Rest easy, Sydney Pollack

Sydney Pollack, 73, a director and producer of popular Hollywood movies for nearly four decades, including the comedy "Tootsie," and who won Academy Awards for "Out of Africa," died May 26 at his home in Los Angeles. He had cancer.

Mr. Pollack, who called himself "Mr. Mainstream," was wildly successful at moviemaking with mass appeal but drew mixed reviews during a prolific career.

His best-remembered work could be provocative, timely and sensitively crafted: "Tootsie" (1982) was hilarious and underscored aspects of the feminist struggle; the taut spy story "Three Days of the Condor" (1975) captured Nixon-era paranoia; "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (1969), though set at a Depression-era dance marathon, resonated with young ticket buyers who saw the rigged contest as a reflection of modern society.

Mr. Pollack's movies often emphasized the loner at conflict with society, whether a fur trapper in the wilderness in "Jeremiah Johnson" (1972) or a cowboy who tries to recover his soul after selling out in "The Electric Horseman" (1979) with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda.

He saw Redford as his ideal collaborator and cast him in seven movies, from "This Property Is Condemned" (1966) to "Havana" (1990), because of what he considered his "very internal, rather understated" acting style as well as a dark undercurrent he found appealing beneath Redford's "golden boy" exterior.

Redford returned the compliment, telling Film Comment magazine, "Sydney's the one director that seems to read me best. . . . Basically he's a romantic."

Audiences embraced two of Mr. Pollack's best-known romance stories: "The Way We Were" (1973) with Redford as a WASP writer and Barbra Streisand as a Jewish political activist during the Hollywood blacklist; and "Out of Africa" (1985), a $30 million production based on Danish author Isak Dinesen's years in Kenya and her complicated affair with a free-spirited and handsome pilot.

The latter film, which earned Oscars for Mr. Pollack for directing and producing, starred Meryl Streep and Redford against a backdrop likened by critics to a National Geographic spread.

Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader complimented Mr. Pollack's craftsmanship and taste, saying that "although the denouement is a bit overextended, he never yields to facile, insistent sentimentality -- his effects are honestly won."

Many others found both films saccharine and ponderous, and Mr. Pollack spoke of his own "tendency by nature to be heavy-handed," which he attributed to his early training as a television director "where you have to grab the audience in the first 10 minutes."

Few disputed that Mr. Pollack was a master of pulling terrific performances from actors. Those who won Oscars under his direction included Gig Young as a cynical dance-marathon announcer in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and Jessica Lange as an emotionally vulnerable actress in "Tootsie."

But even in his less-regarded works, many actors earned Oscar nominations, including Paul Newman and Melinda Dillon in the newspaper libel drama "Absence of Malice" (1981) and Holly Hunter in "The Firm" (1993), based on the John Grisham legal thriller.

Mr. Pollack's skill with performers has been credited to his start in show business as a theater and television actor in the 1950s. With his glasses and curly hair, he became a recognizable presence over the years, thanks to memorable cameo appearances in films and on television.

As a young man, he had been a student of Sanford Meisner, who taught the acting technique known as "the Method," which uses the performer's emotional memory to add realistic touches to a role.

"He was the most influential person in my life in terms of my thinking about drama, about life itself," Mr. Pollack said of Meisner in 1993.

"Everything I do is from the point of view of acting," he added. "I think of cinematography from an actor's point of view. My scripts are from an actor's point of view. Once you find the spine of a part, it becomes a wonderful mold for the whole movie. You measure every single thing against it."

In later years, Mr. Pollack had a significant impact as a producer by using his reputation for commercial success to support other directors, some of them untested. Last year, he backed screenwriter and first-time director Tony Gilroy on the critically praised "Michael Clayton," a thriller with George Clooney.

He also teamed with writer-producer-director Anthony Minghella to produce such films as "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999), "Iris" (2001), "The Quiet American" (2002) and "Cold Mountain" (2003).

Movie critic and historian David Sterritt said Mr. Pollack's "main importance was as a kind of hyphenate -- someone who produced, directed and sometimes acted."

"He was one of the consummate professionals of the last 40 years or so in Hollywood," Sterritt said. "On his own films, or those he supported as a producer or actor, he reached a high level of achievement, if not always a high level of art."

Sydney Pollack was born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and raised in South Bend.

He once described himself as an "unpopular and rather sad kid" while growing up in Indiana and made awkward attempts to fit in socially by playing sports. He once took up boxing but, with his poor vision, "didn't see the punches until they were too close."

Movies enchanted him, but he vividly recalled that his father, a boxer-turned-pharmacist, discouraged his ambitions as an actor as an unmanly trade. Sydney Pollack's two siblings went into entertainment: Bernie became a costume designer, and Sharon became a dance instructor.

After high school, Sydney Pollack went to New York in 1954 and studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Meisner, who was so impressed with Mr. Pollack that he made him his assistant. Mr. Pollack's students included Robert Duvall, Rip Torn, Brenda Vaccaro and Claire Griswold, whom he married in 1958.

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."