Catherine Cyran, an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, producer and writer who began her career under Roger Corman, died on December 24, 2022 in Vancouver, BC after a battle with cancer. She was 59 years old.
Before emerging as a director in the 1990s, Cyran established herself as a screenwriter, with credits for films such as 1990’s Slumber Party Massacre III and A Cry in the Wild, the 1990 adaptation of Gary Paulsen’s novel Hatchet. . She made her directorial debut in 1993 with the sequel White Wolves: A Cry in the Wild II, for which she received an Emmy nomination.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, Cyran was the first person in her family to attend college, graduating from Harvard in 1985. She then spent two years in London working for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Cyran found her footing in the entertainment industry working as an executive assistant under the seminal, prolific producer and director Roger Corman, whose tutelage touched other filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme and Peter Bogdonavich. Under Corman, Cyran wrote and produced titles such as Dead Space, starring Bryan Cranston; Uncaged, starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan; “Fire on the Amazon,” starring Sandra Bullock, and “Kiss Me a Killer,” which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Cyran also ghost-wrote Frankenstein Unbound, Corman’s last feature film as director.
After working with Corman, Cyran began a fruitful collaboration with Fox Family Television Studios, where she wrote and directed the thrillers Dangerous Waters and Hostile Intensions. She then went on to do TV movies on ABC Family and direct Christmas movies like Christmas Do-Over, Homecoming for the Holidays, Christmas Duet, and Cross Country Christmas.
Cyran also developed the martial arts series Bloodfist and has written for Universal productions such as Werewolf and The Beast Among Us. Other notable directing credits include three of the four entries in The Prince & Me series, Victoria Gotti: My Father’s Daughter and True Heart.
Cyran published a novel, The Island of the Last Great Auk. In addition, her screenplay, titled The Last Story, received the Canadian International Film Festival Award for Outstanding Writing. Her last film, Our Italian Christmas Memories, starring Beau Bridges, aired on Hallmark just weeks before her death.
Last year, Cyran decided to take the SAT test “just for fun.” At the age of 58, she achieves a perfect score of 1600.
Cyran was a longtime member of the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild of Canada, and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. As she put it, she aspired to “tell good stories to a wide audience” through her work.