Academy Award winner, Sydney Pollack, died of cancer on Monday May 26th, at the age of 73. Pollack was a famous actor, director, and writer known to many in the film industry as an amazing filmmaker. He was well known for his acting in “Micheal Clayton,” “The Sopranos,” “Eye’s Wide Shut” and many more. He won an Academy Award for directing in 1985 for his film “Out of Africa.” He was also well known for directing many other mainstream films including, “The Way We Were,” “The Firm,” “Tootsie,” and many more.
“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.
Pollack went on on to become one of the most successful and prominent filmmakers of our time.
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.
Throughout his entire career he worked from both sides of the camera. He worked with some of the finest actors, writers, cinematographers, and other filmmakers in his career and it shows through the quality and longevity of his films.
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.”
He was lucky enough to be recognized several times in his career for his work.
“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.
He was a true artist and he will be missed.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 TFS // May 26, 2008 at 9:14 pm
that sucks!
I WILL LIGHT A CANDLE, AND WATCH HAVANA & WILL AND GRACE…
FOR THE LOSS OF ANOTHER FILM-MASTER!
BYE BYE SID
RIP
2 Matt // May 27, 2008 at 3:33 pm
This is a terrible loss and he will be greatly missed. He was Undoubtedly one of the best directors ever.
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