Stars flocked to work with the director Mark Rydell, who has died aged 97, and no wonder: he had trained as a performer alongside James Dean and Steve McQueen, later becoming west coast artistic co-director of the prestigious Actors Studio, while his movies notched up more than 20 Academy Award nominations between them.
Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn won best actor and actress Oscars respectively for his reflective, sentimental drama On Golden Pond (1981), which put Fonda, then a frail 75-year-old, on screen with his daughter Jane for the first and only time. Rydell received a best director nomination for the picture, which ruminated on the themes of family and mortality. “I’m attracted to material that is substantial enough to deal with life and death issues,” he said in 2001. “I don’t like to waste my time with trivia.”
