Mark Rydell, the director of Cinderella Liberty and The Rose who received an Oscar nomination for guiding Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, the final film from the iconic actor, has died. He was 97.
Rydell died Thursday of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, his daughter, Amy Rydell, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Rydell also was an actor who played one-half of a young couple that drove the CBS daytime soap As the World Turns to No. 1 in the ratings in the 1950s. He later portrayed a brutal mobster in Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye (1973), the real-life mob accountant Meyer Lansky in Sydney Pollack’s Havana (1990) and an agent, Al Hack, in Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending (2002).
Fonda received the only competitive Academy Award of his legendary career for his performance as the crusty Norman Thayer Jr. in On Golden Pond (1981), while co-star Katharine Hepburn won the last of her four best actress Oscars for her turn as his wife. Fonda’s daughter, Jane, played their daughter and was nominated as well.
During editing after shooting had been completed, Rydell said he received a phone call from Jane. “She said, ‘Mark, you have to show [the film] to Hank. He’s ill, and I’m afraid he won’t be alive to see this performance,’” he recalled. “So I said, ‘Of course, send him down [to the studio] this afternoon and I’ll run it for him. The limousine arrived, and this guy, who had been so vigorous during shooting, barely got out of the car, and he was shaking and trembling.”
He left Fonda in the theater to watch On Golden Pond on his own. When the director returned, he said Fonda walked toward him and stumbled, falling into his arms. “He felt like a bird, I could feel his bones,” Rydell said, getting emotional. “He whispered to me in my ear, ‘Thank you for the best thing that’s ever happened in my life.’”
Fonda died on Aug. 12, 1982, about five months after he won the Oscar.
Rydell directed five other actors to Oscar noms: Rupert Crosse in The Reivers (1969), Marsha Mason in Cinderella Liberty (1973), Bette Midler in The Rose (1979) and For the Boys (1991), Frederic Forrest in The Rose and Sissy Spacek in The River (1984).
Rydell collaborated with James Caan for the first time in Cinderella Liberty, then reteamed with the actor in Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976) and (also with Midler) in For the Boys.
Mortimer H. Rydell was born in the Bronx on March 23, 1929. His father was a stockbroker on Wall Street who insisted he attend the Bronx High School of Science, but that wasn’t a fit with what he wanted to do for a living: play the piano in a jazz group.
After studying at the Juilliard School of Music, Rydell in 1948 met songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman, who suggested he try acting. They brought him to Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where Steve McQueen and Kim Stanley would be among his classmates.
Rydell made his Broadway debut in 1952 in the Navy comedy Seagulls Over Sorrento, then appeared on several TV shows and in the Don Siegel drama Crime in the Streets (1956), starring John Cassavetes.
In late 1956, Rydell joined As the World Turns as Jeff Baker, a college kid with a wild streak who had his problems with alcohol. Jeff would get romantically involved with Penny Hughes (Rosemary Prinz), and their wedding ceremony, airing on Christmas Eve in 1958, attracted huge ratings.
When Rydell decided to exit the show in 1962, his character was killed off in a car crash, leaving viewers crushed.
With the help of good friend Pollack, Rydell got a job helming episodes of Ben Casey, then directed for other shows including I Spy,The Wild Wild West, The Fugitive and Gunsmoke. Warner Bros. then hired him to make his feature bow on The Fox (1967), a drama that starred Sandy Dennis and Keir Dullea and was based on an erotic D.H. Lawrence novella.
“The wise producers at the time would seek out hot television directors because you didn’t have to pay them very much,” Rydell told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “I was a very successful TV director. I had a lot of awards. I was sent this script because they couldn’t afford a major director.”
Rydell then tackled The Reivers, a William Faulkner adaptation that starred McQueen, and The Cowboys (1972), which starred John Wayne.
(The Cowboys was the first film from Rydell and Pollack’s production company, Sanford Productions, which went on the make other movies including Jeremiah Johnson and the Palme D’Or-winning Scarecrow.)
Rydell had his critical breakthrough with the romantic drama Cinderella Liberty, with Caan starring as a sailor on leave in Seattle who falls for a pool-playing prostitute (Mason) who has a young son born out of wedlock. “The idea of them falling very deeply in love was quite touching to me,” he said.
Rydell insisted that Midler — then an untested actress known for her prowess as a nightclub singer — be cast as the Janis Joplin-like rocker Mary Rose Foster in The Rose. Without a big star as the lead, Fox then cut his budget in half. Rydell, though, was sure Midler was the right call; he had seen her perform in a New York club, and “I thought, this is a miracle, this woman, she’s capable of doing anything.”
On Instagram, Midler wrote that her two Oscar noms were “because of him. He was the actor’s whisperer; just a few words was all it took to understand what was needed. Devoted to Meisner. So many happy memories.”
He got the chance to direct On Golden Pond when Pollack passed. Rydell said the Fondas were estranged and “hadn’t talked for a year” before rehearsals began, he told interviewer Michael Levine.
“The picture was about a woman desperate to reconnect with her father,” he said. “It worked perfectly. The picture was fed by life experience.”
Rydell went on to direct other films like Intersection (1994) and Even Money (2006) and the 2001 TNT biopic James Dean, starring James Franco (Rydell portrayed studio head Jack L. Warner in that telefilm).
Later, Rydell and actor Martin Landau served as the West Coast artistic directors at The Actors Studio; he had studied with Elia Kazan at the original New York outpost many years earlier.
His last effort as a director was a 2007 episode of the ABC series Masters of Science Fiction, hosted by Stephen Hawking.
Rydell was married to actress Joanne Linville and documentary producer Esther Rydell, with both marriages ending in divorce.
In addition to his daughter, survivors include his sons, Chris and Alexander; grandchildren Austin, Ruby Joe and Ginger; and two great-grandchildren.
“All the pictures I made … I don’t think I could get any of them made today,” he said in 2009. “The market is so different; they’re not interested in substantial, human dramas. That’s what attracted me to become a director in the first place: the dramatic interaction between people. Now it’s about spectacle, and explosions and special effects — I’m waiting for people to get fed up with all that.”
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