The death of Donald Cammell was as flamboyant and dramatic as anything he had ever filmed. Haunted by death and suicide for many years, he took his own life in 1996 at age sixty-two with a gunshot to the head. But he fired into the top of his head instead of the roof of his mouth with the result that he was alive and conscious for up to 45 minutes afterwards and, reportedly, was in a happy, almost euphoric state. The fact that he didn't die instantly was not accidental; in fact he allegedly requested that his wife and writing collaborator China Cammell hold up a mirror so he could watch himself die and asked her 'Do you see the picture of Borges?'
Donald Cammell could draw. His brother remembers him having an understanding of perspective at three, and of foreshortening at four. This led him swiftly through art college to a lucrative career in the late fifties as one of London's leading society portrait painters. By the time he was in his twenties, Cammell could afford to sit back in his Chelsea studio. By the mid-sixties Cammell had hit a creative block.