Canadian-born film director Norman Jewsion has died.
Photographed by Norman Jewison in 2009. PDO
Film director Norman Jewison has died at the age of 97. He died at his home last Saturday. This was reported by his publicist Jeff Sanderson on Monday.
Canadian-born Jewison served in the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II. He started his actual career in television, but moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s, where he directed a comedy film 40 Pounds of Troublewhich starred an American Tony Curtis. The director had many Oscar nominations and his career eventually lasted more than 50 years.
Throughout his long career, Jewison combined light entertainment with topical films that spoke to him on a deeply personal level. He stated in his autobiography This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Methat racism and injustice became his most common themes.
– Whenever a movie deals with racism, many Americans feel uncomfortable. Still, it must be faced. We have to deal with prejudice and injustice or we will never understand what is good and bad, right and wrong. We need to feel how the ‘other’ feels, he wrote.
Five of Jewison’s films received Best Oscar nominations: The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Lunatics (1987), Fiddler on the Roof (1971)and A Soldier’s Tale (1984).
Source: Guardian.