--- title: 'Mark Rydell Was an Actor First. That Is Why Henry Fonda Finally Won' type: 'blog post' section: 'Away From Set' standfirst: 'The director of On Golden Pond and The Rose died on Thursday, August 13, aged 97. He had spent six years on a soap opera and about a decade as a working actor before he ever gave a note, and it shows in every performance he got.' author: 'CinePixo' published: '2026-08-19' updated: '2026-08-19' about_people: - 'Mark Rydell' - 'Henry Fonda' - 'Katharine Hepburn' - 'Jane Fonda' - 'Bette Midler' - 'Robert Altman' - 'Steve McQueen' - 'John Wayne' - 'Sydney Pollack' about_films: - 'On Golden Pond (1982)' - 'The Reivers (1969)' - 'The Cowboys (1972)' - 'Cinderella Liberty (1973)' - 'The Fox (1967)' - 'Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976)' tags: - 'Mark Rydell obituary' - 'On Golden Pond Henry Fonda' - 'The Rose Bette Midler' - 'Mark Rydell The Long Goodbye' - 'Katharine Hepburn fourth Oscar' - 'Mark Rydell films' sources: - 'https://www.inquirer.com/obituaries/obit-mark-rydell-20260816.html' - 'https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/movies/mark-rydell-on-golden-pond-director-dead/' - 'https://variety.com/2026/film/news/mark-rydell-dead-golden-pond-1236834732/' - 'https://deadline.com/2026/08/mark-rydell-dead-1237040664/' - 'https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/mark-rydell-dead-golden-pond-cinderella-liberty-the-rose-1236673846/' - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rydell' - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Golden_Pond_(1981_film)' - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fonda' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/blog/mark-rydell-was-an-actor-first-that-is-why-henry-fonda-finally-won' publisher: 'CinePixo' --- # Mark Rydell Was an Actor First. That Is Why Henry Fonda Finally Won *The director of On Golden Pond and The Rose died on Thursday, August 13, aged 97. He had spent six years on a soap opera and about a decade as a working actor before he ever gave a note, and it shows in every performance he got.* By CinePixo, 2026-08-19 · Away From Set ## He spent six years on a soap opera before he ran a set Mark Rydell died on Thursday, August 13, of natural causes at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills. He was 97. The Associated Press reported the death, and his daughter Amy wrote that he was "truly one of a kind. Funniest and most talented person I've ever known." He was born Mortimer Harold Rydell in New York City in March 1929. He studied music at Juilliard, then acting at the Actors Studio, and made his Broadway debut in *Seagulls Over Sorrento* opposite Rod Steiger. His first film role came in 1956, in *Crime in the Streets*, alongside John Cassavetes and Sal Mineo. Then he took a job on daytime television and kept it: Jeff Baker on *As the World Turns*, from 1956 to 1962, with a stretch on *The Edge of Night* as well. Six years of soap opera is a strange line on the résumé of a man who would later direct Katharine Hepburn. It is also the most useful training available for the job he ended up doing. Daytime television in that era shot enormous quantities of dialogue on impossible schedules, live or nearly so. An actor learned what a scene needed in one take because there was no second one. ![Close black-and-white publicity portrait of Robert Altman in 1983, white hair and full white beard, a striped shirt open at the collar, one hand raised against his cheek.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/ac4ac74c-9c80-4e2a-a373-092cbdb6121c.webp) *Photo: Associated Press Newsfeatures · [Public domain](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-US-1989) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_Altman_-_1983.jpg)* ## Robert Altman cast him as the most frightening man in The Long Goodbye Rydell moved to directing through television — episodes of *Mr. Novak*, *Ben Casey* and *Gunsmoke* — and made his first feature, *The Fox*, in 1967. He never stopped acting entirely, and in 1973 Robert Altman put him in *The Long Goodbye* as Marty Augustine, a gangster whose violence arrives without warning and without heat. It is a genuinely alarming performance, and it is alarming because Rydell plays the man as reasonable. Augustine explains himself. He is courteous. The horror is in the arithmetic going on behind a pleasant face. Almost nobody remembers that the actor doing it had a directing career running in parallel, and it is the single best piece of evidence for what kind of director he was: he understood from the inside that menace is a matter of tempo, not volume. His last significant screen role came in 2002, in Woody Allen's *Hollywood Ending*. ![Colour studio publicity portrait of Henry Fonda smiling in a patterned grey waistcoat, white shirt and black cravat against a warm orange backdrop, for the 1959 film Warlock.