Sydney Pollack: Director of enormously popular films including 'Tootsie' and the Oscar-winning 'Out of Africa'

The director, producer and actor Sydney Pollack made several enormously popular films, including the bittersweet romance of opposites attracting each other The Way We Were and the hilariously scathing satire on fame and gender Tootsie, which was recently selected by the American Film Institute as the second greatest comedy made by Hollywood – second only to Some Like It Hot.

In 1985 he won two Oscars, as both director and producer of the sumptuous romantic drama Out of Africa, which won the best picture award. Pollack also had a notable career as a character actor, and was praised for his amusing performance in Tootsie, as the agent of an actor who masquerades as a woman to obtain a role. He also had a recurring role in the television series Will and Grace, as Will's father, and recently won acclaim for his supporting role in a film he also produced, Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney.

The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Pollack was born in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1934. His father was a professional boxer and pharmacist. His parents divorced when he was a child, and his mother, who became an alcoholic, died when he was 16 years old. After graduating from high school in South Bend, Indiana, he went to New York, where he studied acting under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse from 1952 until 1954.

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He made his stage début in an off-Broadway adaptation of Harold Robbins's novel A Stone for Danny Fisher (1954, it was later adapted into a screen vehicle for Elvis Presley titled King Creole), and the following year he made his Broadway début with a small role in Christopher Fry's The Dark is Light Enough, but he also worked as an instructor at the Neighborhood Playhouse from 1954 until 1959 (with a two-year break while he served in the US Army from 1957 to 1958).

"I didn't want to teach," he recently confessed, "but I wasn't doing well as an actor. Sanford Meisner, who was sort of my guru, asked me to come back and be his assistant. It was a lot of pressure trying to teach everyone how to be better. I didn't realise I was forming the basis of a directorial technique. Through the teaching, I got jobs for coaching." The director John Frankenheimer was the first to hire Pollack to coach some of the actors in his ambitious production of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1959) for the Playhouse 90 television anthology series.

Pollack also acted (as Andres) in this landmark show, one of the first to be presented in two parts, and costing $400,000, the most expensive production at that time. It launched Pollack on an extensive television career as an acting coach. "With television, you would do 30 shows a year. I did all those doctor shows – Dr Kildare and Ben Casey – and that was my film school."

Frankenheimer then asked Pollack to coach the young actors in his film about juvenile delinquency The Young Savages (1961), which starred Burt Lancaster as a district attorney's assistant dealing with a racially motivated gang killing. Lancaster became a good friend, and encouraged Pollack to become a director, backing his judgement by introducing him to a leading Hollywood agent, Lew Wasserman. At Lancaster's request, Pollack served as the dubbing supervisor for the American version of Luchino Visconti's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963).

Although he preferred to forget his first assignment as a director, a 30-minute episode of the television western series Shotgun Slade, Pollack's vigorous application included apprenticing himself to an editor, and he directed more than 80 television shows such as The Naked City, The Defenders and The Fugitive.

Pollack made his feature film début as an actor in Dennis Miller's movie War Hunt (1962), playing a sergeant in the Korean War who discovers that he has a homicidal psychopath in his platoon. Also making his feature film début in this low-budget film, as an idealistic new recruit, was Robert Redford, who, like Pollack, had spent a long apprenticeship on stage and television. They began a friendship that would lead to Redford starring in seven of Pollack's later films.

In 1965 Pollack directed a television play, The Game, for the anthology series Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre, which won him an Emmy award for the best directorial achievement in drama. The same year he made his first feature film as a director, The Slender Thread (1965), a modest but gripping story of a Samaritan-like volunteer telephone counsellor (Sidney Poitier) who answers a call from a young woman (Anne Bancroft) who has taken an overdose of pills. As the emergency services race against time to trace the call, Poitier desperately keeps her talking (and awake). Despite some atmospheric location shooting in Seattle, the film seemed something like a television production but, under Pollack's guidance, a superior one, and he demonstrated the skill with actors that was to become one of his trademarks.

Based on a short story by Tennessee Williams, This Property is Condemned (1966) was the first of Pollack's films to star Robert Redford. It was a troubled production that Williams disowned, but Redford and his co-star Natalie Wood won personal plaudits for their performances. After three films starring Burt Lancaster, a comedy western The Scalphunters ( 1968), which uneasily mixed slapstick with pleas for racial equality, the off-beat war drama Castle Keep (1969), and Frank Perry's allegorical The Swimmer (1969), for which he contributed one sequence at Lancaster's request, Pollack made the film that established him and brought him his first Oscar nomination, an adaptation of Horace McCoy's Depression-era novel, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), which effectively used a dance marathon as a microcosm of society. Jane Fonda, Susannah York and Gig Young were all Oscar-nominated, with Young winning as best supporting actor.

Pollack followed up with two of his better vehicles for Robert Redford. Jeremiah Johnson (1972) was a metaphysical western, a leisurely but persuasive tale of a misanthropic fur-trapper in the 1830s. Skilfully directed by Pollack, it was a box-office hit, and was followed by an enormously popular soap-opera, The Way We Were (1973), with the potent teaming of Redford and Barbra Streisand as a prime example of opposites attracting – he the dashing Wasp writer who charms his way through life, she the fierce, voluble liberal set on championing idealistic causes.

