Fred Roos Dies: Oscar-Winning ‘Godfather Part II’ Producer & Longtime Coppola Collaborator Was 89

Anthony D'Alessandro
·7 min read
Fred Roos Dies: Oscar-Winning ‘Godfather Part II’ Producer & Longtime Coppola Collaborator Was 89

Fred Roos, the Oscar-winning The Godfather Part II producer and longtime executive producer for Francis Ford Coppola and Sofia Coppola, died Saturday in Beverly Hills at 89, four days shy of his 90th birthday.

The news about Roos, who won his Godfather Part II Oscar and later was nominated for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, comes as Francis Ford Coppola is here at the Cannes Film Festival, 45 years after winning the Palme d’Or for Apocalypse Now. Coppola is in town with his $120 million passion project Megalopolis, which had its world premiere last week. Roos is billed as EP on Megalopolis.

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The news also comes after Coppola’s wife of 61 years, Eleanor, died April 12. Roos was an executive producer on Hearts of Darkness, her famed documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now that won them both an Emmy in 1992.

Roos was Francis Coppola’s co-producer on The Conversation, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now, and a producer on One From the Heart, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, The Godfather Part III, Youth Without Youth and Tetro.

In 1974, he and Francis Coppola held the rare distinction of earning two Oscar nominations for Best Picture in the same year, for The Conversation and The Godfather Part II. Both were nominated again in 1980 for Apocalypse Now.

RELATED: From ‘The Godfather’ Trilogy To ‘American Graffiti’, ‘Patton’, ‘The Conversation’ & ‘Apocalypse Now’, Francis Ford Coppola Shares His Oscar Memories

Roos also executive produced Sofia Coppola’s films including The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, The Bling Ring, The Beguiled, On the Rocks and her latest, last year’s Priscilla.

The silver-haired Roos, in addition to being a consigliere to the Coppolas on the set, also was renowned for his “shrewd eye [that] helped pick the leads for films like American Graffiti, The Godfather and Star Wars,” wrote Deadline’s Peter Bart, who was the VP Production at Paramount when Coppola made The Godfather.

Roos entered the film industry via the mailroom at the then-powerful talent agency, MCA Inc. (now Universal Pictures), where one of his duties was driving for Marilyn Monroe. He thrived in his position and was promoted to assistant to one of the top agents. While there, Roos developed a love for actors and honed his intuition for discovering talent.

Roos began his career as a casting director in the late 1960s on such TV shows such as Gomer Pyle: USMC, I Spy, The Andy Griffith Show and That Girl. He moved into movie casting with early credits including Monte Hellman’s Flight to Fury, Two-Lane Blacktop and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces before taking on The Godfather.

When Roos was casting Lucas’ 1973 teenage pic American Graffiti, he and fellow casting director Mike Fenton saw between 100 to 150 actors a day, assembling what has been known as a seminal ensemble that included Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Cindy Williams, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips and Suzanne Somers.

RELATED: Cindy Williams Dies: ‘Laverne & Shirley’ Star Who Appeared In ’American Graffiti’ & ‘The Conversation’ Was 75

But there was one standout discovery on that pic: Harrison Ford as drag racer Bob Falfa. Roos knew Ford from his time as a carpenter at Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. After American Graffiti, Roos convinced Coppola to give Ford cameos in The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. However, in between those two, there came another feature for Ford, when Roos championed the actor for Lucas’ Star Wars.

“I was, from the get-go, pushing him for Han Solo,” Roos told EW back in May 2016. “‘George, you saw him right under your nose in American Graffiti,’ and finally it clicked with George. Other people were considered, but finally I won the day with George on that one.”

“Fred is a very loyal man,” Ford once told Bart. “Once he believes in you, he is unrelenting. He kept putting me up for parts, and I kept getting rejected. Finally things worked out.”

Another discovery of Roos was Phillips, who he caught at an open mic band night at the Troubadour. Phillips told the Los Angeles Times: “The casting director Fred Roos happened to be there that night and he approached me and my mother [Michelle Phillips] after our set and asked if I’d like to be in a movie. And I said, ‘Yeah, man, that would be totally cool.’ I was 12 and had no acting experience.”

