NEW YORK TIMES
May 27, 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 of Africa” were among the most successful of the 1970s and ’80s, died Monday at home here. He was 73.
The cause was cancer, said the publicist Leslee Dart, who spoke for his family.
Mr. Pollack’s career defined an era in which big stars (Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty) and the filmmakers who knew how to wrangle them (Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols) retooled the Hollywood system. Savvy operators, they played studio against studio, staking their fortunes on pictures that served commerce without wholly abandoning art.
Hollywood honored Mr. Pollack in return. His movies received multiple Academy Award nominations, and as a director he won an Oscar for his work on the 1985 film “Out of Africa” as well as nominations for directing “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Tootsie” (1982).
“Michael Clayton,” of which Mr. Pollack was a producer and a member of the cast, was nominated for a best picture Oscar earlier this year. He delivered a trademark performance as an old-bull lawyer who demands dark deeds from a subordinate, played by George Clooney. (“This is news? This case has reeked from Day 1!” snaps Mr. Pollack’s Marty Bach.) Most recently, Mr. Pollack portrayed the father of Patrick Dempsey’s character in “Made of Honor.”
Mr. Pollack became a prolific producer of independent films in the latter part of his career. With a partner, the filmmaker Anthony Minghella, he ran Mirage Enterprises, a production company whose films included Mr. Minghella’s “Cold Mountain” and the documentary “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” released in 2006, the last film directed by Mr. Pollack.
Mr. Minghella died in March, at the age of 54, or complications from surgery for tonsil cancer.
Apart from the Gehry documentary, Mr. Pollack never directed a movie without stars. His first feature, “The Slender Thread,” released by Paramount Pictures in 1965, starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. In his next 19 films — every one a romance or drama but for the single comedy, “Tootsie” — Mr. Pollack worked with Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman, Ms. Streisand and others. A frequent collaborator was Robert Redford.
“Sydney’s and my relationship both professionally and personally covers 40 years,” Mr. Redford said in an e-mailed statement. “It’s too personal to express in a sound bite.”
Sydney Irwin Pollack was born on July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and reared in South Bend. By Mr. Pollack’s own account, in the book “World Film Directors,” his father, David, a pharmacist, and his mother, the former Rebecca Miller, were first-generation Russian-Americans who had met at Purdue University.
Mr. Pollack developed a love of drama at South Bend High School and, instead of going to college, went to New York and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. He studied there for two years under Sanford Meisner, who was in charge of its acting department, and remained for five more as Mr. Meisner’s assistant, teaching acting but also appearing onstage and in television.
Curly-haired and almost 6 feet 2 inches tall, Mr. Pollack had a notable role in a 1959 “Playhouse 90” telecast of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” an adaptation of the Hemingway novel directed by John Frankenheimer. Earlier, Mr. Pollack had appeared on Broadway with Zero Mostel in “A Stone for Danny Fisher” and with Katharine Cornell in “The Dark Is Light Enough.” But he said later that he probably could not have built a career as a leading man.
Instead, Mr. Pollack took the advice of Burt Lancaster, whom he had met while working with Mr. Frankenheimer, and turned to directing. Mr. Lancaster steered him to the entertainment mogul Lew Wasserman, and through him Mr. Pollack landed a directing assignment on the television series “Shotgun Slade.”
After a faltering start, he hit his stride on episodes of “Ben Casey,” “Naked City,” “The Fugitive” and other shows. In 1966 he won an Emmy for directing an episode of “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater.”
From the time he made his first full-length feature, “The Slender Thread,” about a social work student coaxing a woman out of suicide on a help line, Mr. Pollack had a hit-and-miss relationship with the critics. Writing in The New York Times, A. H. Weiler deplored that film’s “sudsy waves of bathos.” Mr. Pollack himself later pronounced it “dreadful.”
But from the beginning of his movie career, he was also perceived as belonging to a generation whose work broke with the immediate past. In 1965, Charles Champlin, writing in The Los Angeles Times, compared Mr. Pollack to the director Elliot Silverstein, whose western spoof, “Cat Ballou,” had been released earlier that year, and Stuart Rosenberg, soon to be famous for “Cool Hand Luke” (1967). Mr. Champlin cited all three as artists who had used television rather than B movies to learn their craft.
