Legendary Movie Poster Artist Drew Struzan Passes Away at Age 78 - Known for "Indiana Jones," "Back to the Future," More
Unfortunately we received some very sad news out of Hollywood this morning, as iconic movie poster illustrator Drew Struzan has passed away at the age of 78.
Drew Struzan was born in Oregon in 1947 and began illustrating movie posters in the mid-1970s, starting with B-pictures such as Squirm and Empire of the Ants. But his work soon gained him notice among the major studios, and he was hired to help design the famous “Circus" poster for the 1978 rerelease of the original Star Wars film. Soon Struzan was churning out memorable work for some of the movie industry’s biggest filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Robert Zemeckis, Richard Donner, and more on releases such as E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, The Goonies, and even The Muppet Movie. Many of the images he created have become synonymous with the films themselves.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Drew Struzan designed the official logo for Lucasfilm’s in-house visual effects studios Industrial Light & Magic, and he was hired by Disneyland to illustrate the poster for the Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye– matching the style of posters he had provided for films in Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s Indiana Jones franchise. Along the way he also provided art for innumerable books, comics, home media releases, board games, and even postage stamps. In the late 1990s he created the poster art for all three movies in the Star Wars Special Editions and then went on to do the same for the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Struzan retired in 2008 after contributing the poster for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but returned to illustration periodically for movies like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, for which he created a special alternate poster that was distributed at D23 Expo in 2015.
2013 saw the release of a feature-length documentary about Drew Struzan entitled Drew: The Man Behind the Poster from director Erik Sharkey, and in the spring of this year, his wife revealed that the artist had been struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately he passed away yesterday, but his art and his legacy will surely live on forever.
