SYDNEY POLLACK, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, ACTOR
1-7-1934 — 26-5-2008

THE Academy Award-winning director, Sydney Pollack, who was responsible for some of Hollywood's most influential and best-remembered films of the past four decades, has died of cancer at his home in Los Angeles in the US. He was 73.

Pollack won two Oscars for Out of Africa (1985), but perhaps his best-loved film was Tootsie (1982), after starting his run of success in 1969 with They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.

Pollack also directed many TV series and won the 1966 best directing Emmy Award for an episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.

But his biggest successes were in film. Out of Africa, a 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 Oscars — as director and as producer of the film, which also won the best picture Oscar.

He also received a best director Oscar nomination for Tootsie, the comedy in which Dustin Hoffman stars as an unemployed New York actor who revives his career by transforming himself into a "woman" — and then finds himself falling in love with an actress, played by Jessica Lange.

The making of the film involved testy moments between the director and actor. "Stars are like thoroughbreds," Pollack said. "Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown." Yet it was Hoffman who pressed him to play his actor-character's exasperated agent in Tootsie.

Pollack finally consented to his first big-screen acting role since the 1962 film War Hunt. "Dustin really kept after me to do the part," Pollack recalled. "At one point, he even sent me flowers and signed the note 'Love, Dorothy'."

On the set of War Hunt Pollack met Robert Redford, who was also making his film debut. Pollack later directed seven movies with Redford, beginning with This Property Is Condemned (with Natalie Wood) in 1966. Their collaboration also produced The Way We Were (with Barbra Streisand), Jeremiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor (with Faye Dunaway), The Electric Horseman (with Jane Fonda), Out of Africa (with Meryl Streep) and Havana.

Some critics found The Way We Were and Out of Africa saccharine and ponderous, and Pollack spoke of his own "tendency by nature to be heavy-handed", which he attributed to his early training as a television director "where you have to grab the audience in the first 10 minutes". But those who worked closely with him as a filmmaker credited him with being a painstaking craftsman. Screenwriter Robert Towne described Pollack as "relentless and meticulous". Cinematographer Owen Roizman, who shot five films directed by Pollack, including Tootsie and Havana, said his films had "a lyrical quality like great music, and the timing is impeccable".

As an actor, 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. He also turned up in guest roles on TV series such as Frasier, Will & Grace and The Sopranos.

Some critics accused Pollack of wanting to work only with big-name stars, but he countered that that was just the way events unfolded.

But few disputed that Pollack was a master of pulling terrific performances from actors. Those who won Oscars under his direction included Gig Young as a cynical dance-marathon announcer in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Jessica Lange as an emotionally vulnerable actress in Tootsie.

Even in his less-regarded works, many actors earned Oscar nominations, including Paul Newman and Melinda Dillon in the newspaper libel drama Absence of Malice (1981) and Holly Hunter in The Firm (1993), based on the John Grisham legal thriller.

Pollack, the son of a pharmacist, was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and moved with his family to South Bend, which he said was "a real cultural desert … There weren't many Jews like us; 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 Pollack was 16. He left home after graduating from high school and moved to New York, where he studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. He became Meisner's assistant and the actors he, in turn, taught included Robert Duvall, Rip Torn, Brenda Vaccaro and Claire Griswold, whom he married in 1958. "I knew I wasn't going to be any great shakes as an actor — the way I looked I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend," he said. "I taught. That's how I made my living."

In 1955, he had a small role in the Broadway comedy The Dark Is Light Enough, and later appeared on Playhouse 90 and The United States Steel Hour as well as series such as Have Gun Will Travel.

His career was interrupted by army service in 1957-59.

Other notable films that bear his stamp include Three Days of the Condor (1975), which captured Nixon-era paranoia; Jeremiah Johnson (1972) emphasised the loner (a fur trapper in the wilderness) at conflict with society.

In later years, Pollack had a significant impact as a producer by using his reputation for commercial success to support other directors, some of them untested. Last year he backed screenwriter and first-time director Tony Gilroy on the critically praised Michael Clayton, a thriller with George Clooney. He also teamed with writer-producer-director Anthony Minghella to produce such films as The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), Iris (2001), The Quiet American (2002) and Cold Mountain (2003).

As a director and producer, Pollack's other films included The Yakuza (1974) with Robert Mitchum as an American private eye in Japan; Bobby Deerfield (1977) with Al Pacino as a racing car driver who falls for a woman with cancer, Marthe Keller; Random Hearts (1999), a romantic drama with Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas falling in love after their spouses die in an aircraft crash; and The Interpreter (2005), a thriller with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman and set at the United Nations.

In 2005, he made his first documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, after meeting the celebrated architect at a Los Angeles party.

Pollack won his first movie directing credit for The Slender Thread in 1965, but he later dismissed it as "a dreadful picture". He was not contradicted by reviewers.

His next three films, This Property is Condemned (1966), The Scalphunters (1968) and Castle Keep (1969), also bombed with critics. Then came They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and he was on his way.

Pollock credited Burt Lancaster with getting him his break as a director in Hollywood. They were working as actors on John Frankenheimer's 1961 film The Young Savages, when Lancaster called him into his office: "He told me 'You should be a director', and I said I didn't know anything about directing, so he introduced me to Lew Wasserman (chairman of MCA, owner of Universal Pictures)," Pollack said.

In addition to his wife, Claire, he is survived by his daughters Rebecca and Rachel, a brother and six grandchildren. Another son, Steven, died in the crash of a small aircraft in 1993.

LOS ANGELES TIME, WASHINGTON POST