Sidney Lumet, 1924–2011

Actors loved Sidney Lumet. Al Pacino, who played two of his most memorable roles in the Lumet-directed vehicles Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, called him “an actor’s director.” Rod Steiger, who played a haunted Holocaust survivor in The Pawnbroker, praised Lumet for “his compassion for creative people.” For Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lumet was “a true master who loved directing and working with actors like no other.”

Lumet was born in Philadelphia but always loved New York City, which he portrayed in all its gritty glory in films ranging from 12 Angry Men to Prince of the City, said the Chicago Tribune. His parents were both distinguished actors in the Yiddish theater, and Lumet grew up backstage. He twice played Jesus in stage productions. Like many show-business kids of that time, he attended the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, then entered Columbia University. He dropped out after only one year, joined the Army, and saw service in India and Burma. When he returned to New York, Lumet soon found work as an assistant director for CBS, doing live television. He worked on the historical re-enactment series You Are There, starring Walter Cronkite, and 150 episodes of the thriller Danger.

Lumet’s “social engagement and restless, probing moralism” were on display in his 1957 feature-film debut, 12 Angry Men, said Daily Variety. Shot almost entirely on a single set portraying a jury’s deliberation room—with skillful use of lenses and camera angles to emphasize the cramped, pressured setting—the drama pits a holdout juror, played by Henry Fonda, against 11 peers

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who are initially bent on conviction. The film bears an unlikely resemblance to a later Lumet film, 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express, a “star-studded bauble of a thriller” that most critics considered a departure for a director more often associated with urban realism. The adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery “could well have been titled 12 Angry Passengers,” considering how Lumet’s direction brought out the rage, anxiety, and insecurity masked by the cast’s superficially lighthearted comic performances.

The 1970s marked Lumet’s critical and artistic zenith, said the London Guardian. His credits during that decade include Network, to this day considered the most biting satire of the television industry; Serpico, a study of one honest cop battling a culture of corruption; and Dog Day Afternoon, a sweaty drama about a Brooklyn bank heist gone horribly, hilariously awry, which propelled Pacino into the top tier of American movie stars.

So prolific was Lumet—he directed 43 films in a 50-year career—that the occasional flop was inevitable, said the London Independent. He was fired from Funny Girl after clashing with star Barbra Streisand and producer Ray Stark, and his drama about a mistaken nuclear attack on Russia, Fail-Safe, withered in the shadow of the darkly funny Dr. Strangelove, which tackled similar themes. Other flops included an “over-studied transcription” of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus and a filmed adaptation of the stage hit The Wiz, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. “Even Lumet could not draw the necessary sparkle from Ross as Dorothy.”

Nominated for a Best Director Oscar several times, Lumet never won, although he was awarded an honorary statuette in 2005. Though never one to openly seek awards, Lumet was understandably somewhat bitter about having been passed over in favor of inferior competition. “On two occasions I got so pissed off about what beat us,” he said. “With Network we were beaten out by Rocky, for Christ’s sake.”