Sydney Pollack Dies; Actor and Actor’s Director
Sydney Pollack helped make a sex symbol of Robert Redford, an Oscar-caliber star of Jane Fonda and a woman of Dustin Hoffman.
Pollack, the quintessential actor’s director of Tootsie, The Way We Were and more, who seemed most comfortable in the company of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and vice versa, died tonight of cancer at his Los Angeles home.
The filmmaker, a two-time Oscar-winner, was 73.
“Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better,” George Clooney said in a statement. “A tip of the hat to a class act. He’ll be missed terribly.”
Pollack recently worked with Clooney on Michael Clayton, which Pollack acted in and helped produce, and Leatherheads, which he executive produced.
Michael Clayton, a Best Picture contender at this past February’s Oscars, brought Pollack his sixth career nomination. He won his pair of statuettes for directing and producing the 1985 Best Picture winner, Out of Africa.
He also earned nominations for directing and producing Tootsie, the beloved cross-dressing 1982 comedy, and for directing the 1969 dance-marathon drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.
A former acting teacher who became an in-demand character actor, Pollack had memorable on-screen turns in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives and his own Tootsie, in which he played Hoffman’s exasperated acting agent.
Indicative of a career that seemed as vital as ever, Pollack can currently be seen in theaters as Patrick Dempsey’s father in the comedy Made of Honor.
Pollack, the producer, likewise was busy. He had a number of films in the offing, including The Reader, an upcoming Ralph Fiennes-Kate Winslet romantic drama, from the production company he founded with Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning writer-director who died suddenly in March.
With its central love story, The Reader seems a prototypical Pollack production. As the filmmaker told Online in 2000, “I have never done a film without a love story.”
And, he could have added, he never did a film without an A-list actor, either.
Hoffman, Tom Cruise (The Firm), Meryl Streep (Out of Africa), Paul Newman and Sally Field (Absence of Malice), and Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn (The Interpreter) all worked with Pollack, the director.
Harrison Ford made two movies with PollackRandom Hearts and Sabrina.
Robert Redford made sevenHavana, Out of Africa, The Electric Horseman, Three Days of the Condor, The Way We Were, Jeremiah Johnson and This Property Is Condemned.
A star on a Pollack film, especially a Pollack film of the 1970s and 1980s, could almost bet on two things: the film selling a lot of tickets, and the film netting a lot of Oscar nominations. Actors who earned Academy Award nominations in Pollack films include Hoffman, Newman, Streep, Barbra Streisand (The Way We Were) and Holly Hunter (The Firm).
While Pollack was known for deftly and successfully working with Hollywood giants, he also had a knack for discovering talent. Or, maybe it’s better put, he had a knack for recasting talent.
He spotted Greg Kinnear on E!’s Talk Soup, cast him as Ford’s younger brother in Sabrina and set the TV host onto an Oscar-nominated acting career.
He directed the post-Barbarella Jane Fonda, not then noted as a serious actress, to her first Oscar nomination in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.
And he directed Jessica Lange, also not yet then noted as a serious actress, to her first Oscar-winning performance as Hoffman’s insecure love interest in Tootsie.
Of all the stars he worked with, Pollack was most associated with Redford. This Property Is Condemned, released in 1966, was Pollack’s second feature as director, and one of Redford’s first as a leading man. The two went on to work together on one of the biggest box-office hits of the 1970s, the love-song-inspiring The Way We Were, to one of the more notorious busts of the 1990s, the bad-review-inspiring Havana.
“I’ll tell you something,” Pollack said of Havana to the New York Times. “If I had to do it again, I’d do it. I loved that character that Redford played.”
Pollack was biased. He saw in Redford “the quintessential American hero,” he told Online, and “the loner, the guy who wanted to make his own rules, the guy who learns to become a real human being through the love of a woman,” he expounded on to the Times.
A man who becomes a better man by becoming a woman was the premise of Tootsie, arguably Pollack’s greatest success as director, Oscar wins notwithstanding, and his only film to make the American Film Institute’s list honoring the 100 best U.S.-made movies.
Tootsie, in which difficult actor Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) becomes a soap star by pretending to be spunky actress Dorothy Michaels (also Hoffman), earned 10 Academy Award nominations, and reignited Pollack’s left-for-dead acting career.
According to the filmmaker, Hoffman suggestedno, demandedthat Pollack play Michael Dorsey’s agent, instead of Dabney Coleman, who’d been cast.
“Dustin was very fond of Dabney, but he felt he was a colleague and a peer,” Pollack told Online. “He said, ’If a peer says to me, ’You’re never going to work again,’ I’m not gonna put on a dress. If you say to me, ’You’re never gonna work again,’ then maybe I’ll put on a dress.”
Coleman ended up playing the movie’s boorish soap director; Pollack ended up on other directors’ call sheets.
He played the midlife-crisis-suffering husband in Allen’s Husbands and Wives. He played the tony Long Islander with a penchant for clothing-optional costume parties in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. He played Clooney’s law-firm boss in Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton.
Pollack also did a good amount of TV, including stops on The Sopranos, Frasier and Will & Grace, where he occasionally appeared as Eric McCormack’s prime-time father.
Born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., Pollack once said of his childhood to the Times, “I think of it with great sadness. It was a real cultural desert.”
Pollack found a home in New York City, where acting class kept him busy as both student and teacher. Of his teaching career, Pollack said it only came about because he couldn’t find work as an actor.
