Stars flocked to work with the director Mark Rydell, who has died aged 97, and no wonder: he had trained as a performer alongside James Dean and Steve McQueen, later becoming west coast artistic co-director of the prestigious Actors Studio, while his movies notched up more than 20 Academy Award nominations between them. Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn won best actor and actress Oscars respectively for his reflective, sentimental drama On Golden Pond (1981), which put Fonda, then a frail 75-year-old, on screen with his daughter Jane for the first and only time. Rydell received a best director nomination for the picture, which ruminated on the themes of family and mortality.
Rydell believed all film-makers should try their hand at acting: “I think directors need to stay in touch with the agony of narcissism.” He was as good as his word, continuing to act even once his directing career was in full swing. He played the gangster Meyer Lansky in his friend Sydney Pollack’s drama Havana (1990) and a permanently smiling agent in Woody Allen’s comedy Hollywood Ending (2002). Towering above these was his indelible performance in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) as a charming hoodlum who casually smashes a Coca-Cola bottle in his girlfriend’s face.
He served in the army and later won a scholarship for Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse, where he studied alongside McQueen and was instructed in dance by Martha Graham. From there, he joined the Actors Studio and appeared with his classmate Dean in 1953 in a TV version of William Inge’s play Glory in the Flower. In Don Siegel’s Crime in the Streets (1956), a drama about juvenile delinquency, Rydell acted alongside John Cassavetes and Sal Mineo.
In the same year, he made his debut on the soap opera As the World Turns, where he had a recurring role for the next six years. The end of that job overlapped with his beginnings as a director. Pollack had already employed him as his assistant on the TV medical drama Ben Casey, and soon Rydell was calling the shots on episodes of that show, as well as other series such as Gunsmoke and I Spy.
He graduated to film with two literary adaptations: The Fox (1967), based on the DH Lawrence novella, and a version of William Faulkner’s The Reivers (1969) starring McQueen. While shooting The Cowboys (1972) he reprimanded his star, John Wayne, in front of the entire cast and crew for calling “Action”. Rather than being sacked as Rydell expected, he was instead congratulated by the actor for having had the guts to stand up to him.
Rydell made two consecutive pictures with James Caan – Cinderella Liberty (1973), with Caan as a sailor who falls for a sex worker played by Marsha Mason, and the period romp Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976) – before lobbying hard for Midler to be given the lead role in The Rose, despite her lack of acting experience. When Jane Fonda picked him to direct On Golden Pond, Rydell had the privilege of introducing her father to Hepburn. He wears it in one of the opening scenes.” Though respectful, Rydell was not too awed by his stars to correct some of their indulgences.
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