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LOS ANGELES — Walter Mirisch, the astute and Oscar successful movie producer who oversaw such classics as “Some Like It Scorching,” “West Facet Story” and “Within the Warmth of the Night time,” has died of pure causes, the Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences stated Saturday. He was 101.
Mirisch died on Friday in Los Angeles, in keeping with an announcement from the academy’s CEO Invoice Kramer and its president Janet Yang.
“Walter was a real visionary, each as a producer and as an business chief,” they stated, noting he had served as academy president and an academy governor for a few years. “His ardour for filmmaking and the Academy by no means wavered, and he remained an expensive good friend and advisor. We ship our love and assist to his household throughout this troublesome time.”
Mirisch obtained the very best image Academy Award for 1967’s “Within the Warmth of the Night time,” and the corporate run by him and his brothers additionally produced the best-picture Oscar winners “The Condo” and “West Facet Story.”
Born eight years earlier than the primary Academy Awards ceremony, he served as president of the Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences from 1973 to 1977 and obtained two honorary Oscars, in 1978 and 1983, for his physique of labor and his humanitarian efforts.
As a producer, Mirisch aggressively recruited high filmmakers resembling Billy Wilder and Norman Jewison, then gave them freedom to craft the films as they noticed match.
“We provided these filmmakers what they wanted,” he informed the Los Angeles Occasions in 1983. “Billy might name me up and say, `I might subsequent love to do an image about so-and-so’ — and that is all we might have to know. … We turned, in impact, companions with our administrators.”
His firm’s common secure of administrators included not solely Wilder and Jewison, however Blake Edwards and John Sturges. The corporate additionally produced motion pictures by John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler, George Roy Hill and Hal Ashby.
Mirisch entered the film enterprise in his teenagers, advancing from usher to administration jobs with a theater chain earlier than happening to manufacturing work on low-budget motion flicks and Westerns within the late Nineteen Forties.
The corporate he based in 1957 together with his brother Marvin and half brother Harold was one of the vital profitable unbiased manufacturing outfits to come up from the outdated studio system as tv minimize into film attendance.
The Mirischs made a string of hits from the Fifties to the Seventies, amongst them “The Magnificent Seven,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Nice Escape,” “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “The Pink Panther” and its sequel, “A Shot within the Darkish.”
Their firm began with a handful of Westerns earlier than producing 1959’s “Some Like It Scorching,” the Wilder comedy with Marilyn Monroe co-starring Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as cross-dressing musicians working from the mob.
Mirisch was prepared to tackle uncommon initiatives. A Harvard-trained enterprise govt, he effectively oversaw the commerce facet of issues, permitting his filmmakers to focus on their motion pictures.
Elmore Leonard — the crime novelist and screenwriter on two Mirisch productions, 1974’s “Mr. Majestyk” and the 1987 TV film “Desperado” — devoted his Hollywood satire “Get Shorty” to Mirisch, calling him “one of many good guys.”
Mirisch was additionally amongst a handful of filmmakers Sidney Poitier acknowledged in his speech on the 2002 Academy Awards when he accepted an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.
“These filmmakers persevered, talking by means of their artwork to the very best in all of us,” stated Poitier, who starred in Mirisch’s “Within the Warmth of the Night time” and the sequel “They Name Me Mister Tibbs!”
The Mirisch brothers adjusted their administration type movie by movie, relying on the extent of oversight they felt a director needed or wanted. In a 1972 interview within the journal “Movies and Filming,” Mirisch stated some administrators labored properly as their very own producers, whereas others confirmed little curiosity past the precise filmmaking.
“We have labored with sensible administrators and producer-directors, and I have to say that the connection with every of them has been totally totally different,” he stated.
A group for many of their careers, the Mirisch brothers additionally labored in theater. Earlier than becoming a member of the Allied Artists manufacturing firm within the Nineteen Forties, Walter labored as a producer and later head of manufacturing and Harold and Marvin had administrative jobs.
Whereas at Allied, Walter produced each Westerns and a sequence of low-budget titles within the “Bomba the Jungle Boy” sequence that starred Johnny Sheffield, who had performed Boy within the “Tarzan” motion pictures of the Nineteen Forties.
After his oldest brother, Harold, died in 1968, the surviving siblings continued their firm with Marvin as chairman and Walter, the youngest brother, answerable for manufacturing. Marvin died in 2002.
Walter Mirisch continued to provide theatrical motion pictures into the Nineteen Eighties. Though the standard and business success of his movies usually declined, there have been nonetheless some hits, together with Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe for “Similar Time Subsequent 12 months.” Different movies that got here late in his profession included “Halfway,” “Grey Girl Down,” and the 1979 model of “Dracula.” He was additionally govt producer on a couple of tv initiatives within the Nineties.
Walter Mortimer Mirisch was born in New York Metropolis on Nov. 8, 1921. After finding out at Metropolis Faculty of New York, he earned a bachelor’s diploma from the College of Wisconsin in Madison in 1942 and a graduate diploma in enterprise from Harvard in 1943.
In 1947, Mirisch married Patricia Kahan, who preceded him in loss of life. That they had three kids, Anne, Andrew and Lawrence.
In lieu of flowers, the household requested donations to the Movement Image and Tv Fund (MPTF).
A memorial service shall be held at a future date.
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Former Related Press author David Germain contributed biographical data to this report from Los Angeles.
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