Death of Sydney Pollack

May 26, 2008
Sydney Pollack, Film Director, Dies at 73
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES — Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor whose star-laden movies like “The Way We Were,” “Tootsie” and “Out of Africa” were among the most successful of the 1970s and ’80s, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.
The cause was cancer, said a representative of the family.
Mr. Pollack’s career defined an era in which big stars (Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty) and the filmmakers who knew how to wrangle them (Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols) retooled the Hollywood system. Savvy operators, they played studio against studio, staking their fortunes on pictures that served commerce without wholly abandoning art.
Hollywood honored Mr. Pollack in return. His movies received multiple Academy Award nominations, and as a director he won an Oscar for his work on the 1985 film “Out of Africa” as well as nominations for directing “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Tootsie” (1982).
Last fall, Warner Brothers released “Michael Clayton,” of which Mr. Pollack was a producer and a member of the cast. He delivered a trademark performance as an old-bull lawyer who demands dark deeds from a subordinate, played by George Clooney. (“This is news? This case has reeked from Day One,” snaps Mr. Pollack’s Marty Bach.) The picture received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and a Best Actor nomination for Mr. Clooney.
Mr. Pollack became a prolific producer of independent films in the latter part of his career. With a partner, the filmmaker Anthony Minghella, he ran Mirage Enterprises, a production company whose films included Mr. Minghella’s “Cold Mountain” and the documentary “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” released last year, the last film directed by Mr. Pollack.
Apart from that film, Mr. Pollack never directed a movie without stars. His first feature, “The Slender Thread,” released by Paramount Pictures in 1965, starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. In his next 19 films — every one a romance or drama but for the single comedy, “Tootsie” — Mr. Pollack worked with Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman, Ms. Streisand and others.
Sydney Irwin Pollack was born on July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and reared in South Bend. By Mr. Pollack’s own account, in the biographical dictionary “World Film Directors,” his father, David, a pharmacist, and his mother, the former Rebecca Miller, were first-generation Russian-Americans who had met at Purdue University.
Mr. Pollack developed a love of drama at South Bend High School and, instead of going to college, went to New York and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. He studied there for two years under Sanford Meisner, who was in charge of its acting department, and remained for five more as Mr. Meisner’s assistant, teaching acting but also appearing onstage and in television.
Curly-haired and almost 6 feet 2 inches tall, Mr. Pollack had a notable role in a 1959 “Playhouse 90” telecast of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” an adaptation of the Hemingway novel directed by John Frankenheimer. Earlier, Mr. Pollack had appeared on Broadway with Zero Mostel in “A Stone for Danny Fisher” and with Katharine Cornell and Tyrone Power in “The Dark Is Light Enough.” But he said later that he probably could not have built a career as a leading man.
Instead, Mr. Pollack took the advice of Burt Lancaster, whom he had met while working with Frankenheimer, and turned to directing. Lancaster steered him to the entertainment mogul Lew Wasserman, and through him Mr. Pollack landed a directing assignment on the television series “Shotgun Slade.”
After a faltering start, he hit his stride on episodes of “Ben Casey, “Naked City,” “The Fugitive” and other well-known shows. In 1966 he won an Emmy for directing an episode of “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater.”
From the time he made his first full-length feature, “The Slender Thread,” about a social work student coaxing a woman out of suicide on a telephone help line, Mr. Pollack had a hit-and-miss relationship with the critics. Writing in The New York Times, A. H. Weiler deplored that film’s “sudsy waves of bathos.” Mr. Pollack himself later pronounced it “dreadful.”
But from the beginning of his movie career, he was also perceived as belonging to a generation whose work broke with the immediate past. In 1965, Charles Champlin, writing in The Los Angeles Times, compared Mr. Pollack to the director Elliot Silverstein, whose western spoof, “Cat Ballou,” had been released earlier that year, and Stuart Rosenberg, soon to be famous for “Cool Hand Luke” (1967). Mr. Champlin cited all three as artists who had used television rather than B movies to learn their craft.
