Jake Eberts, 1941–2012

Jake Eberts didn’t sell a single unit during his two-year career as a diesel-engine salesman, and he never liked being an investment banker. But in his mid-30s, in what he later called “a stroke of good fortune for me,” he stumbled into film production. Millions shared his good fortune, as Eberts went on to produce more than 50 films, including four memorable Academy Award Best Picture winners: Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Driving Miss Daisy, and Dances With Wolves.

Soon after earning a degree in chemical engineering from McGill University in his native Montreal, Eberts “found he wasn’t very good at it,” said the Los Angeles Times. He went on to Harvard for an MBA and worked as an investment banker on Wall Street and then in London, where he was asked to arrange financing for an unlikely animated feature about talking rabbits. Watership Down “became a box-office and critical success,” compelling Eberts to leave banking and form his own production company, Goldcrest Films.

“The soft-spoken Eberts” explained his subsequent success with typical humility, said the Montreal Gazette. “I was living in London,” he said, “and there was an explosion of talent there.” Goldcrest launched the Oscar-crowned Chariots of Fire, about two runners in the 1924 Olympic Games. Then director Richard Attenborough approached Eberts with a biopic project he’d been unable to realize for 20 years; Gandhi went on to win eight Oscars. With Goldcrest, Eberts “helped revive the British film industry after a long period in the doldrums,” said BBC.com. But along with successes like The Killing Fields, there were losers, too, such as Absolute Beginners. Goldcrest fell on hard times and was sold in 1987.

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Eberts started a new firm, Allied Filmmakers, by rescuing a stalled project about a Southern widow and her black chauffeur. Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture in 1990, and his next project, Dances With Wolves, got the same honor the following year. In later years he guided other acclaimed features, such as A River Runs Through It, before “forging a new path” with nature documentaries like March of the Penguins, said Variety. His friend director Denys Arcand said it was Eberts’s “noble ideals” that sealed his success. “He felt cinema should be used to better mankind.”