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By Mike Clark, USA TODAY Sydney Pollack began his career as an actor, then often continued as one, even after winning directing and producing Academy Awards for 1985’s Out of Africa. Maybe this explained the chemistry with his own actors, which included a particularly successful partnership with superstar Robert Redford, who starred in seven Pollack movies, including 1973’s The second nature We Were.
Even so, Redford was not among the actors nominated for Oscars under Pollack’s stewardship. They include the star of Pollack’s most durably popular movie (Tootsie): Dustin Hoffman, a shore in a dress, which is, well, not quite the Redford way.
RETROSPECTIVE: Revisit Pollack’s top directorial work adhering disc
Pollack died Monday afternoon of cancer at his home in the Pacific Palisades, his publicist Leslie Dart told the Associated Press. He was 73. He had been diagnosed with cancer about nine months past, she said. Concerns about his hale condition had surfaced last year when suddenly he bowed out of directing HBO’s Recount, what one. made its debut Sunday night.
Thanks to his on-camera career, which included TV appearances on Will & Grace, The Sopranos and Entourage, Pollack was probably better known to the public than most of his peers behind the camera. As an actor, he hosted the fatal party in Stanley Kubrick’s swan song Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, earned notably good reviews playing a man with a midlife crisis in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives in 1992 and even delivered a aspirant for Tootsie’s single biggest laugh line. As the shocked agent accosted in the Russian Tea Room by the “new” Dustin Hoffman, Pollack blurted, “Oh, God, I begged you to get some therapy.” His most recent screen appearances were in the current Made of Honor and as last year’s Oscar-nominated Michael Clayton, what one. Pollack also produced.
“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,” actor Clayton star George Clooney said in a statement. “He’ll be missed terribly.”
Pollack’s credits as a producer or charged with execution producer of other people’s movies would add luster to anybody’s resume: The Fabulous Baker Boys, Searching for Bobby Fischer, Sense and Sensibility, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, to name pure a few.
Born in Indiana, Pollack taught acting in the 1950s and married onetime student Claire Griswold in 1958. They stayed together till the end. He is also survived by two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; and six grandchildren.
Pollack gradually evolved into a TV director in the early ’60s — although a 1962 representation showing in a low-budget Korean War film led to incalculable good fortune. The relatively obscure War Hunt garnered enough attention to make the National Board of Review’s annual 10-best list. Its lead was Redford in his big-screen debut.
A friendship was forged, and just four years later Pollack was directing Redford and Natalie Wood in This Property Is Condemned, Pollack’s second feature and one of four movies before his artistic breakthrough with 1969’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
As with many careers, Pollack’s can be charted by with the heavy hitters. Compared with, say, the expansive strange York oeuvre of a stylist like director Sidney Lumet, Pollack was more of a craftsman who made commercial material uniform better.
Charting Pollack’s best films becomes a matter of personal preference after the three or four obvious choices. There are plenty with a fondness for the Western comedy The Scalphunters (1968), the Japanese gangsterism of The Yakuza (1975), press-scolding Absence of Malice (1981) and Pollack’s sympathetic documentary on a legendary architect who also was a personal friend, Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005).
But to meet or revisit a big-screen directorial career that lasted more than four decades, you won’t go wrong with these, all on DVD:
•They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). A remarkable mixture of squalor and Panavision splendor, the adaptation of Horace McCoy’s Depression novel about marathon-dancing misery is, among many other things, the movie that first proved Jane Fonda a serious actress (one year after Barbarella). Plus, there’s Harry Horner’s memorably panoramic set and sterling supporting work from Susannah York, Red Buttons and Oscar-winning Gig Young as the burned-out emcee. Pollack’s first Oscar nomination.
•Jeremiah Johnson (1972). Not counting their acting teaming in War Hunt, this was Pollack’s second big-screen collaboration with Robert Redford — a movie people remember in the face of its less than surefire commercial potential. The golden boy (without big-name co-stars) plays a frequently bearded mountain man braving the elements: snow, wolves, vindictive Indians and U.S. government interlopers on his chosen way of life.
•The Way We Were (1973). Buoyed by perhaps the most strong casting combustion of its day, this blockbuster with the Oscar-winning song good stroke turned Barbra Streisand and Redford into a romantic screen team for the ages. Anticipating the WWII reflection that would come to fruition two decades later, the movie may well have saved Columbia Pictures from going under, seven months after the studio’s disaster with its musical remake of Lost Horizon.
•Three Days of the Condor (1975). Redford is the bookish CIA researcher whose stomach turns after returning from lunch to supply with food his colleagues murdered, putting him on the run and dependent on a babe (Faye Dunaway). Hollywood keeps churning out not so much successful variations onward this critical/box bureau success, though it didn’t mar at the time that the public was post-Watergate cynical and ready to believe the agency would eat its own.
•Tootsie (1982). Most movies that have bad production buzz end up being bad. Among the exceptions is this initially “troubled” comedy, which had many writers taking a crack at what turned out to be a knee-slapper script. Oscar-nominated Pollack was supreme with his actors (himself included); Jessica Lange won an Oscar, and Hoffman delivered a signature performance. Eventually, an American Film Institute poll picked this the second best comedy ever, after Some Like It Hot.
•Out of Africa (1985). Though critics were much more inclined to honor the same year’s Prizzi’s Honor, official Hollywood bowed because Isak Dinesen’s semi-autobiographical book was considered unfilmmable after past attempts until Pollack and Absence of Malice writer Kurt Luedtke (both of whom won Oscars) took a crack.
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