Self-critical and never quite at ease with Hollywood, Mr. Pollack voiced a constant yearning for creative prerogatives more common on the stage. Yet he dived into the fray. In 1970, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” his bleak fable of love and death among marathon dancers in the Great Depression, based on a Horace McCoy novel, received nine Oscar nominations, including the one for directing. (Gig Young won the best supporting actor award for his performance.)
Two years later, Mr. Pollack made the mountain-man saga “Jeremiah Johnson,” one of three closely spaced pictures in which he directed Mr. Redford.
The second of those films, “The Way We Were,” about a pair of ill-fated lovers who meet up later in life, also starred Ms. Streisand and was an enormous hit despite critical hostility.
The next, “Three Days of the Condor,” another hit, about a bookish C.I.A. worker thrust into a mystery, did somewhat better with the critics. “Tense and involving,” said Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times.
With “Absence of Malice” in 1981, Mr. Pollack entered the realm of public debate. The film’s story of a newspaper reporter (Sally Field) who is fed a false story by federal officials trying to squeeze information from a businessman (Paul Newman) was widely viewed as a corrective to the adulation of investigative reporters that followed Alan J. Pakula’s hit movie “All the President’s Men,” with its portrayal of the Watergate scandal.
But only with “Tootsie,” in 1982, did Mr. Pollack become a fully realized Hollywood player.
By then he was represented by Michael S. Ovitz and the rapidly expanding Creative Artists Agency. So was his leading man, Dustin Hoffman.
As the film — a comedy about a struggling actor who disguises himself as a woman to get a coveted television part — was being shot for Columbia Pictures, Mr. Pollack and Mr. Hoffman became embroiled in a semi-public feud, with Mr. Ovitz running shuttle diplomacy between them.
Mr. Hoffman, who had initiated the project, argued for a more broadly comic approach. But Mr. Pollack — who played Mr. Hoffman’s agent in the film — was drawn to the seemingly doomed romance between the cross-dressing Hoffman character and the actress played by Jessica Lange.
If Mr. Pollack did not prevail on all points, he tipped the film in his own direction. Meanwhile, the movie came in behind schedule, over budget and surrounded by bad buzz.
Yet “Tootsie” was also a winner. It took in more than $177 million at the domestic box office and received 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture. (Ms. Lange took home the film’s only Oscar, for best supporting actress.)
Backed by Mr. Ovitz, Mr. Pollack expanded his reach in the wake of success. Over the next several years, he worked closely with both Tri-Star Pictures, where he was creative consultant, and Universal, where Mirage, his production company, set up shop in 1986.
Mr. Pollack reached perhaps his career pinnacle with “Out of Africa.” Released by Universal, the film, based on the memoirs of Isak Dinesen, paired Ms. Streep and Mr. Redford in a period drama that reworked one of the director’s favorite themes, that of star-crossed lovers. It captured Oscars for best picture and best director.
Still, Mr. Pollack remained uneasy about his cinematic skills. “I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist,” he told an interviewer for American Cinematographer last year. And he developed a reputation for caution when it came to directing assignments. Time after time, he expressed interest in directing projects, only to back away. At one point he was to make “Rain Man,” a Dustin Hoffman picture ultimately directed by Mr. Levinson; at another, an adaptation of “The Night Manager” by John le Carré.
That wariness was undoubtedly fed by his experience with “Havana,” a 1990 film that was to be his last with Mr. Redford. It seemed to please no one, though Mr. Pollack defended it. “To tell you the truth, if I knew what was wrong, I’d have fixed it,” Mr. Pollack told The Los Angeles Times in 1993.
“The Firm,” with Tom Cruise, was a hit that year. But “Sabrina” (1995) and “Random Hearts” (1999), both with Harrison Ford, and “The Interpreter” (2005), with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, fell short, as Hollywood and its primary audience increasingly eschewed stars for fantasy and special effects.
Mr. Pollack never stopped acting; in a recent episode of “Entourage,” the HBO series about Hollywood, he played himself.
Among Mr. Pollack’s survivors are daughters, Rachel and Rebecca, and his wife, Claire Griswold, who was once among his acting students. The couple married in 1958, while Mr. Pollack was serving a two-year hitch in the Army. Their only son, Steven, died at age 34 in a 1993 plane crash in Santa Monica, Calif.