Self-critical and never quite at ease with Hollywood, Mr. Pollack voiced a constant yearning for creative prerogatives more common on the stage. Yet he dived into the fray. In 1970, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” his bleak fable of love and death among marathon dancers in the Great Depression, based on a Horace McCoy novel, received nine Oscar nominations, including the one for directing. (Gig Young won the best supporting actor award for his performance.)
Two years later, Mr. Pollack made the mountain-man saga “Jeremiah Johnson,” one of three closely spaced pictures in which he directed Mr. Redford.
The second of those, “The Way We Were,” about ill-fated lovers who meet up later in life, also starred Ms. Streisand and was a huge hit despite critical hostility.
The next, “Three Days of the Condor,” another hit, about a bookish C.I.A. worker thrust into a mystery, did somewhat better with the critics. “Tense and involving,” said Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times.
With “Absence of Malice” in 1981, Mr. Pollack entered the realm of public debate. The film’s story of a newspaper reporter (Sally Field) who is fed a false story by federal officials trying to squeeze information from a businessman (Paul Newman) was widely viewed as a corrective to the adulation of investigative reporters that followed Alan J. Pakula’s hit movie “All the President’s Men,” with its portrayal of the Watergate scandal.
Sidney Pollack Directing "Tootsie"
But only with “Tootsie,” in 1982, did Mr. Pollack become a fully realized Hollywood player. By then he was represented by Michael S. Ovitz and the rapidly expanding Creative Artists Agency. So was his leading man, Dustin Hoffman.
Mr. Hoffman, who had initiated the project, argued for a more broadly comic approach. But Mr. Pollack — who played Mr. Hoffman’s agent in the film — was drawn to the seemingly doomed romance between the cross-dressing Hoffman character and the actress played by Jessica Lange.
If Mr. Pollack did not prevail on all points, he tipped the film in his own direction. Meanwhile, the movie came in behind schedule, over budget and surrounded by bad buzz.
Yet “Tootsie” was also a winner. It took in more than $177 million domestically and received 10 Oscar nominations, including for best picture. (Ms. Lange took home the film’s only Oscar, for best supporting actress.)
Backed by Mr. Ovitz, Mr. Pollack expanded his reach in the wake of success. Over the next several years, he worked closely with both TriStar Pictures, where he was creative consultant, and Universal, where Mirage, his production company, set up shop in 1986.
Mr. Pollack reached perhaps his pinnacle with “Out of Africa.” The film, based on the memoirs of Isak Dinesen, paired Ms. Streep and Mr. Redford in a drama that reworked one of the director’s favorite themes, that of star-crossed lovers. It captured Oscars for best picture and best director.
Still, Mr. Pollack remained uneasy about his cinematic skills. “I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist,” he told an interviewer for American Cinematographer last year. And he developed a reputation for caution when it came to directing assignments. Time after time, he expressed interest in directing projects, only to back away. At one point he was to make “Rain Man,” a Dustin Hoffman picture ultimately directed by Mr. Levinson; at another, an adaptation of “The Night Manager” by John le Carré.
That wariness was undoubtedly fed by his experience with “Havana,” a 1990 film that was to be his last with Mr. Redford. It seemed to please no one, though Mr. Pollack defended it. “To tell you the truth, if I knew what was wrong, I’d have fixed it,” Mr. Pollack told The Los Angeles Times in 1993.
“The Firm,” with Tom Cruise, was a hit that year. But “Sabrina” (1995) and “Random Hearts” (1999), both with Harrison Ford, and “The Interpreter” (2005), with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, fell short, as Hollywood and its primary audience increasingly eschewed stars for fantasy and special effects.
Mr. Pollack never stopped acting; in a recent episode of “Entourage,” the HBO series about Hollywood, he played himself.
Among Mr. Pollack’s survivors are two daughters, Rebecca Pollack and Rachel Pollack, and his wife, Claire Griswold. The couple married in 1958, while Mr. Pollack was serving a two-year hitch in the Army. Their only son, Steven, died at age 34 in a 1993 plane crash in Santa Monica, Calif.
