Background and career
Michael Antonio Cimino Jr. ( chim-EE-noh, Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo tʃiˈmiːno]; February 3, 1939 – July 2, 2016) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer and author. Notorious for his obsessive attention to detail and determination for perfection, Cimino achieved widespread fame with The Deer Hunter (1978), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. With a background in painting and architecture, Cimino began his career as a commercial director in New York before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s to take up screenwriting. After co-writing the scripts for both Silent Running (1972) and Magnum Force (1973), he wrote the preliminary script for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). The latter became his directorial debut and one of the highest-grossing films of that year. The accolades received for co-writing, directing, and producing The Deer Hunter led to Cimino receiving creative control of Heaven's Gate (1980). The film became a critical failure and a box-office bomb, which lost production studio United Artists an estimated $37 million. Its failure was seen by many observers as the end of the New Hollywood era, with studios next shifting focus from director-driven films toward high-concept, crowd-pleasing blockbusters. More recently, however, Heaven's Gate has undergone a dramatic reappraisal, even being named by BBC Culture as one of the greatest American films of all time. Cimino made only four subsequent films and grew infamous for the number of projects left unfinished due to his uncompromising artistry. In 2002, Cimino claimed he had written at least 50 scripts overall. Several of his ambitious "dream projects" included adaptations of the novels Conquering Horse, The Fountainhead and Man's Fate as well as biopics on crime boss Frank Costello and Irish rebel Michael Collins.
Cimino publicly shared few details of his early life and family background and is believed to have given false birth year information. Many Cimino biographies thus include inaccuracies about his early years, as well as his background in filmmaking. Cimino's presumed birth date was February 3, 1939. A third-generation Italian-American, Cimino and his two younger brothers, Peter and Edward, grew up with their parents in the town of Westbury, on Long Island. He was regarded as a prodigy in early private education, but rebelled as an adolescent by consorting with delinquents, getting into fights, and coming home drunk. Of this time, Cimino described himself as
always hanging around with kids my parents didn't approve of. Those guys were so alive. When I was fifteen I spent three weeks driving all over Brooklyn with a guy who was following his girlfriend. He was convinced she was cheating on him, and he had a gun, he was going to kill her. There was such passion and intensity about their lives. When the rich kids got together, the most we ever did was cross against a red light. His father was a music publisher. Cimino says his father was responsible for marching bands and organs playing pop music at football games. "When my father found out I went into the movie business, he didn't talk to me for a year," Cimino said. He was very tall and thin... His weight never changed his whole life and he didn't have a gray hair on his head. He was a bit like a Vanderbilt or a Whitney, one of those guys. He was the life of the party, women loved him, a real womanizer. He smoked like a fiend. He loved his martinis. He died really young. He was away a lot, but he was fun. I was just a tiny kid.His mother was a costume designer. After Cimino made The Deer Hunter, she said that she knew he had become famous because his name was in The New York Times crossword puzzle. Cimino graduated from Westbury High School in 1956. He entered Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. At Michigan State, Cimino majored in graphic arts, was a member of a weightlifting club, and participated in a group that welcomed incoming students. He graduated in 1959 with honors and won the Harry Suffrin Advertising Award. He was described in the 1959 Red Cedar Log yearbook as having tastes that included blondes, Thelonious Monk, Chico Hamilton, Mort Sahl, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and "drinking, preferably vodka." In Cimino's final year at Michigan State, he became art director, and later managing editor, of the school's humor magazine Spartan. Steven Bach wrote of Cimino's early magazine work:
It is here that one can see what are perhaps the first public manifestations of the Cimino visual sensibility, and they are impressive. He thoroughly restyled the Spartan's derivative Punch look, designing a number of its strikingly handsome covers himself. The Cimino-designed covers are bold and strong, with a sure sense of space and design. They compare favorably to professional work honored in, say, any of the Modern Publicity annuals of the late fifties and are far better than the routine work turned out on Madison Avenue. The impact and quality of his work no doubt contributed to his winning the Harry Suffrin Advertising Award at MSU and perhaps to his acceptance at Yale University. At Yale, Cimino continued to study painting as well as architecture and art history and became involved in school dramatics. In 1962, while still at Yale, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve. He trained for five months at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and had a month of medical training in Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Cimino graduated from Yale University, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1961 and his Master of Fine Arts in 1963, both in painting. After graduating, Cimino moved to Manhattan and was given a job by Pablo Ferro with a small company that produced documentary and industrial films: "They taught me how to use a Moviola. I operated the Moviola and swept the floors and I was hooked — I decided to become a filmmaker." During this time, he also took ballet classes and studied under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio once every week in order to better understand how actors performed.
Within eighteen months of directing TV ads, he was hired by Madison Pollack O'Hare to work on special assignments involving "graphic design concepts and unusual approaches to live film". While there, he handpicked the best cameramen MPO employed to shoot his commercials, including Gordon Willis and Owen Roizman, before either rose to fame. He directed ads for L'eggs hosiery, Kool cigarettes, Pepsi, Canada Dry and Maxwell House coffee, among others. "I met some people who were doing fashion stuff – commercials and stills. And there were all these incredibly beautiful girls," Cimino said. "And then, zoom – the next thing I know, overnight, I was directing commercials." Few of Cimino's early commercial work survived. One of his more successful commercials was shot for United Airlines in 1967. Taking a song called "Take Me Along" from the short-lived Broadway musical, he created an ad in which a group of housewives plead, musically, to their husbands to take them along on their business trips. The commercial is filled with the dynamic visuals, American symbolism and lavish set design that would become Cimino's trademarks. Later that year, he made his most famous commercial; for Eastman Kodak, called "Yesterdays", which went on to win several awards that year. The elaborate commercial took six days to shoot — two on an intricately built set in New York and four on location in Connecticut. Cimino apparently shot close to eight thousand feet of film, which was whittled down to 2 minutes. Although the ads he made were considered among the most prestigious in the industry, they became increasingly costly. "The clients of the agencies liked Cimino," remarked Charles Okun, his production manager from 1964 to 1978. "His visuals were fabulous, but the amount of time it took was just astronomical. Because he was so meticulous and took so long. Nothing was easy with Michael." At the height of his commercial career, Cimino met Joann Carelli, then a commercial director representative, and the two began to date. Encouraged by Carelli, Cimino began to write screenplays, despite no background in writing. To be more prolific, Cimino sought out collaborators to work with, including poet Thomas McGrath and playwright Deric Washburn, who had produced a one-act play off-Broadway. Washburn later recalled that there was always a big distance, socially, between him and Cimino:
"I remember trying to get to know him a little better. A friend had a house in Poughkeepsie, and I invited him up for the weekend. He shows up in his Rolls-Royce, and he's not comfortable there. But he wanted something from me, I think. Mike and I got closest when we started talking about a story. Then it was amazing. It was like one person. It was like a dance. We could boil together." Thomas McGrath and Cimino co-wrote two scripts together, Paradise and Kef. McGrath also gave Cimino a copy of the 1959 Frederick Manfred novel Conquering Horse, tracing the history of the Dakota Indians in America before the arrival of the white man, which Cimino would go on throughout the rest of his life to try and make into a film.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
