Herbert Ross, a film choreographer and director who helped draw star-making performances out of Dorothy Dandridge in "Carmen Jones," Barbra Streisand in "Funny Girl" and Julia Roberts in "Steel Magnolias," died Oct. 9 at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Mr. Ross directed 25 films from 1969 to 1995 and gained a reputation for coaxing Academy Award-winning performances from his actors. Among them were George Burns in "The Sunshine Boys" (1975) and Richard Dreyfuss in "The Goodbye Girl" (1977).
Many other performers were Oscar-nominated on his watch, including Marsha Mason in "The Goodbye Girl" and Shirley MacLaine, Anne Bancroft and Mikhail Baryshnikov in the 1977 ballet drama "The Turning Point." Mr. Ross received his sole nomination as best director for the film, whose themes of competition, jealousy and love were central to many of his movies.
Three years later, he directed "Nijinsky," with ballet star George de la Pena in the title role of the famous ballet dancer of the early 20th century.
Both films were set in a world that Mr. Ross knew well as an acclaimed choreographer in the 1950s and 1960s with American Ballet Theatre and on Broadway. He had choreographed Streisand in her first Broadway show, "I Can Get It for You Wholesale."
Mr. Ross turned out some popular movies in the 1980s and 1990s, including "Footloose" (1984), "Steel Magnolias" (1989) and his last, "Boys on the Side" (1995), with Drew Barrymore and Whoopi Goldberg.
One of his more curious efforts was "Pennies From Heaven" (1981), a musical taken from a Dennis Potter script that starred Steve Martin as a Depression-era sheet-music salesman. The film is now regarded as a cult classic for its form-breaking alternation between bleak reality and dance sequences.
He told an interviewer in 1995 that he purposely carved an eclectic career path. "I saw a number of really brilliant directors in the old Hollywood who had sort of stopped in the year of their greatest triumph . . . and got lost in 1958, or 1967, or 1974, or whatever the year was," he said. "So I was always very anxious not to let that happen to me. And I didn't want to get labeled in a genre."
Herbert David Ross was born in New York and then raised in Miami after the death of his mother. He lost interest in formal schooling and instead found satisfaction swimming in a Florida water show.
At 15, he knew the stage would be his goal. His father reportedly had a fatal heart attack shortly after confronting his son about his career. Mr. Ross expressed no regret in a 1978 interview, saying: "I would do the same thing over again, because there was no other alternative for me. It was almost a primordial urge, like getting back to the sea."
Returning to New York, he studied modern dance under Doris Humphrey. But he soon turned to choreography when he realized he would never be a world-class performer. He staged Broadway shows and supper-club acts for Imogene Coca and Marlene Dietrich, among others.
He also did work in television and, in 1954, his first film: choreographing Dandridge's seductive moves in "Carmen Jones," Otto Preminger's modernization of the Bizet opera. He was reportedly upset with the edited version of his routines and asked that his name be removed from the credits.
He went on to oversee dance sequences in "Doctor Dolittle," with Rex Harrison, and "Funny Girl," in which Streisand made her film debut as entertainer Fanny Brice.
He directed his first film in 1969, "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," a remake with Peter O'Toole of the 1939 tearjerker about a British schoolmaster through the years.
He flourished critically in the 1970s when he made three films based on Neil Simon plays: "The Sunshine Boys," with Burns and Walter Matthau as former vaudeville partners; "The Goodbye Girl," with Dreyfuss and Mason as grudging roommates; and "California Suite," with Matthau, Jane Fonda and Michael Caine in four separate plots.
He also directed Woody Allen as a loser in love who seeks advice from Humphrey Bogart in "Play It Again, Sam" (1972); Streisand again as Brice in "Funny Lady" (1975); and Alan Arkin as Sigmund Freud and Nicol Williamson as Sherlock Holmes in "The Seven Percent Solution" (1976).
His first wife, ballerina Nora Kaye, died in 1987.
His marriage to Lee Radziwill, the sister of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, ended in divorce.
Survivors include a sister, Roslyn Jaffe, of Salisbury, Md.
Herbert Ross directed the Oscar-winning performances of Richard Dreyfuss and George Burns.
