Sydney Pollack
Sydney Irwin Pollack ( born July 1, 1934 in Lafayette, Indiana, † 26 May, 2008 Los Angeles ) was an American film director, producer and actor.
Biography
Pollack's parents, the pharmacist David Pollack and the pianist and singer Rebecca Pollack, born Miller, were Russian Jewish immigrants who had met at Purdue University. Sydney Pollack's parents divorced while he was growing up, because Rebecca Pollack had emotional problems and drank alcohol. She died when Sydney was 16 years old. David Pollack imagined that Sydney dentist, but he showed interest in the film industry. He grew up in Brooklyn and went for two years with the U.S. Army and later took acting classes at the prestigious New York Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre at Sanford Meisner, initially for two years as a drama student. He then spent five years as Meisner's assistant. He then worked in the early 1960s as a stage and television actor. Later he became a professor at New York University and a television director. Overall, he has produced 40 films.
His screen debut as a film actor he was in 1962 with the war film Behind Enemy Lines, which also debuted Robert Redford. Since then, both were friends and Redford was in numerous films Pollack's protagonist, after Pollack had changed behind the camera. Pollack heard alongside John Frankenheimer, the close put her change into directing, Franklin J. Schaffner, George Roy Hill and Martin Ritt, to the filmmakers who thronged the early 1960s from the television to the movies and provided there for fresh air. In 1965 he debuted with the psychodrama voice on the phone as a film director, a further 19 feature films followed. In 1985, he reached with the excellent with a total of seven Oscars love drama Out of Africa the height of his creative powers. In 1973, Sydney Pollack, a member of the jury at the Cannes Filmvestival and 1986 president of the jury.
Pollack was considered one of the smartest directors, who was very popular with actors. He has worked in many genres, he turned Western ( Jeremiah Johnson ) as well as literary adaptations ( Out of Africa ), political thriller ( Three Days of the Condor ), melodramas ( Random Hearts ) and comedies ( Tootsie ). Pollack was one of the most successful representatives of the conservative Hollywood aesthetics, despite the conventional imagery he coined his own style to every film and has also shown moral commitment. He also expressed laconically: "It is not impossible to make mainstream films Which are really good." To his last directorial effort, the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry from 2005 on which he worked as a cameraman. In addition to Gehry's buildings, the film also documents a piece of the 40-year -long friendship with Frank Gehry. Pollack was nominated three times for an Oscar; In 1986 he was awarded for Out of Africa, the Oscar for best director. The film Out of Africa is based on the story of a book by Isak Dinesen ( Karen Blixen ), which was the beginning, " I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of Ngong Hills he often " too German "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills. "
His films are usually bitter love stories with no happy ending. You prefer a dramatic circular structure in the course of which the hero has to deal on the road to self-knowledge with a basically hostile environment society. An example of this circular structure is the early This Property is Condemned, not only symbolically at the end returns to the past leading to the village railroad tracks after a long flashback. In Jeremiah Johnson of the character played by Redford trapper in the second half of the film is a mirror image confronted with the events of the beginning. Other examples of bitter love stories can be found in The Way We Were, in which the couple relationship between the Jewish Marxist and student Katie Morosky ( Barbra Streisand ) and the handsome student from a wealthy family Hubbell Gardner ( Redford ) is not working, Havana, Out of Africa or and Three Days of the Condor, where the brief encounter between the CIA operative Joseph " Condor " Turner ( Redford ) who has taken the photographer Kathy Hale ( Faye Dunaway ) on his escape from the secret hostage, an intense snapshot remains.
Pollack was married since 1958 to actress Claire Griswold, with whom he had three children. On May 26, 2008 Sydney Pollack died of stomach cancer that had been diagnosed nine months earlier.