‘Sound of Music’ director Wise dies
LOS ANGELES – Robert Wise, the highly honored film editor-turned-director who won four Academy Awards for producing and directing “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music,” died Wednesday. He was 91.
Wise, who edited Orson Welles’ landmark “Citizen Kane” and Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons,” became ill at his home Wednesday morning and died of heart failure at UCLA Medical Center, according to Lawrence Mirisch, a family friend and motion picture agent.
Mirisch noted that Wise was buoyant in celebrating his 91st birthday, which was Saturday, at a party over the weekend with two dozen of his closest friends.
“He was always treated with great deference, and it was not for what he accomplished in films but for who he was as a human being,” Mirisch said.
Michael Apted, president of the Directors Guild of America, said in a statement that Wise’s “devotion to the craft of filmmaking and his wealth of head-and-heart knowledge about what we do and how we do it was a special gift to his fellow directors.”
In a directing career that began in 1944 when he took over the reins of the stylish horror classic “The Curse of the Cat People” in mid-production, Wise defied being pigeonholed.
Earning a reputation as a disciplined and impeccable craftsman, he worked in virtually every genre – from high drama and romantic comedy to film noir and the supernatural.
Among the better-known of his 40 films:
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951), the landmark science fiction thriller starring Michael Rennie; “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (1956), the biopic starring Paul Newman as world middleweight champion Rocky Graziano; “I Want to Live!” (1958), a psychological study of a woman awaiting execution in the gas chamber, which earned Susan Hayward a best actress Oscar; “The Haunting” (1963), a classic haunted-house thriller co-starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom; and “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), an epic-length war drama that earned Steve McQueen his only Academy Award nomination.
Other Wise films include “The Body Snatcher,” “The Set-Up,” “Executive Suite,” “Run Silent Run Deep,” “Odds Against Tomorrow,” “Two for the Seesaw,” “The Andromeda Strain,” “The Hindenburg” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”
Wise had the distinction of having not only two films on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time as a director (“West Side Story” at No. 41 and “The Sound of Music” at No. 55), but as an editor he played a key role on the No. 1 film on the list, “Citizen Kane,” for which he received his first Oscar nomination.
In 1998, the modest and self-effacing filmmaker became the 26th recipient of the AFI’s life achievement award, joining the ranks of fellow directors John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Welles in receiving what is widely considered the film industry’s highest career honor.
“Some of the more esoteric critics claim that there’s no Robert Wise style or stamp,” Wise said at the time. “My answer to that is that I’ve tried to approach each genre in a cinematic style that I think is right for that genre. I wouldn’t have approached ‘The Sound of Music’ the way I approached ‘I Want to Live!’ for anything, and that accounts for a mix of styles.”