Sydney Pollack, 73; director achieved critical acclaim, commercial success
LOS ANGELES - Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of "Out of Africa" who achieved acclaim making popular, mainstream movies with A-list stars, including "The Way We Were" and "Tootsie," died yesterday. He was 73.
Mr. Pollack, who also was a producer and actor, died of cancer at his home in the Pacific Palisades district of the city, according to Leslee Dart, his publicist and friend.
"Sydney Pollack has made some of the most influential and best-remembered films of the last three decades," film scholar Jeanine Basinger told the Los Angeles Times recently.
In looking at his films, she said, "what you see is how he kept in step with the times. He doesn't get locked into one decade and left there. He had a very sharp political sensibility and a keen sense of what the issues of his world were, and he advanced and changed as the times advanced and changed."
After launching his show business career as an actor and acting teacher in New York City in the 1950s, Mr. Pollack moved West in the early '60s and began directing episodic television before turning to films.
Beginning with "The Slender Thread," a 1965 drama starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, Mr. Pollack was credited with directing 20 films, including "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," a 1969 drama about Depression-era marathon dancers starring Jane Fonda that earned Mr. Pollack an Oscar nomination for best director.
Known for what
The Pollack-Redford collaboration also produced "The Way We Were" (with Barbra Streisand), "Jeremiah Johnson," "Three Days of the Condor" (with Faye Dunaway), "The Electric Horseman" (with Fonda), "Out of Africa" (with Meryl Streep) and "Havana."
As a filmmaker, Mr. Pollack had a reputation for being a painstaking craftsman - "relentless and meticulous," screenwriter and friend Robert Towne once said.
"His films have a lyrical quality like great music, and the timing is impeccable," cinematographer Owen Roizman said in 2005 when it was announced that Mr. Pollack would receive the 2006 American Society of Cinematographers Board of Governors Award for his contributions to the art of filmmaking.
"He is never satisfied. . . . His passion is contagious. It inspires everyone around him to dig a little deeper," said Roizman, who worked on "Tootsie" and "Havana" with Mr. Pollack.
Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin said "the hallmark" of Mr. Pollack's career "has been intelligence, both in his approach and his selection of subject matter."
"Good, bad or in between, his films at the very least respected their audience," Maltin told the Los Angeles Times. "And, of course, he worked with grade-A collaborators on both sides of the camera - the best screenwriters, the best actors - and it shows."
"Out of Africa," the 1985 drama based on Danish author Isak Dinesen's experiences in Kenya during the early part of the 20th century and her romance with English big-game hunter-adventurer Denys Finch Hatton, earned Mr. Pollack two Academy Awards: as director and as producer of the film, which also won the best picture Oscar.
Mr. Pollack also received a best director Oscar nomination - and a New York Film Critics Circle Award - for "Tootsie." In the 1982 comedy, Dustin Hoffman stars as Michael Dorsey, an unemployed New York actor who revives his career by transforming himself into a woman - actress Dorothy Michaels - who lands a role in a TV soap opera and then finds himself falling in love with an actress on the show, played by Jessica Lange. In the process of masquerading as a woman, Dorsey becomes a better man.
The making of the film was marked by creative dissension between Mr. Pollack and Hoffman - and unexpected difficulties.
"It's like working with the mechanical shark in 'Jaws,' " Mr. Pollack told The New York Times in 1982. "Dustin's breasts fall down. The high heels hurt his feet. The makeup causes pimples, and the heat makes his beard show through after a couple of hours. It's a 3 1/2-hour makeup job, and then the makeup only has a life of four or five hours. We didn't anticipate that."
Mr. Pollack spoke of his preference for working with big stars in an interview with The New York Times in 1982.
"Stars are like thoroughbreds," he said. "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."
Sometimes, 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."
Pressed by Hoffman to play his actor-character's exasperated agent in "Tootsie," Mr. Pollack finally consented to his first big-screen acting role since the 1962 film "War Hunt," during which he met Redford, who also was making his film debut.
