FOG BLOG ENTERTAINMENT LOG: FAMOUS DIRECTOR PETER BOGDANOVICH DIES AT 82:

Peter Bogdanovich, director of Paper Moon, The Last Picture Show, dead at 82...Oscar-nominated director heralded as a 'champion of cinema' who 'birthed masterpieces'....Peter Bogdanovich, the ascot-wearing cinephile and director of 1970s black-and-white classics like The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, has died. He was 82.

Bogdanovich died early Thursday morning at this home in Los Angeles, said his daughter, Antonia Bogdanovich. She said he died of natural causes.

Considered part of a generation of young "New Hollywood" directors, Bogdanovich was heralded as an auteur from the start, with the chilling lone shooter film Targets. Soon after in 1971, The Last Picture Show, his evocative portrait of a small, dying town, earned eight Oscar nominations, including best director and best adapted screenplay for Bogdanovich himself, and won two (for actors Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman) and catapulted him to stardom at the age of 32.

He followed The Last Picture Show with the screwball comedy What's Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, and then the Depression-era road trip film Paper Moon, which won 10-year-old Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as well.

His turbulent personal life was also often in the spotlight, from his well-known affair with Cybill Shepherd that began during the making of The Last Picture Show while he was married to his close collaborator, Polly Platt, to the murder of his Playboy Playmate girlfriend Dorothy Stratten and his subsequent marriage to her younger sister, Louise, who was 29 years younger than him.