In his later years, Mr. Pollack appeared to relish his role as elder statesman. At various times he was executive director of the Actors Studio West, chairman of American Cinematheque and an advocate for artists’ rights.
He increasingly sounded wistful notes about the disappearance of the Hollywood he knew in his prime. “The middle ground is now gone,” Mr. Pollack said in a discussion with Shimon Peres in the fall 1998 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly. He added, with a nod to a fellow filmmaker: “It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good. Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen.”



May 27, 2008
Director and actor Sydney Pollack dies at 73
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:23 p.m. ET
Sydney Pollack found mainstream success with smart films for grown-ups -- a rarity today.
In thrillers, romances and comedies, his movies were intelligent and often dealt with social issues. They call such movies ''independent'' nowadays; Pollack could craft them into hits.
''The middle ground is now gone,'' he told New Perspectives Quarterly in 1998. ''It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good. Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen.''
Movies today tend to come as either blockbusters aimed at the younger demographics or smaller, stylized art-house works -- which typically fail to make money. Pollack did neither.
Pollack, diagnosed with cancer about nine months ago, died Monday afternoon, surrounded by family, at his home in Los Angeles, said publicist Leslee Dart. He was 73.
In a tireless career spanning nearly five decades, Pollack distinguished himself as a true professional: a director, a producer and an actor. His greatest successes as a director -- 1982's ''Tootsie'' and 1985's ''Out of Africa'' -- came years ago, but he showed no signs of slowing down.
He was executive producer of the new HBO film ''Recount'' about the 2000 presidential election, and he produced two high-profile films not yet in theaters: Kenneth Lonergan's ''Margaret'' and Stephen Daldry's ''The Reader.''
On Tuesday, Hollywood mourned the loss of the well-liked, prolific filmmaker. He had worked with seemingly every A-list star in the business, from Robert Mitchum to Al Pacino. But Pollack collaborated with Robert Redford more than any other -- seven films, including ''Out of Africa,'' 1973's ''The Way We Were,'' 1975's ''Three Days of the Condor'' and 1979's ''The Electric Horseman.''
''Sydney's and my relationship both professionally and personally covers 40 years,'' Redford said. ''It's too personal to express in a sound bite.''
Barbra Streisand, who starred alongside Redford in ''The Way We Were,'' said: ''He knew how to tell a love story. He was a great actor's director because he was a great actor.''
Tom Cruise, whom Pollack directed in 1993's ''The Firm'' and with whom Pollack memorably acted in Stanley Kubrick's ''Eyes Wide Shut'' (1999), said: ''Throughout the years, unpretentious and never condescending, he shared with me what he loved about family, storytelling, food, flying and a great bottle of vino. He was a Renaissance man and a great friend.''
''They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'' -- the 1969 film about Depression-era marathon dancers -- received nine Oscar nominations, including one for Pollack's direction. He was nominated again for best director for 1982's ''Tootsie,'' starring Dustin Hoffman as a cross-dressing actor and Pollack as the exasperated agent who tells him: ''I begged you to get some therapy.''
As director and producer, he won Academy Awards for the romantic epic ''Out of Africa,'' which captured seven Oscars in all.
Last fall, Pollack played law firm boss Marty Bach opposite George Clooney in ''Michael Clayton,'' which he also co-produced. It received seven Oscar nominations.
''Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better,'' Clooney said. ''He'll be missed terribly.''
Clooney's admiration for Pollack is evident in the similar way he has traded on star power to make compelling, complex, realistic dramas with a political sensibility. But unlike, say, Clooney's ''Good Night, and Good Luck,'' Pollack's films did big business, no doubt largely aided by their considerable star wattage.
''Tootsie'' made $177 million. ''Absence of Malice,'' a 1981 film that today would be relegated to a studio's specialty division, more than tripled its $12 million budget. The film, starring Paul Newman and Sally Field, remains a remarkably relevant movie about the press 27 years after its release.
''Sydney was a very special person, but the thing that impressed me was that he was special enough so that he didn't have to think that he was,'' Newman said Tuesday.
