George Roy Hill

Oscar-winning director of 'The Sting'

George Roy Hill, film director, writer and actor: born Minneapolis, Minnesota 20 December 1922; married 1951 Louisa Horton (two sons, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1978); died New York 27 December 2002.

The director, writer and actor George Roy Hill did not direct a film until he was nearly 40, but he went on to have two enormous hits, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the film that won him an Oscar as best director, The Sting. Both starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford, actors with whom he would also work on other projects.

After the second film was released, Hill had for a time the distinction of being the only director to have made two of the top ten money-making films. For a while he was one of Hollywood's most bankable directors, his other hits including the musical of the flapper era Thoroughly Modern Millie. If he was never fully embraced by critics, and he was certainly not admired by auteurists, who detected little individuality or personal imprint in his films, he seemed not to worry. "I've always wanted to do entertaining films. I'm not a very deep thinker, I'm more for entertainment than something that has deep meaning to it."

Expressing his unease about reviewers, he commented, "What about Pauline Kael accusing me of emphasising male relationships with Redford and Newman? What am I supposed to do, stop the action in an action picture just to drag some women in?" He had a particular affection for nostalgic subjects, stating, "I read nothing but history for pleasure. In the present, you get too caught up in the emotions of the moment."

His most consistent run of superior work was done in the 1950s, when he was one of that remarkable group including John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet who achieved fame in the pioneering days of live television.

Hill was born in Minneapolis in 1922, his two passions from an early age being music and aviation. He studied music at Yale, where he also sang with the Whiffenpoofs and headed the Dramatic Society, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1943.

In the Second World War he served in the Marine Corps as a transport pilot in the South Pacific, after which he worked briefly on a newspaper in Texas before studying music and literature under the GI Bill at Trinity College, Dublin. To earn some money he acted with Cyril Cusack's repertory company at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, where he also directed his first production, Biography (1948).

Later he toured the United States with Margaret Webster's Shakespeare Repertory Company. Another member of the group was the actress Louisa Horton and they were wed in 1951. Horton later had a leading role in the anti-Communist film Walk East On Beacon (1952), in which Hill made his screen début in a small role. The pair had four children, but divorced in 1978.

Hill made his first appearance on the New York stage in 1949 in an off-Broadway production of Strindberg's intense 1889 play about the battle between the sexes, The Creditors (Fordringsägare). Hill played his role with an arm broken during rehearsal but none the less he and his co-star Beatrice Arthur received excellent reviews. In another off-Broadway production he played Hector Hushabye in Shaw's Heartbreak House (1950).

He also appeared in the radio soap opera John's Other Wife prior to serving in the Marine Corps again, training jet pilots in North Carolina as a captain in the Korean War. One night he had to be talked down by a ground controller at Atlanta airport, and he used this incident as the basis for the first play he wrote, My Brother's Keeper, which became a production of Kraft Television Theater in 1953 with Hill in the cast. It was the start of a distinguished period as writer, actor and director in that golden age of television.

In 1956 he was given the chance to direct a dauntingly ambitious production based on Walter Lord's book about the sinking of the Titanic, A Night to Remember. Co-adapted by Hill and John Whedon, it was the most ambitious live drama that had ever been attempted on television – 107 actors, 31 sets and seven cameras, but the result was a triumph that won Hill an Emmy Award. Variety called it "a brilliant feat from any angle", adding, "As sheer story-telling, its re-creation of the tragic sinking was clearly superior to the several Hollywood film productions framed around the same theme."

Claude Rains starred as the narrator, and Rains was part of a fine cast in another ambitious production directed by Hill for television, Judgment at Nuremberg (1959). Taped as part of the Playhouse 90 series it was acclaimed critically, with Hill being praised for his smooth integration of actual film clips into the action.

The production also gained notoriety when the American Gas Association, who had taken commercial spots on the show, insisted that all reference to "gas chambers" should be blanked out, an act which Variety called "an act so outrageous and inconsistent with the high moral tone of this drama as to be worthy of serious public protest". Astonishingly Hill was pragmatic, and said later,

I was not so upset as I should have been. I thought it was a good publicity gimmick. I sent out a lot of publicity myself to the major newspapers saying watch for this. It was kind of sneaky of me, but it worked.

Hill had already directed his first Broadway play, Ketti Frings' adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1957), which proved a big hit, winning the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award. He returned to television to direct more shows for Playhouse 90, including The Helen Morgan Story (1958), an impressive version of the torch singer's life starring Polly Bergen. Hill said of those early days of television,

I loved the challenge and the pressure. There weren't that many people doing it, and they had a lot of young people. You had to do things that people had never done before, and it was daring, and how it got done as well as it did is a miracle.

