Mark Rydell, Director of 'On Golden Pond,' Dies at 97
Mark Rydell, the Oscar-nominated director of On Golden Pond, has died at the age of 97. His daughter, Amy Rydell, confirmed the death to The Hollywood Reporter. Rydell passed away on Thursday at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California (The Hollywood Reporter).
Rydell received his Academy Award nomination for directing On Golden Pond (1981), a film that carried an extraordinary weight of Hollywood history. Henry Fonda won the only competitive Oscar of his career for his performance as the ageing Norman Thayer. Katharine Hepburn won the last of her four Best Actress Academy Awards for her role opposite him. Jane Fonda, Henry's daughter, played the on-screen daughter and earned her own nomination. The elder Fonda died on 12 August 1982, roughly five months after collecting his award — and Rydell later credited a phone call from Jane Fonda with persuading him to screen the finished film for her ailing father before his death.
On Golden Pond was the apex of a directing career built on character-driven drama. Rydell also helmed Cinderella Liberty (1973), a Seattle-set romance starring James Caan and Marsha Mason, and The Rose (1979), a music-industry drama that earned Bette Midler an Oscar nomination. In total, Rydell directed five other actors to Academy Award nominations: Rupert Crosse in The Reivers (1969), Mason in Cinderella Liberty, Midler again in For the Boys (1991), Frederic Forrest in The Rose, and Sissy Spacek in The River (1984). He collaborated with Caan across three films — Cinderella Liberty, Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976), and For the Boys.
Before he ever called action on a feature, Rydell was a working actor. Born Mortimer H. Rydell in the Bronx on 23 March 1929, he was the son of a Wall Street stockbroker who insisted on the Bronx High School of Science. Rydell studied at the Juilliard School of Music, and in 1948 he met songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman, who brought him to Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse — the celebrated acting teacher whose approach shaped generations of American performers. Rydell made his Broadway debut in 1952 in the Navy comedy Seagulls Over Sorrento.
Television then made him a household name. Rydell joined the CBS daytime soap As the World Turns in late 1956 as Jeff Baker, a college student wrestling with alcohol problems. The role helped drive the show to No. 1 in the ratings. His character's wedding to Penny Hughes, played by Rosemary Prinz, aired on Christmas Eve 1958 and drew a massive audience. When Rydell left the series in 1962, Jeff Baker was killed off in a car crash.
He kept acting in film throughout his directing career, often in vivid character parts. Rydell played a brutal mobster in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), Meyer Lansky in Sydney Pollack's Havana (1990), and a Hollywood agent in Woody Allen's Hollywood Ending (2002). His early screen credits also included Don Siegel's Crime in the Streets (1956), which starred John Cassavetes.
Rydell's films earned their place in the industry's record books not through spectacle but through performance. His gift was drawing career-best work from his casts — and the Academy noticed, again and again.
