| Alan J. Pakula | ||||||||||||||
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 Pakula in Sweden, 1990. |
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| Born | April 7, 1928 The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA |
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| Died | July 11 1998 (aged 70) Melville, Long Island, New York, USA |
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| Spouse(s) | Hope Lange (1963-1971) Hannah Cohn Boorstin (1973-1998) |
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Alan Jay Pakula (April 7 1928 – November 19 1998) was an American film producer, writer and director noted for his contributions to the conspiracy thriller genre. Pakula was born in New York to Polish Jewish parents and was educated at Yale University, where he majored in drama. He started his Hollywood career as an assistant in the cartoon department at Warner Brothers. In 1957, he undertook his first production role for Paramount Pictures. In 1962, he produced To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he received a Best Picture nomination in the 1963 Academy Awards. In 1969, he directed his first feature, The Sterile Cuckoo, starring Liza Minnelli. From October 19, 1963 to 1971, Pakula was married to actress Hope Lange. In 1971, Pakula released the first installment of what would informally come to be known as his "paranoia trilogy". Klute, the story of a private eye's relationship with a call girl (played by Jane Fonda, who won an Oscar for her performance), was a commercial and critical success. This was followed in 1974 by The Parallax View starring Warren Beatty, a similarly labyrinthine post-Watergate thriller notable for its experimental use of hypnotic imagery in a celebrated film-within-a-film sequence in which the protagonist is inducted into the mysterious Parallax Corporation. Finally, in 1976, Pakula rounded out the "trilogy" with All the President's Men, another commercial hit considered by many critics and fans to be one of the best thrillers of the 1970s. [1] The film was based on the bestselling account of the Watergate scandal written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Pakula scored another hit in 1982 with Sophie's Choice, starring Meryl Streep. His screenplay, based on the novel by William Styron, was nominated for an Academy Award. In later years, he largely focused on courtroom dramas, achieving commercial success with Presumed Innocent, based on the bestselling novel by Scott Turow, and The Pelican Brief, an adaptation of the John Grisham bestseller. Pakula died in 1998 in a bizarre car accident on a part of the Long Island Expressway in Melville, New York at the age of 70. A driver in front of him struck a metal pipe, which went through Pakula's windshield, striking him in the head and causing him to swerve off the road and into a fence, killing him instantly.
Notable filmography
- 1997 The Devil's Own
- 1993 The Pelican Brief
- 1990 Presumed Innocent
- 1982 Sophie's Choice
- 1981 Rollover
- 1979 Starting Over
- 1976 All the President's Men
- 1974 The Parallax View
- 1973 Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing
- 1971 Klute
- 1969 The Sterile Cuckoo
- 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird (as producer)
External links
- Alan J. Pakula at the Internet Movie Database
- Alan Pakula's Gravesite
- American Film Institute interview
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The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) • Klute (1971) • Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973) • The Parallax View (1974) • All the President's Men (1976) • Comes a Horseman (1978) • Starting Over (1979) • Rollover (1981) • Sophie's Choice (1982) • Dream Lover (1986) • Orphans (1987) • See You in the Morning (1989) • Presumed Innocent (1990) • Consenting Adults (1992) • The Pelican Brief (1993) • The Devil's Own (1997) |
