Norman Jewison, the versatile filmmaker who could direct a racial drama (In the heat of the night), elegant thriller (The Thomas Crown Affair), musical (Fiddler on the Roof) or romantic comedy (lunastruck) with the best of them, he has died. She was 97 years old.
Jewison died Saturday, publicist Jeff Sanderson announced.
Nominated seven times for an Oscar, he received the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1999.
Known for his ability to coax great performances from his actors (12 of his actors were nominated for Oscars, while five of his features won Best Picture), the most distinguished film director in Canadian history. He often used conventional genre plots to interpret Social Injustice.
Improbably, he began directing musical specials on television.
Jewison earned nominations for best director and best picture for Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Lunatic (1987); received another nomination for directing In the heat of the night (1967), winner of best film; and added two more to produce the screwball comedy Red Scare. The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming (1966) and The story of a soldier (1984).
On leave from the Royal Canadian Navy, Jewison, then 18, began hitchhiking in Chicago and eventually reached Memphis, Tennessee, where he boarded a bus on a hot day. As the naïve Toronto native made his way to a seat in the back next to an open window, the bus started and then stopped, he recalled in an interview. interview 2011 with NPR.
“The bus driver looked at me,” he said. “He said, ‘Can’t you read the sign?’ And there was a little sign, made of tin, hanging from a wire in the center of the bus that said, “Colored people in the back.”
“And I turned around and I saw two or three black citizens sitting around me, and… some white people sitting on top of the bus. And she didn’t know what to do, she was just embarrassed. So I got off the bus and he left me there. I stood under this scorching sun and thought about what had just happened. That this was my first experience with racial prejudice. And it really stuck with me.”
Years later, following the advice of Robert F. Kennedy, who thought America was ready for a film about racial injustice, Jewison took on In the heat of the night, starring Sidney Poitier as a black Philadelphia detective and Rod Steiger as a racist police chief. They both have to work together to solve a murder in a southern town.
Four days before the 1968 Academy Awards, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and the Oscars were postponed for two days. Jewison attended King’s funeral and, although he lost to Mike Nichols of The graduate in the career of director, In the heat of the night He won five statuettes.
Racism was also central to two other Jewison films: The wartime-set The story of a soldier and The hurricane (1999), the latter starring Denzel Washington as Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the real-life boxer wrongfully imprisoned for murder.
However, Jewison also had a talent for comedies, as seen in Lunatic, based on the play by John Patrick Shanley and starring best actress winner Cher. Focusing on an Italian-American family in Brooklyn, Lunatic It was a box office and critical success.
Jewison was also behind photographs as varied as Don’t send me flowers (1964), The Cincinnati Boy (1965), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), rolling ball (1975), FIST (1978), …And Justice for all (1979), Agnes of God (1985) and Other people’s money (1991).
Norman Frederick Jewison was born on July 21, 1926 in Toronto, where his parents ran a general store and post office. He developed an early interest in the arts, studying piano and music theory at the Royal Conservatory, and performing in stage shows and musical comedies in secondary school.
After graduating, Jewison made his professional debut in a minstrel show, which he also directed and co-wrote, and later served in the Canadian Navy during World War II. Returning home, he graduated from Victoria College, University of Toronto in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in general arts.
Jewison worked as a taxi driver in Toronto and occasionally performed as a radio actor for the CBC. In 1950, he moved to London to work and study for two years at the BBC.
The CBC called him back to work in the new medium of television, and Jewison wrote, directed and produced some of his country’s most popular programs and specials. He hired Reuben Shipp, a Montreal writer who had been deported from the United States after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, to work on the variety show. Barris’ rhythm.
In 1950, CBS invited Jewison to New York to update the venerable television musical. Your parade of successes. After recruiting African-American singer Tommy Edwards, who had a hit with “It’s All in the Game,” to be on the show, he was called to a meeting on Madison Avenue with a representative of Lucky Strike cigarettes, the show’s company. South Carolina. based sponsor.
“We have been doing Your parade of successes on radio and television for many years,” the executive told Jewison in an incident he recalled in his 2004 autobiography, This terrible business has been good to me. “We had Sinatra, rock ‘n’ roll and soft stuff, but we never had a black and, young man, we ain’t going to start now.”
After an angry Jew threatened to take this story to the newspapers, Lucky Strike relented and Edwards appeared on the show as scheduled. His integrity was evident and big names wanted to work with him.