Back on Broadway he directed the whimsical musical Greenwillow (1960) with a score by Frank Loesser, starring Tony Perkins, but it was not a success. When Elia Kazan, scheduled to direct Tennessee Williams's new comedy Period of Adjustment (1960), withdrew from the project owing to film commitments Hill took his place. It ran for a modest 132 performances, but MGM asked Hill to direct the film version in 1962. He said, "When MGM offered me the movie I grabbed it. I figured that having done it once for the stage, I'd be ahead of the game."

Starring Jane Fonda and Anthony Franciosa, the film was pleasant but inconsequential. Hill's second film was another stage transcription, Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic (1963), notable for the fine performances of Geraldine Page and Wendy Hiller, but weakened when its elements of miscegenation and incest were diluted for the screen. Hill had his first major film success with The World of Henry Orient (1964), which starred Peter Sellers as a concert pianist pursued by two schoolgirls who have a crush on him. Though it is not one of Sellers's best performances, and Hill was criticised for allowing the pace to slacken occasionally, he was credited for the charming and touching performances of the two girls, Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth.

He was then asked to replace Fred Zinnemann, who had started shooting the epic Hawaii (1966), a sprawling, overlong saga starring Julie Andrews. Andrews starred for Hill with happier results in the Twenties musical Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967). He returned to Broadway to direct a musical version of The World of Henry Orient titled Henry, Sweet Henry (1967). With a patchy score by Bob Merrill, it was a failure, which for Hill may have been a blessing, for he swiftly returned to Hollywood to make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

With Newman and Redford portraying the notorious outlaws not as tough criminals but as free spirits whose life of crime is something of a lark, the film featured the moral ambiguity which figures in much of Hill's work. "I've a terrible fear of being pompous and of taking cheap shots," he once said. "So therefore there's a certain ambiguity in a lot of the work that I do." Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid became the fifth biggest grossing movie of the decade. It won Oscars for its script by William Goldman and its theme song, Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on my Head", and it won Hill his first Oscar nomination.

The film's great success prompted Universal to offer Hill a contract, and his first film for the studio was an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's surreal novel Slaughterhouse Five (1972). The story, with its time- travelling hero and tone of bitter irony, was not an easy one to translate to the screen, and it was not popular, though it won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Hill promptly reunited with Newman and Redford for The Sting (1973), in which Newman and Redford were nattily dressed conmen in the 1930s working an elaborate scam on a sadistic gangster (Robert Shaw). The film was originally planned as a vehicle for Redford until Newman heard about it and reputedly said to Hill, "You're making another film with Redford and there's no part for me?" The writer David S. Ward swiftly re-thought the role of a subsidiary character for Newman and moulded both main parts to fit the personalities of the stars. The result was arguably Hill's best film, a joyous movie which was an enormous hit and won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Scoring (Marvin Hamlisch's brilliant use of gorgeous ragtime melodies by Scott Joplin), and one for Hill as Best Director.

Hill was then able to indulge his passion for aviation, penning a story about a barnstorming pilot in the 1920s, The Great Waldo Pepper (1975). The story was inspired by an idol of Hill's, Charles "Speed" Holman, "a pilot who used to make his approach to spectators at state fairs flying past the grandstand upside down". William Goldman translated Hill's tale into a screenplay, and Robert Redford starred, but the film did disappointingly at the box-office. Hill then reunited with Newman for Slap Shot (1977), a look at the world of minor-league ice hockey. Though unsuccessful, the film has gained a cult following for its outrageously raucous humour.

Leaving Universal, Hill made a charming and modest comedy A Little Romance (1979), in which a pair of very young lovers in Paris are assisted in their furtive romance by a genial thief (Laurence Olivier). Hill then tackled another book that many considered unfilmable, John Irving's The World According to Garp (1982). Starring Robin Williams as the central character, the film won Hill plaudits for his handling of the unwieldy material, and it won Oscar nominations for both Glenn Close and John Malkovich, but it proved too offbeat for the general public.

Hill's last two films were The Little Drummer Girl (1984), starring Diane Keaton in a poorly received adaptation of John Le Carré's complex spy story with a background of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Funny Farm (1988), a flat comedy starring Chevy Chase as a city chap who tries living in the country with farcical results. Hill, who was drinking heavily when he made the film, announced his retirement on its completion, though he continued to teach drama at Yale University.

Tom Vallance