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Mike Hodges, Get Carter and Flash Gordon director, dies aged 90

Mike Hodges, the British director known for films including Get Carter, Croupier, The Terminal Man and Flash Gordon, has died at the age of 90.

Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian© Provided by The Guardian

Mike Kaplan, a longtime friend and producer on Hodges’ final feature film I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, confirmed his death to the Guardian. Hodges died at his home in Dorset on Saturday. A cause of death was not given.

Hodges’ career was bookended with British gangster films: Get Carter (1971) and Pulp (1972), then Croupier (1999) and his final film I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003). He was also known for his campy cult classic Flash Gordon.

Born in Bristol in 1932, Hodges first worked as a chartered accountant, then spent two years serving on a Royal Navy minesweeper around fishing ports in the north of England. It was there that he “witness[ed’] horrendous poverty and deprivation that I was previously unaware of”, an experience that he later said had informed Get Carter. “I went into the navy as a newly qualified chartered accountant and complacent young Tory,” he wrote in a letter to the Guardian, “and came out an angry, radical young man.”

He later entered show business as a teleprompter operator in British television, where he started observing how television was made. He began writing scripts and soon could quit his job with the number of commissions he was getting. He began producing and directing news and documentary series, then wrote, directed and produced two thrillers for ITV Playhouse Rumour and Suspect, which resulted in him being approached to adapt Ted Lewis’s novel Get Carter.

Set against a working class background in northern England, Michael Caine plays the titular London gangster who seeks his own form of justice after his brother is killed in Newcastle. Get Carter was a huge hit and was soon regarded as England’s answer to The Godfather.

Hodges is survived by his wife Carol Laws, his sons Ben and Jake, and five grandchildren, Marlon, Honey, Orson, Michael and Gabriel.