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Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, best known for “Super Size Me,” has died aged 53. He passed away Thursday night due to complications from cancer, the Daily Mail reported. He had privately been undergoing chemotherapy. However, it is unclear what type of cancer Spurlock had or how long he had been fighting it.
His death comes 20 years after Spurlock ate exclusively at McDonald’s for a month to highlight the dangers of a fast-food diet. Spurlock gained attention in 2004 with his groundbreaking film, “Super Size Me,” which was nominated for an Academy Award. The documentary chronicled the detrimental physical and psychological effects of eating only McDonald’s food for 30 days.
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“It was a sad day, as we said goodbye to my brother Morgan,” his brother Craig Spurlock who worked with him on several projects, said. “Morgan gave so much through his art, ideas and generosity. Today the world has lost a true creative genius and a special man. I am so proud to have worked together with him.”
Born in 1970 in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Spurlock graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1993.
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He began his entertainment career as a playwright, earning awards for his 1999 play “The Phoenix” at the New York Fringe Festival.
Before gaining fame, he created and hosted the gonzo web series “Bet You Will,” where contestants were paid to perform outrageous tasks, such as eating a full jar of mayonnaise. The show aired on MTV and the now-defunct Spike.
His breakthrough project was the 2004 documentary “Super Size Me,” which documented the impact on his health after consuming only McDonald’s food for 30 days.
“It’s a great way to take the edge off a very preachy subject,” he told the Guardian in 2004.
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Spurlock was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature that year and won the Best Director award at the Sundance Film Festival.
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Following that experience, Spurlock told Civil Eats in 2010, “There are great films that are out there that deal with food, [and] I think if there’s a way I can help champion some of those other filmmakers, I’d rather do that than go into making another food movie.”
“For me, movies have to be something that if you don’t [make them], then you are going to go crazy. If you don’t tell this story, if you don’t put it on a page, if you don’t put it on film, then it is literally going to affect your brain from this moment forward,” he went on. “There may be something that comes along that kind of strikes me in that way, and if it does, I’ll have to tell it.”
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His next film after “Super Size Me” was 2008’s “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?”, where Spurlock searched for the terrorist and visited countries affected by his actions.
Spurlock’s other notable works include the 2010 film “Freakonomics,” based on the book of the same name.
Spurlock was married to Alexandra Jamieson from 2006 to 2011, with whom he has a son named Laken. In 2016, he married Sara Bernstein, with whom he had a son named Kallen.
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