Pollack moved gracefully between in front of the camera and behind it. He became an elite producer, helping bring to theaters well-crafted (but not snooty) films, among them 1995's ''Sense and Sensibility,'' 2002's ''The Quiet American'' and 2005's ''The Interpreter,'' which he also directed.
He teamed with the late Anthony Minghella on the production company Mirage Enterprises, and produced most of Minghella's films, including ''The Talented Mr. Ripley'' and ''Cold Mountain.'' The company also released Pollack's last film, the 2006 documentary ''Sketches of Frank Gehry.''
''He was elegant, a gentleman, smart and generous, a wonderful actor, a great cook -- a true connoisseur of life,'' said Nicole Kidman, who starred in ''The Interpreter. ''He guided me artistically and personally, not just as a director or producer but as a mentor and friend.''
The film was the first shot at U.N. headquarters; by then, Pollack was an unofficial ambassador of movies. He often appeared in documentaries about filmmakers; he participated in American Film Institute television specials; and he spoke artfully about classic cinema while hosting series such as Turner Classic Movies' ''The Essentials.''
Sidney Irwin Pollack was born in Lafayette, Ind., to first-generation Russian-Americans. In high school in South Bend, he fell in love with theater, a passion that prompted him to forgo college, move to New York and enroll in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater.
Studying under Sanford Meisner, Pollack spent several years cutting his teeth in various areas of theater, eventually becoming Meisner's assistant.
''We started together in New York and he always excelled at everything he set out to do, his friendships and his humanity as much as his talents,'' said Martin Landau, a longtime close friend and associate in the Actors Studio.
Though Pollack would make his name as a director and producer, his first love was acting. It wasn't until later in his career that the parts came easily: a notable role in ''The Sopranos,'' a role in Woody Allen's ''Husbands and Wives,'' appearances on TV shows ''Will & Grace,'' ''Frasier'' and ''Entourage.''
His last screen appearance was in ''Made of Honor,'' a romantic comedy still in theaters, where he played the oft-married father of star Patrick Dempsey's character.
''Since I don't pursue an acting career, I (now) have the luxury of getting more offers than when I was pursuing an acting career,'' Pollack told The Associated Press last year, laughing. ''It's the irony of life. When I was a young kid and wanted to be an actor, I couldn't get arrested.''
After appearing in a handful of Broadway productions in the 1950s, Burt Lancaster urged Pollack to try directing and introduced him to MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman. His first full-length feature was 1965's ''The Slender Thread,'' about a suicide help line.
The film was scored by Quincy Jones. ''Sydney Pollack's immense talents as a director were only surpassed by the compassion that he carried in his soul for his fellow man,'' Jones said Monday.
Pollack first met Redford when they acted in 1962's low-budget ''War Hunt,'' and would go on to play a major role in making Redford a star. ''It's easy working with Bob; I don't have to be diplomatic with him,'' Pollack once told the AP. ''I know what he can and cannot do; I know all the colors he has. I've always felt he was a character actor in the body of a leading man.''
Pollack said in 2005 that for ''Tootsie,'' Hoffman pushed him into playing the agent role, repeatedly sending him roses with a note reading, ''Please be my agent. Love, Dorothy.'' At that point, Pollack hadn't acted in a movie in 20 years -- since ''The War Hunt'' with Redford.
The love soon frayed as Pollack and Hoffman differed over whether the film should lean toward comedy or drama, and the tension spilled out publicly. But the result was a hit at the box office and received 10 Oscar nominations, with Jessica Lange winning for best supporting actress.
''Stars are like thoroughbreds,'' Pollack once told The New York Times. ''Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best -- whatever it is that's made them a star -- it's really exciting.''
He added: ''If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.''
Pollack is survived by his wife, Claire; two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; his brother Bernie; and six grandchildren. Pollack's son, Steven, died in a plane crash in 1993.
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On the Net:
A YouTube collection of interviews with Pollack: http://www.mcnblogs.com/mcindie/archives/2008/05/sydney--pollack--1.ht ml
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Associated Press writers Raquel Maria Dillon in Los Angeles and Marcus Franklin in New York contributed to this report.