'Fifty Shades' Director Dead Aged 71: Hollywood Film-Maker and Madonna Collaborator James Foley Dies After Long Brain Cancer Battle
Filmmaker James Foley has died aged 71 following a battle with brain cancer having been diagnosed last year.
May 9 2025, Published 2:49 p.m. ET
Hollywood director James Foley has died aged 71 following a battle with brain cancer.
RadarOnline.com can reveal the filmmaker, who directed the sequels from the Fifty Shades movie franchise, was diagnosed with the illness last year.
The filmmaker was best known for directing sequels in the Fifty Shades movie franchise.
And he also directed a number of videos starring superstar singer Madonna.
A representative confirmed that Foley died peacefully in his sleep earlier this week.
Foley helped launch the careers of Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon, who starred in his 1996 thriller Fear.
In the same year, he released the legal thriller The Chamber, which starred Gene Hackman and Chris O'Donnell, but his biggest successes were his final films, the sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, both of which were box office hits.
Foley took over from Sam Taylor-Johnson to direct the two follow-up movies to the original Fifty Shades of Grey.
Foley, who was born in Brooklyn in 1953 before moving to Staten Island as a child, attended the MFA program in film studies and production at the University of Southern California after finishing his undergraduate work at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
After his student film gained the attention of the acclaimed filmmaker Hal Ashby, Foley used the attention to get his first feature theatrical directing job on the 1984 romantic drama Reckless, starring Daryl Hannah and Aidan Quinn.
His follow-up, At Close Range, attracted bigger stars in Sean Penn and Christopher Walken, and it attracted festival and awards attention, though it failed to earn back its budget.
Foley's follow-up, 1987's Who's That Girl, paired him with its star, Madonna.
The filmmaker, who was reportedly the best man at her wedding to his previous collaborator Sean Penn, also directed music videos for three of her songs in the run-up to the film: Live To Tell, Papa Don't Preach and True Blue.
His greatest critical success was his film adaptation of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and Jack Lemmon won the festival's Best Actor award for his work.
A North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival followed, and the movie now boasts a 95 percent fresh rating from critics surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes.
Foley also worked closely with Madonna and directed a number of her music videos.
However, audiences weren't as intrigued by the film, which earned an Oscar nomination for Al Pacino, and it only grossed around $10.7million against a $12.5million budget.
Foley collaborated again with Pacino in 1995 on the drama Two Bits.
After the success of his 1996 thriller Fear, Foley reunited with star Wahlberg and Hong Kong icon Chow Yun-fat for the 1999 action film The Corruptor, but the film received mixed reviews and failed to make back its budget.
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He had modest commercial success with his films in the 2000s, Confidence (2003) and Perfect Stranger (2007), but the latter film — a psychological thriller starring Halle Berry and Bruce Willis — was lambasted by critics.
And after years working on big-budget TV series, he returned to filmmaking in 2017 to take over the Fifty Shades of Grey series after the first film's director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, left the franchise.
Foley is survived by his sister Eileen and Jo Ann, his brother Kevin and his nephew Quinn.