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/24d2b54c-01d1-4f90-b2ad-3c3d16465d81.webp) ![Black-and-white MGM studio publicity portrait of Katharine Hepburn, shoulder-length waved hair, in a dark jacket with a wide white collar, looking straight at the camera, 1941.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/f7f51788-03a6-4edc-8f19-1106c48044cc.webp) *Photos: Studio publicity still, photographer unknown · [Public domain](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-US-not-renewed) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Fonda_in_Warlock.jpg); Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, restored by Adam Cuerden · [Public domain](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-US-not-renewed) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Katharine_Hepburn_publicity_photograph.jpg)* ## 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. ![Bette Midler smiling in a high-necked black dress and silver drop earrings in front of a Kennedy Center Honors backdrop at the 2021 Medallion Ceremony.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/94efa994-2db6-42a4-b836-03cdff51520f.webp) *Photo: Shawn Miller / Library of Congress · [CC0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bette_Midler_2021_Kennedy_Center_Honors_(cropped).jpg)* ## 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. ![Black-and-white full-length still of Steve McQueen in a three-piece checked suit with a watch chain, one hand on his hip, standing in an office interior, 1968.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/3d3c7765-dc51-49bf-9056-577eb844cf63.webp) *Photo: Unknown author · [Public domain](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-US-no_notice) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steve-McQueen-1968_(cropped).jpg)* ## 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. ## In this piece - [Mark Rydell](https://cinepixo.com/people/mark-rydell) - [Henry Fonda](https://cinepixo.com/people/henry-fonda) - [Katharine Hepburn](https://cinepixo.com/people/katharine-hepburn) - [Jane Fonda](https://cinepixo.com/people/jane-fonda) - [Bette Midler](https://cinepixo.com/people/bette-midler) - [Robert Altman](https://cinepixo.com/people/robert-altman) - [Steve McQueen](https://cinepixo.com/people/steve-mcqueen) - [John Wayne](https://cinepixo.com/people/john-wayne) - [Sydney Pollack](https://cinepixo.com/people/sydney-pollack) - 1982 · [On Golden Pond](https://cinepixo.com/movies/on-golden-pond-1982) - 1969 · [The Reivers](https://cinepixo.com/movies/the-reivers-1969) - 1972 · [The Cowboys](https://cinepixo.com/movies/the-cowboys-1972) - 1973 · [Cinderella Liberty](https://cinepixo.com/movies/cinderella-liberty-1973) - 1967 · [The Fox](https://cinepixo.com/movies/the-fox-1967) - 1976 · [Harry and Walter Go to New York](https://cinepixo.com/movies/harry-and-walter-go-to-new-york-1976) ## Sources - https://www.inquirer.com/obituaries/obit-mark-rydell-20260816.html - https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/movies/mark-rydell-on-golden-pond-director-dead/ - https://variety.com/2026/film/news/mark-rydell-dead-golden-pond-1236834732/ - https://deadline.com/2026/08/mark-rydell-dead-1237040664/ - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/mark-rydell-dead-golden-pond-cinderella-liberty-the-rose-1236673846/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rydell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Golden_Pond_(1981_film) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fonda Every factual claim above is drawn from these. The reading of them is ours. Source: https://cinepixo.com/blog/mark-rydell-was-an-actor-first-that-is-why-henry-fonda-finally-won Written for CinePixo. Nothing on this page is imported prose.