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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 Monday. He was 73. Pollack,
who also was a producer and actor, died of cancer at his
home in Pacific Palisades, 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 Times recently.
In
looking at Pollack’s 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, 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, 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 Pollack an Oscar nomination for best director.
Known
for what New York Times film critic Janet Maslin once
described as “his broadly commercial instincts and
penchant for all-star casts,” Pollack directed seven
movies with Robert Redford, beginning with This
Property Is Condemned (with Natalie Wood) in 1966.
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, 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, who
shot five films directed by Pollack, including
Tootsie and Havana, said in 2005 when it was
announced that Pollack would receive the 2006 American
Society of Cinematographers Board of Governors Award for
his contributions to advancing the art of filmmaking.
“He is
never satisfied....His passion is contagious. It
inspires everyone around him to dig a little deeper,”
Roizman said.
Film
critic and historian Leonard Maltin said “the hallmark”
of 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 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 Pollack two
Academy Awards: as director and as producer of the film,
which won the best picture Oscar.
Pollack
also received a best director Oscar nomination—and a New
York Film Critics Circle Award—for Tootsie, the
1982 comedy starring Dustin Hoffman 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 Pollack and Hoffman—and unexpected difficulties.
“It’s
like working with the mechanical shark in Jaws,”
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
three-and-a-half-hour makeup job, and then the makeup
only has a life of four or five hours. We didn’t
anticipate that.”
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.”
Pollack’s experience as an actor and acting teacher
helped earn him a reputation as an “actor’s director.”
“He
talks in a language that actors can understand,” Ed
Harris, who played an FBI agent in Pollack’s 1993
dramatic thriller The Firm, starring Tom Cruise,
told USA Today at the time. “He won’t just say ‘speed
up’ or ‘slow down’; he’ll talk to you about the
situation.”
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
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.
In a
1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Pollack said
he liked to talk to his actors at length.
“When I
start a scene I say, ‘Let’s not make this a movie.’ It’s
my way of wanting it first to be realistic. You’re not
doing it to be observed. You’re doing it alone. I tell
actors, ‘Watch Candid Camera, then flick the
channel to something else, then turn back. You’ll see
how phony the acting looks because real reaction so
often means doing nothing.’ It’s always simple. The
tendency with actors is to think that if you’re doing
more, you’re doing more.”
Pollack
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 is
also survived by six grandchildren and a brother Bernie,
a
Hollywood costume designer.
Services
will be private. |
