LONDON—Hugh Hudson, a British filmmaker who debuted as a feature director with the Oscar-winning Olympics drama “Chariots of Fire” and later made such well-regarded movies as “My Life So Far” and the Oscar-nominated “Greystoke,” has died at age 86.
Hudson’s family issued a brief statement announcing that he died Friday at a hospital in London “after a short illness.”
A London native, Hudson started out as a documentary editor and producer and also worked in television advertising before finding work in feature films in the late 1970s as a second-unit director on Alan Parker’s “Midnight Express.” In 1981, producer David Puttnam asked Hudson to direct “Chariots of Fire,” which starred Ben Cross and Nigel Havers as British athletes of contrasting religions and backgrounds at the 1924 Olympics….