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Sydney Irwin Pollack (July 1, 1934 – May 26, 2008) was an American film director, producer, and actor. Pollack is known for directing commercially and critically acclaimed studio films.
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Sydney Pollack was an Academy Award-winning director, producer, actor, writer and public figure, who directed and produced over 40 films. Sydney Irwin Pollack was born July 1, 1934 in Lafayette, Indiana, USA, to Rebecca (Miller), a homemaker, and David Pollack, a professional boxer turned pharmacist.
- July 1, 1934
- May 26, 2008
- Overview
- Early work in television and film
- Film directing
- Tootsie and Out of Africa
- Last films
Sydney Pollack (born July 1, 1934, Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.—died May 26, 2008, Pacific Palisades, California) American director, producer, and actor who helmed a number of popular films, including The Way We Were (1973), Tootsie (1982), Out of Africa (1985), and The Firm (1993). Although lacking a distinctive style, he was known for eliciting strong performances from actors.
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After high school, Pollack moved to New York City, where he took acting classes with Sanford Meisner and later taught. In 1955 he appeared in the Broadway production of The Dark Is Light Enough, and the following year he began acting on television. His early notable TV credits included For Whom the Bell Tolls, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s no...
Pollack’s first credit as a film director was The Slender Thread (1965), in which a crisis-line volunteer (played by Sidney Poitier) keeps a sleeping-pill-overdose victim (Anne Bancroft) talking on the phone as police try to trace the call and save her. That modest effort was followed by Pollack’s first prestige production, This Property Is Condemned (1966), an extremely loose expansion of Tennessee Williams’s one-act play. The 1930s drama, which was cowritten by Francis Ford Coppola, cast Natalie Wood as a young woman in a small Mississippi town who falls in love with a visiting railroad official (played by Redford) and ends up committing adultery.
In 1968 Pollack made The Scalphunters, a comedic western starring Burt Lancaster, Ossie Davis, and Telly Savalas. The director then worked on The Swimmer (1968), an adaptation of a John Cheever story, but he was not credited. Lancaster starred in that film and returned for Castle Keep (1969), a World War II adventure about a group of soldiers (including Peter Falk and Bruce Dern) who take refuge in a Belgian castle.
Up to that point, Pollack’s films had received largely mixed reviews. With They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), however, he had his first critical and commercial success. The Depression-era drama was a powerful adaptation of Horace McCoy’s 1935 existential novel about a dance marathon that ends tragically for several of its desperate contestants. Three of the four principal actors—Jane Fonda, Susannah York, and Gig Young—were nominated for Academy Awards (Young won), and Pollack received his first nomination for best director. He followed that downbeat ode with the metaphysical western Jeremiah Johnson (1972), a beautifully photographed account of the life of a former soldier who escapes civilization by living in the Rocky Mountains, where he struggles to survive the perils of nature, Native Americans, and even the U.S. cavalry. Redford successfully sacrificed his golden-boy persona to underplay the cryptic character, and the film was a major hit.
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Pollack next directed Redford in The Way We Were (1973), an enormously popular and unremittingly nostalgic love story. It costarred Barbra Streisand as a liberal activist who becomes the conscience of an apolitical writer (Redford), and Streisand received an Oscar nomination for best actress; the title song, which she sang, and Marvin Hamlisch’s score both won Academy Awards.
Tootsie (1982) was one of the highlights of Pollack’s career, a blend of romance and comedy built around the talents of Dustin Hoffman, who played a struggling actor who turns to cross-dressing in order to land a role on a soap opera. The Academy Award-nominated film featured strong performances by Jessica Lange (who won an Oscar), Bill Murray, Dabney Coleman, Teri Garr, and Charles Durning. Pollack was notable as a skeptical agent, and he earned his second Oscar nod for direction.
In 1985 Pollack directed his most-lauded film, Out of Africa, which was based on the life of Karen Blixen-Finecke, who gained fame as Isak Dinesen. Meryl Streep starred as the Danish writer who, with her husband-of-convenience (Klaus Maria Brandauer), moves to East Africa and establishes a coffee plantation. Complications arise when she later meets and falls in love with the British adventurer Denys Finch Hatton (Redford). Although not without criticism—some argued it was long and that Redford was miscast as Hatton—the film was praised for its intelligence and stunning cinematography. Out of Africa won seven Academy Awards, including best picture, and Pollack won his only Oscar for best director.
Pollack’s last films were largely unsuccessful. Sabrina (1995), starring Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford, and Greg Kinnear, was a flawed remake of the heralded 1954 romantic comedy by Billy Wilder. Random Hearts (1999) was a misfire, with Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas ill matched as a police officer and a congresswoman who find that their spouses, who have just been killed in an airplane crash, were having an affair. After a protracted absence from directing, Pollack helmed his final film, The Interpreter, in 2005. The political thriller starred Nicole Kidman as a United Nations interpreter who overhears an assassination plot, and Sean Penn was the skeptical Secret Service agent investigating her claims. In 2005 Pollack also directed an episode on architect Frank Gehry for American Masters, a TV series on PBS.
Pollack continued to act throughout his career. In fact, had he not been such a successful film director, he likely would have had a significant career as an actor. In addition to appearing in his own films, he had roles in such notable movies as Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and Michael Clayton (2007). He also acted in a number of TV shows, including Frasier, Mad About You, Will & Grace, and The Sopranos.
- Michael Barson
Sydney Pollack was an Academy Award-winning director, producer, actor, writer and public figure, who directed and produced over 40 films. Sydney Irwin Pollack was born July 1, 1934 in Lafayette, Indiana, USA, to Rebecca (Miller), a homemaker, and David Pollack, a professional boxer turned pharmacist.
- January 1, 1
- Lafayette, Indiana, USA
- January 1, 1
- 1.82 m
+. By Michael Cieply. May 26, 2008. LOS ANGELES Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor whose star-laden movies like “The Way We Were,” “Tootsie” and “Out...
Sydney Irwin Pollack (July 1, 1934 – May 26, 2008) was an American film director, producer, and actor. Pollack is known for directing commercially and critically acclaimed studio films.
May 14, 2018 · POLLACK, SYDNEY (1934– ), U.S. film director and producer. Born in Lafayette, Indiana, Pollack first learned his craft by directing many tv episodes of such programs as Ben Casey, The Defenders, Dr. Kildare, The Fugitive , and The Naked City .