"Dustin really kept after me to do the part," Mr. Pollack told The New York Times in another interview in 1982. "At one point, he even sent me flowers and signed the note, 'Love, Dorothy.' The acting itself was fun. It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren't directing it. But to do it while you're directing interferes with your concentration."
As an actor, Mr. Pollack later appeared in a number of films, including Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," Robert Altman's "The Player," Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," and the recent Oscar-nominated Tony Gilroy film "Michael Clayton."
"I don't care much about acting," he told the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune in 2002. "It's more about watching other directors work."
Basinger, head of the film studies department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., and the author of numerous books on film, said Mr. Pollack "was a fabulous actor, and he understood actors and got the best out of them" as a director.
"Here's a man who could have himself been a movie star of a certain type had he so chosen because he really is that good an actor," she said, adding that Mr. Pollack, who spoke to film students at Wesleyan several times, also "cared about education" and was a "natural-born teacher."
Mr. Pollack's experience as an actor and acting teacher helped earn him a reputation as an "actor's director."
Fonda, who earned an Oscar nomination for her leading role in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" has said the darkly dramatic film was "a turning point for me, both professionally and personally."
With Mr. Pollack's guidance, she said, "I probed deeper into the character and into myself than I had before, and I gained confidence as an actor," she wrote in her autobiography, "My Life So Far."
The son of a pharmacist, Sydney Pollack was born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and moved with his family to South Bend.
"I think of it with great sadness," he said of his experiences in South Bend in a 1993 interview with The New York Times. "It was a real cultural desert. There weren't many Jews like us, and it was real anti-Semitic."
His parents divorced while he was growing up, and his mother, who "had emotional problems and became an alcoholic," died when Mr. Pollack was 16. Although his father envisioned him becoming a dentist, Mr. Pollack left home after graduating from high school and moved to New York to become an actor. After studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, Mr. Pollack became Meisner's assistant.
Mr. Pollack, whose career was interrupted by Army service from 1957 to 1959, had a small role in the 1955 Broadway comedy "The Dark Is Light Enough" and later appeared on "Playhouse 90" and "The
Mr. Pollack's work as an actor on director John Frankenheimer's two-part adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" on "Playhouse 90" led Frankenheimer to ask him to work as a dialogue coach for two children in his "Playhouse 90" production of "Turn of the Screw."
That in turn led Mr. Pollack to do similar work in Hollywood on Frankenheimer's 1961 film "The Young Savages," starring Burt Lancaster.
"Lancaster told me to come to his office one day and said, 'You should be a director,' and I said that I didn't know anything about directing, so he introduced me to Lew Wasserman (then chairman of MCA, owner of Universal Pictures)," Mr. Pollack told The New York Times.
Over the next several years, Mr. Pollack directed episodes of TV shows such as "The Fugitive," "The Defenders," "Kraft Suspense Theatre," and "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour."
In 1966, he won an Emmy for his direction of "The Game," an episode of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre." He also received Emmy nominations as the director of another segment of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre" and an episode of "Ben Casey."
Pollack's other films as a director are "The Scalphunters" (with Lancaster), "Castle Keep," "The Yakuza," "Bobby Deerfield," "Absence of Malice," "The Firm," "Sabrina," "Random Hearts," and "The Interpreter."
His most recent film was a departure: "Sketches of Frank Gehry," a feature-length documentary released in this country in 2006 about his friend, the renowned architect whose work includes the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr. Pollack, who co-founded Mirage Productions in 1985, was a founding member of the Sundance Institute.
He met his wife, Claire, when he was teaching and she was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse. They were married in 1958 and had three children, Rebecca, Rachel and Steven. Steven died in a plane crash in 1993. He also leaves six grandchildren and a brother, Bernie, a Hollywood costume designer.
Services will be private. 