Sidney Lumet, a US film director known for inspiring top-notch performances from actors in a stream of classic films, including 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network and Fail-Safe, died on Saturday at age 86, his Hollywood talent agency said.
Lumet’s death at his Manhattan home was confirmed by Michelle Suess, a spokeswoman for International Creative Management in Los Angeles.
Lumet was one of the leading film directors of the second half of the 20th century. He was prolific, directing more than 40 movies, and was versatile, dabbling in many different film genres. He shot many of his movies in his native New York.
Lumet received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2005. He previously had been nominated for Oscars five times without winning: as best director for 12 Angry Men (1957), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and The Verdict (1982); and for best screenplay as co-writer of Prince Of The City (1981).
His films, nominated for more than 50 Oscars, were typically unsentimental and extremely well-crafted, exploring intelligent and complicated themes.
In an incredible 12-year span — 1964 to 1976 — Lumet directed 18 films, including Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker, The Group, The Anderson Tapes, Serpico, Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day -Afternoon and Network.
He continued to direct films well into his 80s.
“He has the energy of a young man and the mind of a young man,” Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman told the Houston Chronicle.
Hoffman starred in Lumet’s bleak crime melodrama Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in 2007 when the director was 83.
Lumet was acclaimed for his technical know-how and his ability to coax strong performances from actors. He drew some of the best career performances out of Hollywood stars such as Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, Al Pacino and Faye Dunaway. He directed 17 acting performances nominated for Oscars.
“Elia Kazan used to really try to get inside the head and psyche of everybody he worked with,” Lumet told the New York Times in 2007, referring to the influential director. “I’m the exact opposite school. I don’t like to get involved.”
“And I try not to work with lunatics,” he said.
Many of his films were masterpieces. In the tense 1964 Cold War drama Fail-Safe, an electrical malfunction sends US bombers on a nuclear attack on Moscow, prompting the US president, played by Fonda, to sacrifice New York to atomic bombs to avert all-out war with the Soviet Union.
In his film directorial debut, 12 Angry Men, a lone dissenting juror played by Fonda struggles to -convince other jurors, including Jack Klugman and Lee Cobb, of the innocence of an accused murderer.
Network was scathing satire in which US television executives exploit the ravings of an anchorman played by Peter Finch, who memorably shrieks: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
In 1973’s Serpico, Pacino plays an honest policeman who takes on the corruption of fellow New York cops. Pacino was back two years later in Dog Day Afternoon, about a man robbing a bank to pay for his male lover’s sex-change operation.
Lumet explored police corruption again in Prince of the City.
Even some of Lumet’s misfires were memorable. He directed The Wiz in 1978, adapting The Wizard of Oz with a black cast headed by Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, but the resulting clunky musical was jeered by film critics.
Born on June 25, 1924, Lumet served as an Army radar technician in World War II, then worked as a stage actor in New York and before directing acclaimed live TV dramas during the 1950s. He was married four times.
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