Sydney Pollack and Frank Ghery shooting Sony Classics' Sketches Of Frank Ghery - Pollack's final film as director
"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. He'll be missed terribly," said George Clooney of actor, director and producer Sydney Pollack, who died yesterday at the age of 73. It was a fitting tribute to a determined all-rounder who took on Hollywood at its own game and made some of the best loved movies of the 20th century.
Known for films like Tootsie, Out Of Africa and The Way We Were, Pollack only became a director by accident. After a tough childhood in Lafayette, Indiana, where he had to deal with anti-Semitism and the death of his alcoholic mother, he moved to New York to train as an actor whilst supporting himself through teaching. This led to dialogue coaching work on the Hollywood set of The Young Savages, where he met Burt Lancaster. "Lancaster told me to come to his office one day and said, 'You should be a director,'" Pollack explained. When he protested that he knew nothing about directing, the star introduced him to the owner of Universal Pictures. After training in television, Pollack took on his first feature film (The Slender Thread, with Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft) in 1965. Though Pollack himself would later come to despise it, the film was a hit and his new career had begun.
Over the course of the next 40 years, Pollack directed 21 films. He made his name by using the mainstream Hollywood format and big name stars to put across a real artistic vision. "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. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form," he said. And, on the actors he worked with, "Stars are like thoroughbreds. 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." An interesting metaphor from the director of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
The star who meant the most to Pollack was Robert Redford, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship after they met on the set of War Hunt. They made a total of 11 films together, including Havana, The Electric Horseman and Three Days Of The Condor. Redford said in a statement that, after their 40-year friendship, he found the loss of Pollack too personal to discuss.
Sadly, Pollack never had much confidence in his own abilities as an actor, despite receiving plenty of acclaim for his work in films like Michael Clayton, Eyes Wide Shut, and Woody Allen's Husbands And Wives. His last appearance was in Made Of Honor, released earlier this year, but by the time it hit cinemas he had already retired from the world of filmmaking, having been diagnosed with cancer. His daughters and his wife of 47 years were with him at his Los Angeles home when he died.
“It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good," Pollack argued, defending his choices to the last with his trademark humour. "[Constantin] Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen.”
