Pollack leaves a legacy of popular films

Being an actor made Sydney Pollack a better director. That was the repeated consensus of the stars he guided through some of the most popular films of the 1970s and '80s.

He was also a self-confessed hopeless romantic. "I couldn't do a film without a love story somewhere," he once told me during an interview.

Pollack, who died Monday at age 73, was a commercial filmmaker for the Hollywood machine, and he enjoyed working with big stars. And he worked with some of the biggest — Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Sidney Poitier, Harrison Ford, Al Pacino, Natalie Wood, Sally Field, Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Nicole Kidman.

Like a number of other strong directors who labored in big-budget Hollywood movies, he could take genre films and make them better through sheer talent. But unlike, say, Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford, or even such contemporaries as Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese, Pollack didn't become identified with a certain kind of movie. He excelled at drama, action, period pieces and comedy.

Among his most popular films were "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (1969), "Jeremiah Johnson" (1972), "The Way We Were" (1973), "Three Days of the Condor" (1975), "The Electric Horseman" (1979), "Absence of Malice" (1981), "Tootsie" (1982), "Out of Africa" (1985) and "The Firm" (1993).

Though Pollack had a few flops along the way — hey, so did Hitchcock and Ford — his name on a film was considered bankable by the studios and reliable by the audience.

Pollack started out as an actor in episodic television, then in the early '60s began directing episodes of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour," "The Fugitive" and others, with an eye toward feature films.

But his first big-screen assignment came as an actor in a Korean War B-movie, "War Hunt," where he met another actor making his film debut, Robert Redford. They formed a lifelong friendship and Redford would star in seven Pollack films, including two made in Utah, "Jeremiah Johnson" and "The Electric Horseman."

Pollack also helped Redford establish the Sundance Institute, and prior to that was on the board of the film festival that Sundance would eventually adopt. Redford once told me it was Pollack who suggested the festival move to Park City.