Remembering Sydney Pollack
I was profoundly sad to learn of the death of Sydney Pollack today, particularly so close on the heels of another great Hollywood director, Anthony Minghella, [see EA 03/18/08] whom Pollack had teamed with in Mirage Productions. 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 on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.
Much is going to be written on this giant of the screen in the coming days. This excerpt out of Salon:
“It’s true that good actors are often good regardless of the direction (or lack thereof) they get from a filmmaker. But you can usually tell when a director is driven by the impulse to bring out the best in everyone. Pollack had a way of orchestrating the performances in a movie as if he were a conductor placing each instrument to greatest advantage in a piece of music. He could often bring an actor’s best qualities to the fore, and make his or her worst ones register as little more than background noise. Not all directors are good actors themselves, nor do they need to be. But Pollack had a way of turning his own intuitiveness as an actor into generosity toward others, the sort of alchemy that should never be taken for granted when you’re talking about an industry filled with fat egos.”
