Sidney Lumet, who directed such impassioned, often furious, movies as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network, died this morning at his home in New York City. He was 86. The cause of death was lymphoma, his stepdaughter Leslie Gimbel told the New York Times.
Lumet, who received five Oscar nominations and seven DGA nominations for his work, was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2005 for his “brilliant services to screenwriters, performers and the art of motion pictures.”
Lumet, as a man and as a filmaker, was most at home in New York. “Locations are characters in my movies,” he once wrote. “The city is capable of portraying the mood a scene requires.” And his films often tackled social issues and focussed on lead characters struggling for personal and moral identity.
He directed some of his era's greatest movie performers, including Marlon Brando, Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Ingrid Bergman, Al Pacino, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, among others.
In the 1970s, Lumet plunged into New York-set crime tales with what amounted to a trilogy about life in a corrupted city: Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Prince of the City (1981).
Born in Philadelphia on June 25, 1924, Lumet grew up in New York, where his father Baruch joined the Yiddish theater. He himself appeared on stage by the age of five and made his Broadway debut in 1935 as one of the kids in Sydney Kingsley's Dead End.
During the ‘50s, he directed more than 250 TV shows, many of them live. His personal favorites were the CBS News-aided “You Are There” segments, The Salem Witch Trials, which he directed the same week that Edward R. Murrow aired his famous interview of Red-baiter Joseph McCarthy and The Death of Socrates.
His first feature film was the 1957 courtroom drama 12 Angry Men, which followed Henry Fonda and other actors into the jury room for an examination of the justice system and earned three Oscar nominations.
During the ‘60s, Lumet's films reflected the social upheavals of the times. He moved from play adaptations like The Fugitive Kind, A View From the Bridge and Long Day's Journey Into Night to The Pawnbroker, starring Rod Steiger as the victim of Nazi persecution; the nuclear drama Fail-Safe; and The Group, which looked at the lives of eight Vassar grads.
In the ‘70s, he enjoyed a particularly successful collaboration with Pacino on movies that burrowed into the reality of New York street life — the cop drama Serpico and the bank heist tale Dog Day Afternoon.
Working from a screenplay by Chayefsky, Lumet also served up a satire about the TV business in 1976's Network, a scathing portrait of the business that proved in many ways prophetic about the rush for ratings and also popularized Peter Finch's cry of “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore.”
Lumet was married three times — to Rita Gam, Gloria Vanderbilt and Gail Jones — before marrying his current wife Mary Gimbel in 1980.
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.