But that wasn’t all in terms of Roos’ discoveries as he also launched the careers of Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Laurence Fishburne, Frederic Forest, Diane Lane, Nicolas Cage, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, Jennifer Connelly, Carrie Fisher, Billy Bob Thornton, Marshall Bell and many others. He also revitalized the acting careers of Martin Landau and Bill Murray and was instrumental in casting Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, and Cailee Spaeny in their first important leading roles. Quite often Roos could recognize attributes in actors before they saw it in themselves.

The Godfather repped Roos’ first teaming with Coppola in which he was involved in casting. That team-up led to a five-decade collaboration with the family. One of Roos’ myriad early actor discoveries was John Cazale, who would play the dim older brother Fredo to Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone. Roos first caught Cazale in an Off Broadway show starring Dreyfuss. Roos was there to see Dreyfuss for The Godfather, but it was Cazale who was the takeaway from that performance.

It was Roos as a producer on 1979’s Apocalypse Now who helped keep the audacious $30M production intact amid typhoons, Marlon Brando’s ego, Harvey Keitel’s firing after a week and replacement by Martin Sheen; the latter’s heart attack, etc., punctuated by a John Milius script that had an unresolved ending. Roos in Robert Koehler’s oral history on the film chose to shoot the movie in the Philippines over Australia as the latter continent required 100% locals casting, which wasn’t feasible. The producer also had contacts on the ground, having shot there. The production had to film at Aussie military bases because the U.S. military declined any clearance for Apocalypse Now to shoot on its bases. This entailed talks with Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ administration.

Roos told Koehler, “while Martin [Sheen’s] heart attack [in late March ’77] was a terrifying moment for all of us, Francis having to take a time-out from filming to recover his psychological equilibrium — and that’s what it was — was one of the most sobering moments during the entire shoot.”

Apocalypse Now went on to gross close to $105M worldwide at the box office, win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and saw eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and wins for Sound and Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography.

For Eleanor Coppola, Roos executive produced the acclaimed documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), which chronicled Francis Ford Coppola’s calamitous shoot. It earned four Primetime Emmy Awards and won two for Directing and Editing. Decades later, Roos prided himself on producing Eleanor’s feature film Paris Can Wait (2016), helping her make her directorial debut at the age of 80.

Roos’ first credit as producer was the 1964 Jack Nicholson-led Flight to Fury, on which he also shared a “story by” credit on with the filmmaker. He reunited with the duo on the WWII-set Back Door to Hell and again on Cordillera, which Hellman co-directed and Nicholson co-wrote. Reportedly, Nicholson once nicknamed Roos “The Rooster.”

Roos’ also produced Nicholson’s directorial debut, 1971’s Drive, He Said, as well as Carroll Ballard’s Oscar-nominated The Black Stallion (1979), Wim Wenders’ Hammett (1982), Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987), Agnieszka Holland’s The Secret Garden (1993) and the Golden Globe-nominated St. Vincent (2014) starring Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy. He also produced Wonderwell (2023) starring Carrie Fisher in her last on-screen performance alongside music star Rita Ora. For Broadway, Roos convinced author S.E. Hinton and American Zoetrope to turn The Outsiders into a Broadway play, which garnered 12 Tony nominations last month, including Best Musical.

Fred was the son of Dr. Victor Otto Roos, a general practitioner, and Florence Mary (née Stout). Born in Santa Monica and raised in Riverside, CA, his fascination with film began as a child when movie stars occasionally would pass through his local movie theater on promotional tours. His family moved to Los Angeles so he could attend Hollywood High School and play baseball, and in 1956 he earned a BFA from UCLA. After graduation, Roos was drafted by the Army and served two tours in Korea, the first one with future director-producer Garry Marshall.

Roos son and producing partner, Alexander Roos, continues to produce and has several projects in various stages of active development and production under their banner, FR Productions.

Roos was determined never to retire from the film business and to go with his boots on. He got his wish.

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