Mark Rydell, Director of On Golden Pond and The Rose, Dies at 97
Mark Rydell, the Oscar-nominated director of On Golden Pond, The Rose, and For the Boys, has died at the age of 97. The news was announced by Bette Midler on Instagram on 14 August 2026, who wrote that Rydell had died that morning. He was 97, having been born on 23 March 1929. (Deadline)
Rydell directed Midler in her first film, The Rose (1979), the musical drama loosely inspired by the life of Janis Joplin that earned Midler an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. The pair reunited for For the Boys (1991). Midler wrote that Rydell "taught me so much" across both films, and noted that he had been an actor before turning to directing. (Deadline)
He was, in fact, an actor first. Rydell studied at the Actors Studio, the famed New York workshop that shaped a generation of American screen performers, before moving behind the camera (Britannica). His directing credits spanned a wide range of genres and stars. The Fox (1967), an adaptation of a novella by D.H. Lawrence, was his first feature. He followed it with The Reivers (1969), based on the William Faulkner novel, and Cinderella Liberty (1973), starring James Caan as a sailor on shore leave. The River (1984), with Sissy Spacek, rounded out a filmography that also included the John Wayne western The Cowboys and the television film James Dean (Directors Guild of America).
His most celebrated film was On Golden Pond (1981), the family drama starring Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda in his final screen role. The film was a box-office hit, grossing over $119 million domestically — the domestic market being the United States and Canada — on a reported budget of roughly $15 million. It received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, and won three Oscars: Best Actor for Fonda, Best Actress for Hepburn, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Rydell's own nomination was the only one of his career.
On Golden Pond also carried a personal thread: Jane Fonda, who played the estranged daughter of Henry Fonda's character, had openly sought the project as a way to repair her real-life relationship with her father. The dynamic gave the film a charge that critics and audiences responded to, and it became the second-highest-grossing film of 1981 in the domestic market, behind only Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Midler's tribute was brief and warm. She remembered Rydell as a teacher as much as a director — someone who shaped her craft on her very first set and again more than a decade later. For a performer whose career has spanned five decades, that double debt says something about the director's reach across generations of talent.
Rydell's career bridged the studio-system twilight and the New Hollywood era, and his films drew performances from some of the biggest names in American cinema — Fonda, Hepburn, Wayne, Midler, Spacek, Caan. He was 97.
