TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Prolific Director, Actor Sydney Pollack Dies

ADVERTISEMENT

The Washington Post

Published: May 27, 2008

Sydney Pollack, 73, a director and producer of popular Hollywood movies for nearly four decades, including the comedy "Tootsie," and who won Academy Awards for "Out of Africa," died Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He had cancer.

Pollack, who called himself "Mr. Mainstream," was wildly successful at moviemaking with mass appeal, but drew mixed reviews during a prolific career.

His best-remembered work could be provocative, timely and sensitively crafted: "Tootsie" (1982) was hilarious and underscored aspects of the feminist struggle; the taut spy story "Three Days of the Condor" (1975) captured Nixon-era paranoia; "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (1969), though set at a Depression-era dance marathon, resonated with young ticket buyers who saw the rigged contest as a reflection of modern society.

Pollack's movies often emphasized the loner at conflict with society, whether a fur trapper in the wilderness in "Jeremiah Johnson" (1972) or a cowboy who tries to recover his soul after selling out in "The Electric Horseman" (1979) with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda.

He saw Redford as his ideal collaborator and cast him in seven movies, from "This Property is Condemned" (1966) to "Havana" (1990).

Audiences embraced two of Pollack's best-known romance stories: "The Way We Were" (1973) with Redford as a WASP writer and Barbra Streisand as a Jewish political activist during the Hollywood blacklist; and "Out of Africa" (1985), a $30 million production based on Danish author Karen Blixen's years in Kenya and her complicated affair with a free-spirited and handsome pilot.

The latter film, which earned Oscars for Pollack for directing and producing, starred Meryl Streep and Redford against a backdrop likened by critics to a National Geographic spread.

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."

But 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.

As an actor, Pollack's most notable role may have been as Hoffman's long-suffering agent in "Tootsie," a part he was said to have taken only reluctantly after Hoffman, in female character, hounded him with notes that read, "Please be my agent! Love, Dorothy."

He had key supporting roles in Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives" (1992) as an adulterer, Robert Altman's "The Player" (1992) as a Hollywood lawyer and Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999) as a creepy doctor - parts he took because he was curious about how other famous directors worked. He also had a stint as a wife-killing oncologist on the HBO mob drama "The Sopranos."

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT