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Stuart was associated with David L. Wolper, with whom he established a base of West Coast documentary production at a time when New York filmmakers and TV networks' news divisions dominated the field.
Stuart's documentaries during those years include The Making of the President 1960, for which he won an Emmy, as well as subsequent explorations of the campaigns in 1964 and 1968. Other programs were The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the Oscarnominated Four Days in November.
His groundbreaking 1973 film Wattstax focused on the Wattstax music festival of the previous year and Los Angeles' Watts community in the aftermath of the 1965 riots.
The 1971 musical fantasy Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder, was Stuart's response to a young reader of the Roald Dahl children's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That fan was Stuart's daughter Madeline, who asked her dad to make a movie of the book she loved. With Wilder as Willy Wonka (and 11-year-old Madeline in a cameo role as a student in a classroom scene), it became an enduring family favourite.