In his later years, Mr. Pollack appeared to relish his role as elder statesman. At various times he was executive director of the Actors Studio West, chairman of American Cinematheque and an advocate for artists’ rights.
He increasingly sounded wistful notes about the disappearance of the Hollywood he knew in his prime. “The middle ground is now gone,” Mr. Pollack said in the fall 1998 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly. He added, with a nod to a fellow filmmaker: “It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good. Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen.”
By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
9:08 PM PDT, May 26, 2008
Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of "Out of Africa" who achieved acclaim making popular, mainstream movies with A-list stars, including "The Way We Were" and "Tootsie," died Monday. He was 73.Pollack, who also was a producer and actor, died of cancer at his home in Pacific Palisades, according to Leslee Dart, his publicist and friend.
As a filmmaker, Pollack had a reputation for being a painstaking craftsman -- "relentless and meticulous," screenwriter and friend Robert Towne once said.
"His films have a lyrical quality like great music, and the timing is impeccable," cinematographer Owen Roizman, who shot five films directed by Pollack, including "Tootsie" and "Havana," said when it was announced that Pollack would receive the 2006 American Society of Cinematographers Board of Governors Award for his contributions to filmmaking.
"He is never satisfied. . . . His passion is contagious. It inspires everyone around him to dig a little deeper," Roizman said.
George Clooney, who starred with Pollack in "Michael Clayton," said: "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."
Beginning with "The Slender Thread," a 1965 drama starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, Pollack was credited with directing 20 films, including "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," a 1969 drama about Depression-era marathon dancers starring Jane Fonda that earned Pollack an Oscar nomination for best director.
Known for what New York Times film critic Janet Maslin once described as "his broadly commercial instincts and penchant for all-star casts," Pollack directed seven movies starring Robert Redford, beginning with "This Property Is Condemned" (with Natalie Wood) in 1966.
The Pollack-Redford collaboration also produced "The Way We Were" (with Barbra Streisand), "Jeremiah Johnson," "Three Days of the Condor" (with Faye Dunaway), "The Electric Horseman" (with Fonda), "Out of Africa" (with Meryl Streep) and "Havana" (with Lena Olin).
"Sydney Pollack has made some of the most influential and best-remembered films of the last three decades," film scholar Jeanine Basinger told The Times.
In looking at Pollack's films, she said, "what you see is how he kept in step with the times. He doesn't get locked into one decade and left there. He had a very sharp political sensibility and a keen sense of what the issues of his world were, and he advanced and changed as the times advanced and changed."
Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin said "the hallmark" of Pollack's career "has been intelligence, both in his approach and his selection of subject matter."
"Good, bad or in between, his films at the very least respected their audience," Maltin told The Times. "And, of course, he worked with grade-A collaborators on both sides of the camera -- the best screenwriters, the best actors -- and it shows."
"Out of Africa," the 1985 drama based on Danish author Isak Dinesen's experiences in Kenya during the early part of the 20th century and her romance with English big-game hunter-adventurer Denys Finch Hatton, earned Pollack two Academy Awards: as director and as producer of the film, which won the best picture Oscar.
Pollack also received a best director Oscar nomination -- and a New York Film Critics Circle Award -- for "Tootsie." In the 1982 comedy, Dustin Hoffman stars as Michael Dorsey, an unemployed New York actor who revives his career by transforming himself into a "woman" -- actress Dorothy Michaels -- who lands a role in a TV soap opera and then finds himself falling in love with an actress on the show, played by Jessica Lange. In the process of masquerading as a woman, Dorsey becomes a better man.
The making of the film was marked by creative tension between Pollack and Hoffman -- and unexpected difficulties.
"It's like working with the mechanical shark in 'Jaws,' " Pollack told the New York Times in 1982. "Dustin's breasts fall down. The high heels hurt his feet. The makeup causes pimples, and the heat makes his beard show through after a couple of hours. It's a 3 1/2 -hour makeup job, and then the makeup only has a life of four or five hours. We didn't anticipate that."
Pollack spoke of his preference for working with big stars in an interview with the New York Times in 1982.
"Stars are like thoroughbreds," he said. "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."
Sometimes, he added, "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."
Pressed by Hoffman to play his actor-character's exasperated agent in "Tootsie," Pollack finally consented to his first big-screen acting role since the 1962 film "War Hunt," during which he met Redford, who also was making his film debut.
"Dustin really kept after me to do the part," Pollack told the New York Times in another interview in 1982. "At one point, he even sent me flowers and signed the note, 'Love, Dorothy.' The acting itself was fun. It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren't directing it. But to do it while you're directing interferes with your concentration."
Pollack later appeared in a number of films, including Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," Robert Altman's "The Player," Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" and the recent Oscar-nominated Tony Gilroy film "Michael Clayton." Pollack also turned up in guest roles on TV series such as "Frasier," "Will & Grace" and "The Sopranos."
"I don't care much about acting," he told the South Bend Tribune in 2002. "It's more about watching other directors work."
Basinger, head of the film studies department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., and the author of numerous books on film, said Pollack "was a fabulous actor, and he understood actors and got the best out of them" as a director.
"Here's a man who could have himself been a movie star of a certain type had he so chosen, because he really is that good an actor," she said, adding that Pollack, who spoke to film students at Wesleyan several times, also "cared about education" and was a "natural-born teacher."
Pollack's experience as an actor and acting teacher helped earn him a reputation as an "actor's director."
"He talks in a language that actors can understand," Ed Harris, who played an FBI agent in Pollack's 1993 dramatic thriller "The Firm," told USA Today at the time. "He won't just say 'speed up' or 'slow down'; he'll talk to you about the situation."
Fonda, who earned an Oscar nomination for her leading role in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," has said the darkly dramatic film was "a turning point for me, both professionally and personally."
With Pollack's guidance, she said, "I probed deeper into the character and into myself than I had before, and I gained confidence as an actor," she wrote in her autobiography, "My Life So Far."
In a 1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Pollack said he liked to talk to his actors at length.
"When I start a scene, I say, 'Let's not make this a movie.' It's my way of wanting it first to be realistic. You're not doing it to be observed. You're doing it alone. I tell actors, 'Watch "Candid Camera," then flick the channel to something else, then turn back. You'll see how phony the acting looks because real reaction so often means doing nothing.' It's always simple. The tendency with actors is to think that if you're doing more, you're doing more."
The son of a pharmacist, Pollack was born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and later moved with his family to South Bend.
"I think of it with great sadness," he said of his experiences in South Bend in a 1993 interview with the New York Times. "It was a real cultural desert. There weren't many Jews like us, and it was real anti-Semitic."
His parents divorced while he was growing up, and his mother, who he said "had emotional problems and became an alcoholic," died when Pollack was 16. Although his father envisioned him becoming a dentist, Pollack left home after graduating from high school and moved to New York to become an actor. After studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, Pollack became Meisner's assistant.
Pollack, whose career was interrupted by Army service from 1957 to 1959, had a small role in the 1955 Broadway comedy "The Dark Is Light Enough" and later appeared on "Playhouse 90" and "The United States Steel Hour," as well as series such as "The Twilight Zone" and "Have Gun Will Travel."
As an actor, however, he viewed teaching as his meal ticket.
"I knew I wasn't going to be any great shakes as an actor -- the way I looked I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend," he told the New York Times in 1993. "I taught. That's how I made my living."
Pollack's work as an actor on director John Frankenheimer's two-part adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" on "Playhouse 90" led Frankenheimer to ask him to work as a dialogue coach for two children in his "Playhouse 90" production of "Turn of the Screw."
That in turn led Pollack to do similar work in Hollywood on Frankenheimer's 1961 film "The Young Savages," starring Burt Lancaster.
"Lancaster told me to come to his office one day and said, 'You should be a director,' and I said that I didn't know anything about directing, so he introduced me to Lew Wasserman," then chairman of MCA, owner of Universal Pictures, Pollack told the New York Times.
Poitier told the Los Angeles Times on Monday night that working with Pollack on "The Slender Thread" from 1965 was "a great experience." Pollack, Poitier said, "was young and gifted and enormously talented. He wound up leaving an amazing mark on the American film industry."
Over the next several years, Pollack directed episodes of TV shows such as "The Fugitive," "The Defenders," "Kraft Suspense Theatre" and "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour."
In 1966, he won an Emmy for his direction of "The Game," an episode of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre." He also received Emmy nominations as the director of another segment of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre" and an episode of "Ben Casey."
Pollack's other films as a director are "The Scalphunters" (with Lancaster), "Castle Keep," "The Yakuza," "Bobby Deerfield," "Absence of Malice," "The Firm," "Sabrina," "Random Hearts" and "The Interpreter."
His most recent film, released in the U.S. in 2006, was a departure: "Sketches of Frank Gehry," a feature-length documentary about his friend, the renowned architect whose work includes the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Variety critic Todd McCarthy called Pollack's portrait of the architectural giant, shot in part with Pollack's own hand-held camera, "a rich tour of [Gehry's] artistic world and the journey that brought him to where he is today."
Pollack also had more than 40 credits as a producer or executive producer on films such as "Presumed Innocent," "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "Cold Mountain" and "Michael Clayton."
The HBO production "Recount," which premiered Sunday, was executive-produced by Pollack and Jay Roach. He was originally scheduled to direct the project but pulled out in August for health reasons.
Pollack, who co-founded Mirage Productions in 1985, was a founding member of the Sundance Institute, chairman emeritus of the American Cinematheque, a founding member of the Film Foundation, and a member of the board of directors for the Motion Picture and Television Fund.
He met his wife, Claire, when he was teaching and she was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse. They were married in 1958 and had three children, Rebecca, Rachel and Steven. Steven died in a plane crash in 1993.
He is also survived by six grandchildren and a brother, Bernie, a Hollywood costume designer.
Sidney PollackTuesday, May 27th 2008, 2:08 AM
Sydney Pollack, director of such iconic films as "Out of Africa," "Tootsie," "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and "The Way We Were," has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 73.
The end came Monday in his Pacific Palisades home with his family at his bedside, publicist and friend Leslee Dart said.
Pollack was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director three times, winning for "Out of Africa." He also won an Oscar for producing that film.
"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, who starred in last year's Oscar-nominated "Michael Clayton." Pollack played an unsavory corporate lawyer in the film.
Robert Redford, who starred in "The Electric Horseman" and "Three Days of the Condor," said, "Sydney's and my relationship, both professionally and personally, covers 40 years. It's too personal to express in a sound bite. I would only hope for the sake of dignity that his family can get the peace it deserves at this time."
Legendary New York publicist Bobby Zarem called the death of his friend and colleague for nearly 30 years "a major loss to the industry and to all of us."
Elaine Kaufman, owner of the upper East Side restaurant Elaine's, long a hangout for celebrity writers, Hollywood movers and shakers and politicians, said she was "deeply saddened" by Pollack's death.
"I've known him since the '70s," Kaufman said. "We traveled together in France about 10, 12 years ago. He was one terrific guy with a really good heart. This is just terrible."
A director to whom actors were extremely loyal, Pollack started out as an actor himself after studying and teaching at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.
Years later, he returned to acting when the star of his 1982 film "Tootsie," Dustin Hoffman, urged him to take on the role of his agent. The two sparred over creative differences during shooting, and their combative relationship transferred effortlessly to the screen.
Pollack went on to play in more than 15 films, including Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives" and "Michael Clayton," which he also co-produced.
He had a recurring role on "Will & Grace" as Eric McCormack's father.
Pollack was born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants.
He came to New York in 1952 and studied with the influential acting teacher Sanford Meisner, who eventually invited him to teach. His wife, Claire, whom he married in 1958, was one of his students. They had three children.
Of his craft, Pollack once said, "I don't value a film I've enjoyed making. If it's good, it's damned hard work."
With Leo Standora, Joe Neumaier and George Rush
Sidney PollackNEW YORK POST
By RAQUEL MARIA DILLON, AP
May 27, 2008 --
LOS ANGELES -- Academy Award-winning director Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay who achieved commercial success and critical acclaim with the gender-bending comedy "Tootsie" and the period drama "Out of Africa" while often dabbling as a television and movie actor, has died. He was 73.
Pollack died of cancer Monday afternoon at his home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, said publicist Leslee Dart. Pollack had been diagnosed with cancer about nine months ago, said Dart.
Pollack, who occasionally appeared on the big screen himself, worked with and gained the respect of Hollywood's best actors in a long career that reached prominence in the 1970s and 1980s.
"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," George Clooney said in a statement from his publicist.
"He'll be missed terribly," Clooney said.
Last fall, he played law firm boss Marty Bach opposite Clooney in "Michael Clayton," a drama that examines the life of fixer for lawyers. The film, which Pollack co-produced, received seven Oscar nominations, including for best picture and a best actor nod for Clooney. Tilda Swinton won the Oscar for supporting actress.
Pollack was no stranger to the Academy Awards. In 1986, "Out of Africa" a romantic epic of a woman's passion set against the landscape of colonial Kenya, captured seven Oscars, including best director and best picture.
In accepting his Oscar, Pollack commended Meryl Streep, who was nominated for best actress but didn't win.
"I could not have made this movie without Meryl Streep," Pollack said. "She is astounding - personally, professionally, all ways."
Over the years, several of his other films, including "Tootsie" and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" got several nominations, including best director nods.
The list of actors he directed reads like a who's who of Hollywood A-listers: Sally Field and Paul Newman in "Absence of Malice," Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn in "The Interpreter," Robert Mitchum in "The Yakuza," Tom Cruise in "The Firm," Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor," and Redford and Barbra Streisand in "The Way We Were," and other big-name actors in other films.
"Having the opportunity to know Sydney and work with him was a great gift in my life," Field said in a statement. "He was a good friend and a phenomenal director and I will cherish every moment that I ever spent with him."
In later years, he devoted more time to acting, appearing in Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," Robert Altman's "The Player," Robert Zemeckis' "Death Becomes Her," and Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut."
His last screen appearance was in "Made of Honor," a romantic comedy currently in theaters, where he played the oft-married father of star Patrick Dempsey's character.
Pollack had an occasional recurring role on the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace" playing Will's (Eric McCormack) father, and also appeared in the "The Sopranos," "Frasier" and "Mad About You."
Pollack also produced many independent films with filmmaker Anthony Minghella, who died in March, and the production company Mirage Enterprises. His recent producing credits include "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Cold Mountain."
The Lafayette, Ind. native was born to first-generation Russian-Americans. In high school in South Bend, he fell in love with theater, a passion that prompted him to forego college and move to New York and enroll in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater.
Studying under Sanford Meisner, Pollack spent several years cutting his teeth in various areas of theater, eventually becoming Meisner's assistant.
"We started together in New York and he always excelled at everything he set out to do, his friendships and his humanity as much as his talents," said Martin Landau, a longtime close friend and associate in the Actors Studio, through spokesman Dick Guttman.
After appearing in a handful of Broadway productions in the 1950s, Pollack turned his eye to directing - where he would ultimately leave his biggest mark.
"Sydney let the dialogue and the emotion of a scene speak for itself. Not given to cinematic tricks, his gentle and thoughtful touch and his focus on the story let us inhabit the world he created in each film," said Michael Apted, president of the Directors Guild of America.
In the "The Interpreter," that world was the United Nations. The first feature film to be shot inside the U.N., Pollack had never been inside the Manhattan landmark until starting work on the film in 2004.
"I am ashamed to admit that I went to school here in New York. I got married here, I worked here, I walked by this building a thousand times," he told reporters. "I had never been inside it until the first location scouting trip, and I was awed by it."
Pollack, who stood over six feet tall and had a striking presence on the screen, never totally gave up acting.
"Most of the great directors that I know of were not actors, so I can't tell you it's a requirement," he said. "On the other hand, it's an enormous help."
At the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival, Pollack said "Tootsie" star Dustin Hoffman pushed the director into playing the actor's exasperated agent.
Pollack said Hoffman repeatedly sent him roses with a note reading, "Please be my agent. Love, Dorothy." At that point, Pollack hadn't acted in 20 years.
In the 1982 movie, Hoffman plays an out-of-work actor who pretends to be a woman to land a role on a soap opera.
"I didn't think anyone would believe him as a woman," Pollack said. "But the world did, they went crazy."
Pollack is survived by his wife, Claire; two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; his brother Bernie; and six grandchildren.Pollack's son, Steven, died in a plane crash in 1993.
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