Sydney Irwin Pollack was an American film director, producer and actor.
17 Facts About Sydney Pollack
2.
Sydney Pollack made appearances in Robert Altman's Hollywood mystery The Player, Woody Allen's relationship drama Husbands and Wives, and Stanley Kubrick's erotic psychological drama Eyes Wide Shut.
3.
Sydney Pollack was born in Lafayette, Indiana, to a family of Jewish immigrants, the son of Rebecca and David Sydney Pollack, a semi-professional boxer and pharmacist.
4.
Sydney Pollack studied acting with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre from 1952 to 1954, working on a lumber truck between terms.
5.
In 1960, John Frankenheimer, a friend of Sydney Pollack, asked him to come to Los Angeles to work as a dialogue coach for the child actors on Frankenheimer's first big picture, The Young Savages.
6.
Sydney Pollack played a director in The Twilight Zone episode "The Trouble with Templeton" in 1961.
7.
Over time, Sydney Pollack's films received a total of 48 Academy Award nominations, winning 11 Oscars.
8.
Sydney Pollack appeared in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives as a New York lawyer undergoing a midlife crisis, and in Robert Zemeckis's Death Becomes Her as an emergency room doctor.
9.
Sydney Pollack received the first annual Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking award from the Austin Film Festival on October 21,2006.
10.
Sydney Pollack formed a production company called Mirage Enterprises with the English director Anthony Minghella.
11.
Besides his many feature film laurels, Sydney Pollack was nominated for five Primetime Emmys, earning two: one for directing in 1966 and another for producing, which was given four months after his death in 2008.
12.
The moving image collection of Sydney Pollack is housed at the Academy Film Archive.
13.
Sydney Pollack was married to Claire Bradley Griswold, a former student of his, from 1958 until his death in 2008.
14.
Claire, Sydney Pollack's wife, died on March 28,2011, at 74 years of age, from Parkinson's disease.
15.
Concerns about Sydney Pollack's health surfaced in 2007, when he withdrew from directing HBO's television film Recount, which aired on May 25,2008.
16.
Sydney Pollack died from cancer the following day at his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, at the age of 73.
17.
Sydney Pollack had been diagnosed about ten months prior to his death; the type of cancer has been variously cited as pancreatic, stomach, or of unknown primary origin.