Our Friend Richard Donner

We sadly report that our good friend and friend of animals, Hollywood director Richard Donner, has died at 91.

Mr. Donner has been a special friend of the International Marine Mammal Project (IMMP) for many years. He cared about causes and brought his concerns into his films. In a scene in Lethal Weapon 2, actor Danny Glover’s character is caught by one of his kids eating a tuna sandwich, stating “Daddy, you can’t eat tuna….Mom, dad killed flipper.” To an incredulous Danny Glover, his daughter points to her shirt (an Earth Island Dolphin Safe Campaign t-shirt) and his wife said: “We’re boycotting tuna, honey, because they kill the dolphins that get caught in the nets.”

Dave Phillips notes: “That was so quintessential Dick Donner. He was going to get that scene in, and the reaction he got from his friends and colleagues just made him want to do more. I remember hearing that he and his partner, Lauren Shuler Donner, had their eyes on doing a Hollywood film all about whales. I had my doubts that they could pull it off, but Dick and Lauren were unstoppable.”

Perhaps most notably, Lauren directed the hit movie Free Willy, with Dick jumping in to help. They wanted the film to make a difference and approached Earth Island for ideas. We brainstormed a plan to put an (800) number right at the end of the movie that people could call to get involved in saving whales. Released in 1993, Free Willy became a runaway family hit. Kids called by the hundreds of thousands, and many of them wanted to save the orca whale Keiko, who was the star of the movie.

Phillips added: “To this day we still get calls on that line. It turned the world on about the plight of Keiko and led to the monumental worldwide effort to rescue Keiko, bring him back to health and have him be the first captive orca ever returned to his home waters. The Donners made conservation history. Without Dick and Lauren, it never would have happened.”

Largely behind the scenes, Dick Donner and Lauren Shuler Donner played a monumental role in getting the real Willy – known as Keiko – released to the wild waters in Iceland that he was once taken from as a youth. As public pressure and concerns increased about the plight of the real orca, Keiko, Donner turned to IMMP, which established, with his help, the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation to raise funds and organize the moving of Keiko back to his home waters after rehabilitation.

Keiko was the living in very poor conditions in Mexico City, underweight and in bad health, and plagued with a skin disease. But the campaign succeeded in bringing him back to health and eventually to bring him to a sea pen and release in his home waters of Iceland. Keiko lived for about four years in his North Atlantic home, enjoying freedom.

“Dick moved mountains to help Keiko and cared deeply about protecting all animals. He wasn’t afraid to pull every lever he had to shine a light on the atrocities and force change,” Phillips stated.

We all are poorer for the loss of Dick Donner, but we can enjoy all the great movies he brought to the screen, including the Christopher Reeves Superman, Scrooged, the Lethal Weapon series, The Goonies, and Free Willy, among many other favorites. And we all will remember the role he played standing up for life on Earth.

You can learn more about the Keiko project here.