‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ director James Foley passes away

James Foley, a renowned filmmaker passed away at the age of 71 after “years-long struggle” with brain cancer.

The director, best known for his contributions to the Fifty Shades of Grey sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed as well as Who’s That Girl starring Madonna, had been battling cancer for many years.

It was revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that Foley had “died peacefully in his sleep earlier this week” after “years-long struggle.”

Under the name Peter Percher, Foley also teamed up with the Material Girl singer on her Live to Tell, Papa Don’t Preach and True Blue music videos.

He also served as Madonna’s best man at her wedding to now ex-husband, Sean Penn, back in 1985.

Reminiscing the start of his career, Foley told Film Freak Central in an old interview, “I was very lucky, and in the perverse calculus of Hollywood I was in the last year of film school and shared a house with a guy.”

“There was a woman who was pursuing my friend so we had this film school party, which consisted of people projecting their student films onto a white wall and getting st**ed,” he recalled.

Foley continued, “And this girl came. Hal Ashby was pursuing her — she was pursuing my friend and Hal was pursuing her — and Hal called her up and asked to come to this party full of film students. Just as he walked through the door, my film was showing on the wall.”

“I’ll never know whether he was being polite or anything, but he told me he liked it and stuff and he was going to form a company that was going to produce other people’s movies and what did I want to do? I could write something and direct it,”

James Foley’s official cause of death is yet to be confirmed, additionally, Madonna is yet to break silence over the devastating news.