Justin Hardy's family said the filmmaker died on Friday night after a heart attack, aged 61, as he was preparing for the premiere of his latest film.
In a statement to the Press Association, the family said: “Our family is devastated to share that Justin Hardy passed away last night. He was so full of life right to the end, and incredibly energised to be working towards premiering his latest film this month. We are all so proud of him and heartbroken he won’t be with us at his premiere. He was a man of family, of boundless creativity, and of devotion for everyone he held dear.”
A career shaped by The Wicker Man
Robin Hardy, Justin's father, was best known for the 1973 folk horror classic The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland, in which a police officer is sent to the fictional Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate a missing girl.
After reading history at Oxford University, Justin studied film at Bournemouth and scriptwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He directed series and films including The Bill, Princes In The Tower, Trafalgar Battle Surgeon, The Relief Of Belsen, Spanish Flu: The Forgotten Fallen and London's Burning, and was nominated for an Emmy and a Bafta. In recent years he had been teaching screenwriting at University College London.
His brother Dominic Hardy told PA that Justin would be remembered as someone “with an incredible appetite for life”. Reflecting on his career, Dominic added: “He really became a filmmaker his own right, one who always brought the productions in under-budget, who got extraordinary performances, and who had a wonderful sense of narrative. I told him this repeatedly over the years, but I admired his work because it was profoundly humanist and always moved me to tears. We had a father who made a film that has a huge legacy, but Justin made hundreds.”
Completing the family trilogy
In 2024 the brothers released the documentary Children Of The Wicker Man, detailing their complicated legacy with their father’s magnum opus, which saw Robin sacrifice his family life for a film that bombed at the box office before later becoming a cult classic. Robin died in 2016 aged 86, having spoken publicly about his desire to complete The Wicker Man trilogy after releasing The Wicker Tree in 2011.
After their father’s death, the brothers were contacted about plans for a third film. Dominic said they saw the request as the “impetus to close the chapter on the films”. “After Children Of The Wicker Man, Justin was also going in a new direction and looking forward to writing more scripts,” he said. They decided to wrap up their father’s trilogy.
Wrath Of The Gods, released this month and just completed by Justin, was inspired by a concept in a recently unearthed script written by Robin. It stars Game of Thrones’ Francis Magee and Norwegian actress Christiane Schaldemose, and follows a woman isolated on an island where she is “torn between the ghosts of the past and the gods of the present” before being forced to confront “dark family secrets lurking in the shadows”.
Dominic, an art historian at the University of Quebec in Montreal, said of his brother’s final work: “He did an incredibly beautiful job with Wraths Of The Gods. When he showed the final version to me, I said, 'Now you have made a film with a capital F. It is your film. It is your vision', and it settles the legacy of our father, who had invented a massive thing of the same name, but Justin made something humanist telling an important story.”
Final premiere
The brothers last caught up in London a few weeks ago, when Justin told Dominic: “I really love writing projects like this and if I could write things like this for the rest of my career, that would be great'.”
“It’s just so sad that that’s not going to happen,” Dominic said. “We’ve lost him and we’ve lost that larger-than-life presence looking over us all. But I think the fact he made Wrath Of The Gods and made something new was a great satisfaction to him.”
Justin Hardy is survived by his wife Larissa and children Sam, Ludo, Nico and Summer. Wrath Of The Gods will premiere at FrightFest in Leicester Square on August 28.
