May 27, 2008, 12:51 GMT
Los Angeles - US director and Oscar winner Sydney Pollack - known for producing intelligent, commercially successful, star-laden films such as Out of Africa, Tootsie and The Way We Were - has died at the age of 73.
A file picture dated , 03 August 2002 shows US director, producer and actor Sydney Pollack, answering questions concerning the Leopard of Honour, a lifetime achievement award, he received at the 55th International Film Festival of Locarno in Locarno, Switzerland. Pollack died of cancer 26 May 2008 at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., USA, according to his agent. He was 73. EPA/MARTIAL TREZZINI
He had been battling cancer and died Monday at his Los Angeles home, news reports said, citing the filmmaker's friend and publicist Leslee Dart.
Pollack won two Oscars for best director and best picture for directing and producing 1985's Out of Africa, based on the memoirs of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen, played by Meryl Streep.
The movie in which she and Robert Redford played ill-fated lovers in colonial Kenya was nominated for 11 Oscars and won seven.
Pollack was nominated for Academy Awards four other times. The first was for best director for 1969's They Shoot Horses, Don't They about Depression-era marathon dancers and starring Jane Fonda.
Pollack received two nods for best director and best picture for 1982's Tootsie, a gender-bending comedy starring Dustin Hoffman, and his final nomination for best film came for his final critically acclaimed movie, last year's Michael Clayton, which he produced and starred in, playing the morally murky boss of the title character, a fixer in a law firm portrayed by George Clooney.
Pollack was best known as an actor's director and directed 12 actors in Oscar-nominated roles.
'I am not a visual innovator,' he told the film critic Roger Ebert. 'I haven't broken any new ground in the form of a film. My strength is with actors. I think I'm good at working with them to get the best performances, at seeing what it is that they have and that the story needs.'
Pollack starred in more films (30) than he directed (21), winning acclaim not only for his role in Michael Clayton but also directing himself opposite Hoffman in Tootsie and working with other top directors in such movies as Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, Robert Altman's The Player and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
He also made regular guest appearances in popular television series, such as Will and Grace, The Sopranos, Frasier and a recent episode of Entourage in which he played himself.
Pollack was born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Indiana, the son of a pharmacist. He was determined to become an actor after appearing in high school plays and moved to New York after graduation. He studied under Sanford Meisner at the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and later became Meisner's assistant.
Believing he did not have the look to be a leading man or to win meaty roles, he turned to teaching actors and eventually directing.
He got his start in television before directing 1965's The Slender Thread. The film starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft and was about a college student volunteer at a crisis hotline who tries to talk a caller out of suicide.
He went on to direct some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including Paul Newman, Sally Field, Al Pacino, Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn, Nicole Kidman, Jessica Lange, Harrison Ford, Faye Dunaway, Tom Cruise and Robert Mitchum.
He was also instrumental in establishing Robert Redford as a star. Both men admired one another's acting and directing, and Redford starred in seven of Pollack's films: his second feature, 1966's This Property Is Condemned with Natalie Wood, 1972's Jeremiah Johnson, 1973's The Way We Were with Streisand, 1975's Three Days of the Condor with Dunaway, 1979's The Electric Horseman with Fonda, Out of Africa and 1990's Havana with Lena Olin.
'Stars are like thoroughbreds,' he told The New York Times in a 1982 interview. 'Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown, but when they do what they do best - whatever it is that's made them a star - it's really exciting.'
Tootsie was the only comedy in a career dominated by dramas, often romances or political or legal thrillers. He also directed only one film without stars, his last, the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry about his friend the architect, released last year.
That film was made by Mirage Enterprises, a production company Pollack ran with filmmaker Anthony Minghella, who died in March at 54 from complications from surgery for tonsil cancer. The company produced critically acclaimed movies, including Minghell'a Cold Mountain and The Quiet American.
Other movies Pollack directed included The Firm, The Interpreter, Absense of Malice, Bobby Deerfield and 1995's Sabrina.
'If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people,' he told the Times, 'but I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.'
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