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Mark Rydell, director of Oscar-winning On Golden Pond and Bette Midler vehicle The Rose, has died. He was 97. Midler broke the news on Instagram. “Mark Rydell, the director or my first film, The Rose, died this morning,” she wrote. “He was an actor of note before he became a director, and I was so lucky to have met him when I did; he taught me so much on The Rose and later on For The Boys.”
Born in 1929 in the Bronx, Rydell began his career in the arts as a musician. He studied piano at Juilliard and became a jazz musician in the 1950s. But he quickly pivoted after seeing how much his contemporaries were using drugs. “Heroin was the drug of choice,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “Knowing that I have an addict’s personality in that a little is good but a lot is better, I knew I was in danger. So I went back to college and went to the Neighborhood Playhouse.”
He got his start in soaps, playing Jeff Baker on As the World Turns. During his soap-opera days, he befriended future Actors Studio legend James Lipton. In 1973, he played mobster Marty Augustine in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye.
Acting soon led to directing. “I enjoy leading,” he told the Times. “I am a good father. I have three children. Directing is a very paternal occupation.” Rydell started in television, directing episodes of shows including I Spy, The Wild Wild West, and Gunsmoke. His first feature film was The Fox, a box-office hit despite (or perhaps because of) its controversial lesbian content and masturbation scene. His second film, The Reivers, earned Rupert Crosse an Oscar nomination. In 1979, Rydell directed Midler in her first film, The Rose, a drama loosely based on the life and death of Janis Joplin. It received four Oscar nominations, including Best Actress for Midler. Over the years, Rydell’s films earned 26 Academy Award nominations.
In 1981, Rydell received his first personal Oscar nomination, for directing On Golden Pond. “I was somewhat intimidated by having to tell these legends when they were wrong,” Rydell said in 2002. “So after the first scene they turned to me with the innocent eyes of a 19-year-old with a hunger of approval. It made me feel, ‘Oh I see, if you are a really good actor you don’t know what you have done. You get lost in the moment.’”
Rydell was praised as being an actor’s director. “There are few directors who really understand and who can encourage the actor,” Lipton said of his friend, “and when the actor needs guidance can give it to the actor in terms other than ‘just stand up now and walk two paces’ — all of those dumb directions.” Midler credited her two Oscar noms to him, writing on Instagram, “He was the actor’s whisperer; just a few words was all it took to understand what was needed. Devoted to Meisner. So many happy memories.”
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