NOTEWORTHY DEATHS

— Renowned director of Bonnie and Clyde

Arthur Penn, the three-time Oscar-nominated director best known for Bonnie and Clyde, died Tuesday, a day after he turned 88.

Penn died of congestive heart failure at his New YorkCity home, said his daughter, Molly. A veteran of directing live television dramas in the 1950s, Penn made his film directorial debut with The Left Handed Gun, a 1958 revisionist Western starring Paul Newman as Billy the Kid.

Penn, who was often attracted to characters who were outsiders, directed only a dozen other feature films over the next three decades, including The Miracle Worker, The Chase, Mickey One, Alice’s Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves, The Missouri Breaks and Four Friends.

But during his heyday in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Penn was in the vanguard of American filmmakers and is considered a pivotal figure in American cinema thanks to Bonnie and Clyde, the film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as Depression-era bank robbers-turned-folk heroes.

“Had he only directed Bonnie and Clyde, he’d bea director of note,” film critic Leonard Maltin told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “But that was simply the most successful of these highly individual, often idiosyncratic, films that he made in his heyday.”

Penn was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 27, 1922. His older brother, Irving, later became an internationally renowned photographer. He died in October 2009.

Penn, a former president of the Actors Studio in New York, married actress Peggy Maurer in 1956. They had two children, Matthew and Molly. His wife and children survive him, as do four grandchildren.

Arkansas, Pages 14 on 09/30/2010

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