Samuel Goldwyn Jr obituary

The film producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr, who has died aged 88, shared with his father a name and a career in Hollywood, but he struck out on his own in favouring cerebral subjects, encouraging independent film-making and backing new directors, such as Ang Lee and Anthony Minghella.

He was born in Los Angeles, the son of the man originally known as Szmuel Gelbfisz and his second wife, Frances (nee Howard). Sam Sr was, in many ways, the man who invented Hollywood: with his brother-in-law, Jesse L Lasky, he had made the first film produced there, The Squaw Man (1913), and used his own money to make such box-office hits as Guys and Dolls (1955).

Sam Jr was educated at the University of Virginia and served in the US army during the second world war. Afterwards, he worked in Britain as a writer and associate producer for the Rank Organisation, and produced stage plays, including The Gathering Storm, starring Bryan Forbes, at St Martin’s theatre, London. When he returned to the US, he was employed as an associate producer for Universal studios.

In 1951, during the Korean war, he was recalled for military service. When he returned, he worked for a time in television, and produced films including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960), The Young Lovers (1964), starring Peter Fonda and Sharon Hugueny, which he also directed, and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970).

His testing time came with his father’s death in 1974. Sam Sr had had a disappointing end to his career with the failure of his filmed version of Porgy and Bess (1959). Sam Jr had to decide whether to follow his father’s example and make big movies or scale down the operation. He chose the latter. In 1979 he started up his own independent production company, the Samuel Goldwyn Company, which also specialised in taking quality foreign films to the US.

Its films included The Golden Seal (1983), A Prayer for the Dying (1987), starring Mickey Rourke, and Mystic Pizza (1988), with Julia Roberts in her debut in a leading role. A succession of movies that drew on his connections to British artists started with Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989). Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), starring Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson, followed, the first in a run of award-winning films directed by Minghella, and in 1994 Goldwyn co-funded and produced The Madness of King George, based on Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III.

Also in 1994, Goldwyn produced Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, the third film in the director’s trilogy about the new generation in Taiwan, which was nominated for an Oscar. But The Preacher’s Wife (1996), starring Whitney Houston and Denzel Washington, did only moderately well and was followed by his company’s temporary collapse. Goldwyn managed to refinance himself, and in 2001 was executive producer of the comedy Tortilla Soup, directed by Maria Ripoli.

View image in fullscreen

In 2003 he had great success, producing the screen adaptation of the Patrick O’Brian sea adventures, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, starring Russell Crowe and directed by Peter Weir. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, winning two, and eight Baftas, winning four, and picked up many other awards.

For a time Goldwyn had a home in London, as well as living in his father’s plush mansion in Beverly Hills, California. He was always sensitive about his father’s unjustified reputation as a clown, famed for his malapropisms. That was, he maintained, unfair on a man with an intense artistic sense who took personal control of all his own projects and was much respected by his employees. But the son recognised the importance of the publicity they brought and admitted that sometimes Goldwyn’s PR men invented his sayings. “I think my father’s brain worked faster than his mouth,” he once told me. As Goldwyn Sr really did say: “We’ve all passed a lot of water since then.”

Fittingly, perhaps, Goldwyn Jr’s last production was the 2013 remake starring Ben Stiller of one of his father’s films, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947).

He is survived by his third wife, Patricia (nee Strawn); his sons, John, Francis and Tony, and daughter, Catherine, from his first marriage, to Jennifer Howard, which ended in divorce; and by a son, Peter, and daughter, Elizabeth, from his second marriage, to Peggy Elliott, which ended in divorce.