Walter Mirisch, the legendary independent-minded producer who’s the one particular person to obtain the Academy of Movement Photos Arts & Sciences’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, the Irving G. Thalberg Award and an Oscar for finest image, has died. He was 101.
The affable Mirisch, who served 4 phrases as president of the Academy of Movement Photos Arts and Sciences from 1973-77, died Friday in Los Angeles of pure causes, AMPAS introduced.
“Walter was a real visionary, each as a producer and as an trade chief,” Academy CEO Invoice Kramer and Academy President Janet Yang stated in a joint assertion. “He had a robust influence on the movie neighborhood and the Academy, serving as our president and as an Academy governor for a few years. His ardour for filmmaking and the Academy by no means wavered, and he remained a pricey pal and adviser.”
Survivors embody his son Larry Mirisch, the proprietor of The Mirisch Company, the below-the-line store that he based in 1992.
Mirisch earned his Oscar statuette in 1968 for producing the edgy thriller Within the Warmth of the Evening (1967). His manufacturing outfit, The Mirisch Co., produced two different classics that took dwelling the Academy’s final prize: Billy Wilder’s poignant comedy The Condo (1960) and Robert Smart and Jerome Robbins’ musical drama West Facet Story (1961).
Within the Warmth of the Evening star Sidney Poitier, within the foreword of Mirisch’s 2008 e book I Thought We Have been Making Films, Not Historical past, known as him a “legendary producer, visionary filmmaker, brave seeker of fact, particularly in troubling occasions.”
And novelist Elmore Leonard famously devoted Get Shorty, his scathing 1990 satire of the movie trade, to the producer: “To Walter Mirisch, one of many good guys.”
In August 1957, Mirisch, then in cost at Allied Artists, fashioned The Mirisch Co. together with his older brothers Marvin and Harold, they usually signed a distribution cope with United Artists. The corporate thrived, producing a wide-ranging slate of 67 movies throughout the next 20 years whereas accumulating 28 Oscars.
Amongst these options: Some Like It Sizzling (1959), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Nice Escape (1963), The Pink Panther (1963), The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Identical Time, Subsequent 12 months (1978).
Along with Within the Warmth of the Evening, Mirisch himself produced such movies as The Man within the Internet (1959), Two for the Seesaw (1962), Toys within the Attic (1963), seven-time Oscar nominee Hawaii (1966), Mr. Majestyk (1974), Halfway (1976) and, earlier, a collection of Bomba, the Jungle Boy motion pictures within the Fifties (filmmaker Ron Howard has stated he liked these movies as a child.)
All through his profession, Mirisch labored with quite a lot of prime administrators, together with William Wyler, John Ford, John Sturgis, Blake Edwards and Norman Jewison.
Revered for taking clever dangers and tackling social points, Mirisch and his Within the Warmth of the Evening colleagues have been honored in 1998 by the Academy with a specifically restored print in celebration of the movie’s thirtieth anniversary.
The drama, directed by Jewison from Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay and starring Rod Steiger as a Mississippi lawman and Poitier as a Black detective investigating a homicide in a racist southern city, received 5 Oscars in all.
“Even at this time, it has lots to say to us,” Mirisch stated through the 1998 ceremony. “As a substitute of mounting a soapbox and making speeches, it makes its level by dramatizing how a southern redneck sheriff and an jap, Black detective are lastly capable of see each other not as stereotypes however as people.”
Mirisch additionally served three phrases as president of the Producers Guild of America and was the recipient of its David O. Selznick Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. He was given the Thalberg honor in 1978 and the Hersholt award in 1983.
In 1976, he was the recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Hollywood International Press Affiliation, that group’s highest movie honor.
The Mirisch Co. entered tv in 1959 with the Western collection Wichita City, starring Joel McCrea, and went on to supply such exhibits as The Rat Patrol and Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson’s Hey, Landlord. UA acquired The Mirisch Co. in March 1963, and the brothers continued to supply movies and TV exhibits for the studio.
Mirisch led quite a few initiatives to safe a profitable future for the Academy, together with establishing a brand new headquarters for the group in Beverly Hills in 1975.
In a 2012 interview with The Hollywood Reporter on his last day as Academy president, the late Tom Sherak stated Mirisch was invaluable in serving to him decide to renegotiate AMPAS’ contract with the Kodak Theatre (now often known as the Dolby Theatre), the house of the Oscars.
“I used to be involved about the place we [could] go and who would need us,” Sherak instructed THR. “And I’ll always remember, it was Walter Mirisch … who checked out me and stated: ‘Tom, take heed to me. It’s the Academy Awards. You’ll discover a place to go. Renegotiate, Tom. Belief me.’ And that’s after I went to train our proper to renegotiate.
“Then immediately we began getting presents. We stayed there as a result of that’s the place we belonged. So it was Walter Mirisch who gave me the go-ahead in his personal method to say go do it; someone will need us, don’t fear. And he was proper on.”
Born in New York Metropolis on Nov. 8, 1921, Mirisch acquired a B.A. in historical past in 1942 from the College of Wisconsin at Madison, successful a graduate fellowship in historical past. Regardless of his scholarly bent, he liked motion pictures, hoping to get into the leisure trade, however with no movie colleges in existence, he selected to attend Harvard to check enterprise.
After incomes a grasp’s diploma, Mirisch landed his first showbiz job with a theater chain, studying in regards to the motion pictures from the exhibition aspect. He quickly migrated to Monogram Studios in 1945, and his first credit score as a producer was on the crime drama Fall Man (1947).
By 1951, he was government producer in control of Monogram and its Allied Artists subsidiary.
Mirisch additionally had management roles with the Los Angeles Music Middle, the Movement Image & Tv Fund, Cedars-Sinai Medical Middle and UCLA.
Survivors embody his kids, Anne, Andrew and Lawrence; his granddaughter, Megan, and her husband, Craig; and his great-grandsons, Emery and Levi. His spouse, Patricia, died in 2005.
In lieu of flowers, the household requests donations to the MPTF.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
