Sebastián Lelio, Oscar-Winning Director of 'A Fantastic Woman,' Dies at 52

Sebastián Lelio, the Chilean writer-director whose "A Fantastic Woman" won Chile's first-ever Academy Award, died on Friday at 52. The death cuts short a career that had only recently confirmed him as world cinema's most versatile humanist.

Lelio's peak arrived in 2017, when he premiered two films in a single year. "A Fantastic Woman," his transgender character study propelled by trans star Daniela Vega's emotionally unguarded performance, won Best Screenplay at the Berlinale and then the Oscar for Best International Feature — the first Chilean film ever to take the category, sealing a resurgence of the country's cinema alongside contemporaries Sebastián Silva and Lelio's own producer Pablo Larraín.

The second 2017 film, "Disobedience," marked his English-language debut: a sober, sensitively observed portrayal of an illicit romance between two women in North London's strict Orthodox Jewish community, acted beautifully by Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams with a restraint occasionally broken by frank, charged sensuality.

Why remake your own film?

When it was announced in 2017 that Lelio would helm a U.S. remake of his 2013 breakout "Gloria," admirers had cause for concern. English-language do-overs of world cinema successes frequently go awry — and Dutch director George Sluizer's hopeless 1993 remake of his own 1988 chiller "The Vanishing" stood as a cautionary tale that even the original filmmaker's involvement guaranteed nothing.

Lelio knew better than his doubters. The 2019 "Gloria Bell" hewed close to its template, inheriting its pleasures and poignancies, but proved a canny exercise in performer-as-auteur influence. Paulina García was a funny, resilient force of nature in 2013; Julianne Moore brought a yearning, lonely fragility that gave even the uplifting trajectory an undertow of melancholy. Moore, at the very least, deserved awards attention that year. The two Glorias improbably prove the truth about Lelio: even when ostensibly making the same film twice, he never made the same film twice.

What was his path to the top?

His 2005 debut, "The Sacred Family," was confident and scrappy — a droll comic tale of a bourgeois man falling for his son's girlfriend, shot with a handheld jaggedness far from his later polish, made semi-improvised. He carried that method into "Navidad" (2009), a troubled-youth study selected for Cannes' Directors' Fortnight, before the more sophisticated "The Year of the Tiger" (2011), an understated Locarno competitor exploring faith, guilt and trauma after Chile's devastating 2010 earthquake.

By the time "Gloria" reached Berlin's main competition in 2013, expectations were high and the film delivered as an ebullient crowdpleaser. Where Larraín established himself as the dark prince of new Chilean cinema with spiky works like "Post Mortem" and "No," Lelio became its great humanist — his touch light but not soft, his perspective probing but not abrasive. He let Vega, with whom he closely developed the protagonist, be "A Fantastic Woman's" chief ambassador.

His finest film as a director, arguably, was comparatively shortchanged: "The Wonder" (2022), adapted from "Room" author Emma Donoghue's novel, set in 19th-century Ireland and shot by Ari Wegner with a damp, chilly verdigris finish. Florence Pugh's tenacious performance anchored its story of feminine resolve and dueling moral and spiritual convictions.

His final film, last year's political musical "The Wave," returned him to Chile, inspired by the 2018 #MeToo-related feminist student protests that shut down universities nationwide. Rhetorically heavy-handed but choreographed with dynamic aplomb, it broke the fourth wall to ask, pointedly, what a male director was doing on an expressly feminist project. The joke encapsulated his generous, community-minded approach: his auteur signature was subtly distinctive, yet he never made himself the star of his work.