The turning point came in 1959 when John Frankenheimer, a prolific director of the era’s live TV dramas who would later helm such films as the original Manchurian Candidate, hired Pollack as an acting coach. The gig led to TV directing gigs, which led to his first feature, The Slender Thread, a 1965 suicide hotline drama with, as would become Pollack’s way, two stars, Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft.
Pollack’s last dramatic film as director was the United Nations-set The Interpreter, which was released in 2005, the same year as his lone documentary as a filmmaker, Sketches of Frank Gehry, about the noted architect.
A prolific producer and executive producer, Pollack helped make high-profile Oscar fare (Minghella’s Cold Mountain and The Talented Mr. Ripley), smallish films (Sliding Doors, Searching for Bobby Fischer) and even a John Goodman vehicle (King Ralph).
In the end, Pollack was defined by big stars and big movies. He knew it. And embraced it.
“Not all those big movies are good for you. I suppose there’s a lot of bad onesI’m sure people would say I’ve made some of them,” Pollack once told National Public Radio. “But the good ones do move you.”
Friends, Family Remember Sydney Pollack
Friends, family and colleagues held a private memorial service for the late Sydney Pollack on Saturday in Los Angeles, according to the Associated Press. No other details were given.
The two-time Oscar-winning producer, director and actor died of cancer on May 26 at the age of 73. He is survived by his wife, Claire, two daughters and six grandchildren. His only son, Steven, died in a plane crash in 1993.
Pollack’s Projects Up in the Air
Sydney Pollack left behind one of the great film legacies when he died Monday. He also left behind a pile of unfinished business.
The fate of the Hollywood titan’s myriad projects remains uncertain, with his death following so closely that of his producing partner and fellow Oscar winner Anthony Minghella, who died of a hemorrhage following routine surgery in March.
The duo, considered two of Hollywood’s most esteemed auteurs, had several high-profile productions in the pipeline at their Mirage Enterprises, including an English-language remake of 2007’s Best Foreign Oscar winner, The Lives of Others, for the Weinstein Company and the upcoming HBO series The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.
Mirage executives are now scrambling to figure out what to do with the slate.
Sources tell the Hollywood Reporter several of the pair’s projects that do not have other producers attached might end up under the purview of Pollack’s agents at Creative Artists Agency and his family. Alternatively, daughter Rebecca, formerly an executive at United Artists, could step in and oversee them.
“We’re all flying a little blind right now,” an insider close to Pollack tells the trade.
In the meantime, Mirage says it plans on moving ahead with the lineup, which includes the following:
- I Don’t Know How She Does It, a feature film adaptation of Allison Pearson’s novel, helmed by David Frankel (Marley & Me)
- The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, a feature adapted by Minghella from a novel by Liz Jensen
- The Silver Linings Playbook, an inspirational drama based on a forthcoming novel
- Bartimaeus Trilogy: The Amulet of Samarkand, based on the children’s fantasy series by Jonathan Stroud
- The Ressurectionists, a film for Miramax based on the novel by Michael Collins, which Minghella planned to direct
- Colombian Gold, a murder mystery to be directed by Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl)
- Liberty, a thriller set in Haiti
- Turbulence, a thriller Mirage was producing for Universal
Cruise, Kidman, Streisand Remember Pollack
Judging by the A-list tributes extended by those who worked with director Sydney Pollack, he wasn’t just a dedicated filmmaker, he was a dedicated friend.
“I first met him while he was in the midst of editing Tootsie (one of the all-time classics),” Tom Cruise said of Pollack, who died Monday at 73 after a battle with cancer.
“I’d seen every one of his pictures and he generously took the meeting. Years later, having lived through some short post schedules myself, I realized just how generous. He spent over six hours, with the patience of Job, answering all my questions.
“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,” said Cruise, who acted for Pollack in The Firm and costarred with him in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
“He was a Renaissance man and a great friend. I will miss him dearly.”
Nicole Kidman, who also pulled double duty with Pollack, starring in his thriller The Intepreter and opposite him in Eyes Wide Shut, called him “irreplaceable to so many people.”
“He was elegant, a gentleman, smart and generous, a wonderful actor, a great cook…a true connoisseur of life,” Kimdan said today in a statement. He guided me artistically and personally, not just as a director or producer but as a mentor and a friend. I will miss him terribly.”
Barbra Streisand honored her The Way We Were director as “a great actor’s director because he was a great actor.”
“He knew how to tell a love story,” she said in a statement. “And he was a very good friend, someone I even shared secrets with.”
Similar sentiments were issued by longtime Pollack pal Martin Landau. The men became friends when both were industry newbies.
“Ever since we started together in New York, Sydney excelled at everything he set out to do, his friendships and his humanity no less than his extraordinary talents.”
Greg Kinnear made the jump from E!’s Talk Soup to the big screen when Pollack cast him in Sabrina opposite Harrison Ford.
“Sydney Pollack earned his reputation as the quintessential actor’s director. He was challenging, he cared about the work and made you feel safe, even if he was directing you in your first film. I’ll always be grateful to him. He was a class act and will certainly be missed,” said Kinnear.
George Clooney, meanwhile, was first out of the gate to remember the Hollywood legend and all-around nice guy, issuing a statement Monday night. Pollack served as a producer on Clooney’s two most recent big-screen outings, Leatherheads and Michael Clayton.
“Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better. A tip of the hat to a class act. He’ll be missed terribly.”