The writer Arthur Laurents later wrote that his original script was heavily doctored to build up Redford's role and to diminish the film's political content, and the critic Pauline Kael stated, "The decisive change in the characters' lives which the story hinges on takes place suddenly and hardly makes sense", but such flaws did not stop the film doing extremely well and becoming a perennial romantic favourite.

A director who always resisted categorisation, Pollack next both produced and directed The Yakuza (1975), a dark, violent tale of the lethal Japanese secret society, which starred Robert Mitchum. Unpopular at the time, the film has since become a cult favourite, possibly more highly regarded than the director's next film, Three Days of the Condor (1975), which starred Redford as a CIA researcher who escapes death by chance when he is out getting coffee for his colleagues, who are victims of a mass slaughter. Redford then sets out to track down the culprits in a enjoyable mystery based on the book Six Days of the Condor.

Bobby Deerfield (1977), starring Al Pacino as a racing driver in love with a dying heiress, is one of the occasional failures that pepper Pollack's filmography, but The Electric Horseman (1979), starring Redford as a modern-day cowboy reduced to publicising breakfast cereal, and Jane Fonda as a reporter on his trail when he kidnaps a horse which his employers intend for the glue factory, was a pleasing romance, and Absence of Malice (1981) was an acerbic tale of the effects of irresponsible journalism, sparked by the fine performances of Sally Field and Paul Newman.

Tootsie (1982) is arguably Pollack's finest film, a witty cross-dressing comedy that also purveys trenchant messages about fame, identity and perceptions. Dustin Hoffman played Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels, an unemployed actor who manages to get cast as a female in a television soap-opera and quickly becomes one of the nation's favourite characters. Talking of the cross-dressing theme, Pollack commented, I think since the Sixties, with all of the revolution that happened then, we sort of were forced to re-examine the perimeters of gender and sexuality. The year we made Tootsie, we had two other movies with men playing women and women playing men – Victor/Victoria and Yentl.

The film won an Oscar for Jessica Lange, as Dorothy's confused soap co-star, and Pollack himself won praise for his hilarious portrayal of Hoffman's agent, a role that he was persuaded by the star to take – Hoffman allegedly thought their testy private relationship would add flavour to their scenes together. Pollack recalled:

I got in front of the camera for the first time in years because Dustin Hoffman insisted I play that role, to the point where he started sending me flowers, saying, "Please be my agent, Love, Dorothy". It wasn't just a suggestion, it was bordering on a temper tantrum. . . So it's his fault I ended up acting again, which started guys like Robert Altman and Woody Allen calling me.

Pollack received an Oscar nomination for his direction of Tootsie, and three years later achieved his double Oscar with the stately, sumptuous, ravishingly photographed and very long Out of Africa (1985), starring Meryl Streep as the Danish émigrée writer Karen Blixen, and Robert Redford as her lover, the British adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton.

Pollack's final film with Redford, Havana (1990), set in Cuba during Batista's last days of power, brought him some of his worst reviews. He scored a hit, though, with an exciting thriller, The Firm (1993), starring Tom Cruise in a slick adaptation of John Grisham's complex novel, but Pollack's final films were not among his best – a misguided remake of Sabrina (1995), a spineless romantic drama, Random Hearts (1999) and The Interpreter (2005), for which he was allowed unprecedented access to the United Nations building and had the star power of Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, but was defeated by a convoluted script that required more than a little suspension of disbelief.

In 2006 Pollack made Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary about the celebrated artist. He proclaimed himself disenchanted with today's corporate emphasis on the youth market:

The only substantial repeat business is from the youth market. Kids go to see movies two or three times instead of once. Expensive films now really require repeat business. Most adults are not repeat customers. The market has been aimed at a narrower spectrum over the years. The films that you used to be able to make through the studios are now independent films. I don't think I could make Jeremiah Johnson today.

Pollack had become very active as a producer, forming Mirage Enterprises in 1985, with executive billing on The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Iris (2001) with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, and The Quiet American (2002) with Michael Caine. He produced The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), directed by Anthony Minghella, who joined him as a partner in Mirage Enterprises, and Pollack produced Minghella's Cold Mountain (2003) and Breaking and Entering (2006). Last year he produced Michael Clayton, as well as playing a role in the film.

In recent years he had been particularly in demand as an actor. He gave a sharply etched performance in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives (1992) as a lawyer undergoing a midlife crisis. "I did Husbands and Wives because I was curious to watch Woody direct, same thing with Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut. He's a director I admire enormously." In Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Pollack had played a businessman with some bizarre fetishes. He also acted in Altman's The Player (1992), Death Becomes Her (1992) and Changing Lanes (2002), and in several recent television series including The Sopranos, Entourage and Will and Grace.

Tom Vallance

Sydney Pollack, actor, director and producer: born Lafayette, Indiana 1 July 1934; married 1958 Claire Griswold (two daughters, and one son deceased); died Los Angeles 26 May 2008.