Jewison directed a 1960 special with the red-hot Harry Belafonte, the first on American television to star a black actor; guided comeback star Judy Garland in a 1961 television special and episodes of her CBS variety show; managed The million dollar incident, a comedy in which Jackie Gleason was kidnapped and held for ransom; and she did Lerner and Loewe’s Broadwaywith performances by Julie Andrews and Maurice Chevalier.
With a recommendation from Tony Curtis, Jewison went to Los Angeles and was hired to run Universal Pictures. 40 pounds of trouble (1962), starring Curtis, Suzanne Pleshette and Phil Silvers in one of the first films shot at Disneyland.
He received a contract from the studio and continued directing light comedies. The excitement of it all (1963), starring Doris Day and James Garner; Don’t send me flowers, with Day and Rock Hudson; and The art of love (1965), with Garner, Elke Sommer and Angie Dickinson.
When producer Martin Ransohoff fired director Sam Peckinpah The Cincinnati BoyJewison was given the reins of the drama by Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson. The Hollywood Reporter He called his work “bold, imaginative and confident,” and he was on a roll.
He produced his first film (and also directed) The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming!a savage parody of Russian paranoia starring Alan Arkin and Carl Reiner (who had written Emotion of everything and Art of love).
After In the heat of the nightJewison produced and directed the elegantly erotic The Thomas Crown Affair, starring McQueen and Faye Dunaway; produced The landlord (1970), a racial comedy-drama directed by his former film editor, Hal Ashby; and produced and directed happily, happilystarring Owner star Beau Bridges.
He had met Kennedy at a hospital in Sun Valley, Idaho, when his children were injured while competing in a ski race, and he was supposed to meet the presidential candidate the night he was assassinated in Los Angeles.
“I was very disappointed,” Jewison said. THRKevin Cassidy in a 2011 interview. “JFK had been assassinated, Bobby had been assassinated, I had marched at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in Atlanta. It was 1970, so I packed everyone up in Los Angeles and went to England.”
Jewison spent the next seven years in Europe, making films such as the top-grossing musical Fiddler on the Rooffilmed on location in Yugoslavia and at Pinewood Studios in London, and Jesus Christ Superstar and the protagonist of Gregory Peck billy two hats (1974), both filmed in Israel.
Jewison went on to direct and produce James Caan’s violent action film. rolling ballAl Pacino’s judicial thriller… And Justice for all and the charming romantic comedy Best friends (1982), starring Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn.
Jewison also continued to explore important themes, with the plot of Agnes of God, starring Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft, focused on the struggle between logic and the Catholic Church. Her last film was the Nazi thriller. The declaration (2003), starring Michael Caine.
Jewison served as producer of the 1981 Academy Awards, which were rescheduled after President Reagan was shot, and earned an Emmy nomination in 2002 for directing the HBO telefilm. Dinner with friends.
Jewison returned to Toronto in 1978 and lived on a 240-acre farm in Ontario. For years he hosted a gala picnic at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In 1982, Jewison was named an officer of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian award, and then set out to establish the Canadian equivalent of the American Film Institute.
“I got a phone call to visit the AFI in Beverly Hills,” Jewison said. THR. “So I went up and there was a group of young filmmakers sitting on the floor and there was John Ford with a bottle of whiskey. And he is answering all of his questions. He was impressed. It was very exciting. So I thought, ‘Wow, if he could put something like this together in Canada, that would be fantastic.’”
The result was the Canadian Film Centre, founded in 1988 in Toronto.
He is survived by his second wife, Lynne St. David; his children, Kevin (and his wife, Suzanne), Michael (Anita) and Jenny (David); and his grandchildren Ella, Megan, Alexandra, Sam and Henry. Celebrations of his life will be held in Los Angeles and Toronto.
Said Jewison in his Thalberg acceptance speech:
“The only thing I really regret about winning this prize is that, you know, it’s not like the Nobel or the Pulitzer. I mean, the Thalberg award comes with no money attached. If so, I’d share it with the Canadian Film Center and AFI, where the next generation of filmmakers are preparing to entertain the world in the new millennium.
“And my last thought for all those young filmmakers is this: find some good stories. It doesn’t matter how gross, top 10, bottom 10, what the rating is, what the demographic is. Do you know something? “The highest-grossing film is not necessarily the best.”