Antonio Margheriti

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia   Antonio Margheriti 19 September 1930 4 November 2002 also known under the pseudonym Anthony M Dawson was a prolific Italian filmmaker He was born in Rome and died in 2002 from a heart attack in Monterosi Viterbo near Rome at the age of 72 Margheriti started out in the Italian film industry in 1956 as a screenwriter He started directing in 1960 his first film being Spacemen aka Assignment Outer Space Margheriti is known for his science fiction horror spaghetti western and action movies He was the director of such cult movies as Cannibal Apocalypse Castle of Blood The Virgin of Nuremberg Assignment Outer Space Wild Wild Planet Naked You Die Mr Super Invisible The Last Hunter Battle of the Worlds and numerous others Most of his films were directed under the pseudonym of Anthony M Dawson He stopped using his real name in the USA early in his career when he realized the English translation of the name Antonio Margheriti was Anthony Daisies and he thought it sounded too effeminate He was the only Italian director who worked directly for American production companies like MGM United Artists 20th Century Fox Columbia Pictures etc with films like Yor the Hunter from the Future Take a Hard Ride Killer Fish etc Margheriti said his actionadventure films were his favorites and his least favorite movies were the swordandsandal peplum films he made in the early 1960s such as Devil of the Desert and Giants of Rome For years director Richard Morrissey disputed Margheritis claim that he had directed Andy Warhols Frankenstein in the early 1970s saying that Margheriti was mostly just a technical advisor on that film Morrissey said Margheriti did however direct a very very brief segment of the movie mostly the scenes involving the two children roaming around in the lab Margheriti worked with many wellknown genre actors such as Lee Van Cleef John Saxon Claude Rains John Morghen Klaus Kinski Barbara Steele Reb Brown Donald Pleasence Yul Brynner David Warbeck Luciano Pigozzi Marvin Hagler Terence Hill Fred Williamson Christopher Lee and many others Most of his later films were shot in the Philippines especially his war films Margheriti also collaborated on the special effects in two Italian cult films which he did not direct Sergio Leones Fistful of Dynamite 1971 and Aldo Lados The Humanoid 1979 Margheriti retired from filmmaking in 1996 at age 66 He died in 2002 of natural causes Margheritis son Edoardo and his daughter Antonella are both also involved in filmmaking Eli Roths character in the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Bastards took Margheriti as his namesake Description above from the Wikipedia article Antonio Margheriti  licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia