Sydney Pollack; 'Tootsie' Director Won Oscars for 'Out of Africa'

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Director Sydney Pollack Dies

Best known for "Tootsie" and "Out of Africa," the Academy Award winner dies of cancer. He was 73.

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In addition to his wife, of Los Angeles, survivors include two daughters, Rebecca Pollack and Rachel Pollack, both of Los Angeles; a brother; and six grandchildren. A son, Steven Pollack, died in a small-plane crash in 1993.

In the 1950s, Sydney Pollack began making regular appearances on TV anthology programs such as "Playhouse 90." Director John Frankenheimer brought Mr. Pollack to Hollywood in 1961 to work as a dialogue coach on the juvenile delinquency drama "The Young Savages."

Mr. Pollack said he bonded with the film's star, Burt Lancaster, over the fact that neither had been to college. Lancaster smoothed the way for Mr. Pollack's entry into Hollywood by urging powerful agent and mogul Lew Wasserman to hire him as a director.

He said Lancaster told Wasserman: "He can't be worse than some of those bums you got workin' for you now."

Mr. Pollack directed many TV series and won the 1966 best directing Emmy Award for an episode of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre." He also took occasional acting jobs and made his movie debut in the supporting role of a sergeant in "War Hunt" (1962), a drama set during the Korean War that featured the largely unknown Redford.

In 1965, Mr. Pollack won his first movie directing credit for "The Slender Thread," a suicide help-line drama with Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. Mr. Pollock later dismissed the melodramatic film as "a dreadful picture," and he was not contradicted by reviewers.

He also bombed critically with his next three films, including "This Property is Condemned" (1966), based on a Tennessee Williams one-act play; the satiric western "The Scalphunters" (1968), starring Lancaster; and the anti-war drama "Castle Keep" (1969), based on a William Eastlake novel.

He began his first long run of hits with "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," a grim film with Jane Fonda. The movie proved an unexpected commercial success and brought Pollack an Oscar nomination for directing and launched him to the front rank of directors.

Most reviewers found "Tootsie," with Dustin Hoffman as an out-of-work actor masquerading as a woman to get a job on a TV soap opera, probably his finest achievement.

Critic Pauline Kael wrote that Mr. Pollack seemed to direct with less self-consciousness, especially in opening scenes showing what she called "a crackling, rapid-fire presentation of the hopes versus the realities of out-of-work actors' lives."

Mr. Pollack's most notable acting 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."

Directing and production credits included "The Yakuza" (1974) with Robert Mitchum as an American private eye in Japan; "Bobby Deerfield (1977) with Al Pacino as a race car driver who falls for a woman with cancer, Marthe Keller; "Random Hearts" (1999), a romantic drama with Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas falling in love after their spouses die in a plane crash; and "The Interpreter" (2005), a thriller with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn set at the United Nations.

In 2005, he made his first documentary, "Sketches of Frank Gehry," after meeting the celebrated architect at a Los Angeles party.

Mr. Pollack told the Christian Science Monitor that he hoped his own films, made for broad audiences, would follow the tradition of many movies of the 1930s and 1940s dismissed as "standard studio fare" but are now seen as great art.

He added that he was motivated by two factors: "First, I have to satisfy the needs of popular art. Second, I don't want to be intellectually insulting. I want to raise issues and questions that are sufficiently intriguing -- so people I care about will like them, too."