Mark Rydell Was an Actor First. That Is Why Henry Fonda Finally Won

His last significant screen role came in 2002, in Woody Allen's Hollywood Ending.

Photos: Studio publicity still, photographer unknown · Public domain · source; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, restored by Adam Cuerden · Public domain · source

On Golden Pond gave Henry Fonda the Oscar he had never won

Rydell directed features for nearly four decades. The Reivers in 1969, with Steve McQueen. The Cowboys in 1972, with John Wayne. Cinderella Liberty in 1973. Harry and Walter Go to New York in 1976. The Rose in 1979. The River in 1984. For the Boys in 1991. Intersection in 1994, and Even Money in 2006.

The one everybody knows opened on December 4, 1981. On Golden Pond put Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn on a lake in New Hampshire as a couple near the end of a long marriage, with Jane Fonda as the daughter who cannot talk to her father. It received ten Academy Award nominations and won three. Fonda won Best Actor. Hepburn won Best Actress, her fourth in that category, a record for acting wins that still stands. Ernest Thompson won for the adapted screenplay. The film took $119.3 million domestically and finished as the second-highest earner of its year in North America.

Fonda's was the only competitive Academy Award he ever won for acting, at the close of a career that had started in 1935 and produced exactly one previous acting nomination, for The Grapes of Wrath forty-one years earlier. He was too ill to attend the ceremony. Jane accepted for him and said her father would probably have put it this way: "Well, ain't I lucky." He died that August.

Rydell was nominated for Best Director and lost to Warren Beatty for Reds, which is the defensible outcome and beside the point by the measure that matters here. The job on that film was to get two very old, very great, very guarded actors to be tender in front of a camera while one of them was dying. He got it.

He also produced. In 1971 he formed Sanford Productions with Sydney Pollack, which made Jeremiah Johnson and Scarecrow — the latter won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Photo: Shawn Miller / Library of Congress · CC0 · source

Bette Midler called him the actor's whisperer

Rydell directed Bette Midler twice, in The Rose and For the Boys. The Rose was her first film, and it is still the performance that proves she could have had an entirely different career if she had wanted one. After his death she wrote that he was "the actor's whisperer; just a few words was all it took to understand what was needed."

That phrase is worth sitting with, because "a few words" is the whole discipline. Directors who have never acted tend to over-explain, and an over-explained actor plays the explanation instead of the scene. Rydell had been the person on the other side of that conversation for about a decade before he started giving the notes — his first directing credits are television episodes from 1963 and 1964, by which time he had been acting on stage, in films and on daytime television for years.

He put it more plainly himself: "All great art rests on telling the truth. The real pursuit of an artist is to tell the truth." It is the sort of line that could be empty coming from someone else. From a man whose films are mostly about people failing to say the thing they need to say to a parent or a child, it describes an actual method.

Photo: Unknown author · Public domain · source

The films kept returning to parents and children

Look at the shape of the work. A father and daughter who have not spoken properly in decades. A young sailor and the woman he tries to rescue in Cinderella Liberty. A boy taken on by a man in The Reivers. Children driving cattle after the men are gone in The Cowboys. A singer destroying herself in front of an audience that loves her for it in The Rose.

He was not a stylist and never pretended to be. The camera in a Rydell film is where it needs to be to see a face change, and nowhere more interesting than that. In a decade when American directors were being celebrated for the visible signature, he built a career on the least fashionable skill available: getting a performance that hurts, and then leaving it alone.

He is survived by his daughter Amy and son Christopher, from his marriage to the actor Joanne Linville, and his son Alexander, from his marriage to the producer Esther Rydell.

• On Golden Pond1982 · Mark Rydell
• The Reivers1969 · Mark Rydell
• The Cowboys1972 · Mark Rydell
• Cinderella Liberty1973 · Mark Rydell
• The Fox1967 · Mark Rydell
• Harry and Walter Go to New York1976 · Mark Rydell