R.I.P. Peter Yates
By NIKKI FINKE | Sunday January 9, 2011 @ 9:52pm PST

Deadline has learned that English film director and producer and 4-time Oscar nominee Peter Yates -- who helmed such celebrated and dissimilar films as Bullitt, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, Breaking Away, Suspect, and The Dresser -- has passed away in London after a long illness. He was 82. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he was a stage actor before working as an assistant director for Tony Richardson. Yates' feature directorial debut was the early 1960s low-budget Summer Holiday (1963) with Cliff Richard And The Shadows. He soon graduated to the 1967 crime thriller Robbery, a fictionalized version of Britain's The Great Train Robbery. It was a short jump to his first American film, Bullitt (1968), starring Steve McQueen in one of the definitive cop movies of all time thanks to that car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Other films he directed included John and Mary (1969), Murphy's War (1971), The Hot Rock (1972), For Pete's Sake (1974), The Deep (1977), Eyewitness (1981), The Dresser (1983), Krull (1983), Eleni (1985), Suspect (1987), The House on Carroll Street (1988), An Innocent Man (1989), Year of the Comet (1992), Roommates (1995), and Curtain Call (1999). He earned two Oscar nominations (director and producer) for Breaking Away, and another two (director and producer) for The Dresser.

The Friends Of Eddie Coyle