Moshe Mizrahi

Oscar-winning Israeli film director

Moshe Mizrahi, an Israeli director whose Madame Rosa won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1978, died on 3 August at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He was 86. His son, Daniel, said the cause was pneumonia.

Mizrahi, who was born to a Jewish family in Egypt that immigrated to Palestine when he was a teenager, did not begin directing feature films until 1970. But he started impressively: Two films that he shot in Israel – I Love You Rosa (1972) and The House on Chelouche Street (1973) – were nominated for Oscars for best foreign-language film but both lost.

So when Mizrahi asked Simone Signoret, the French star known for smouldering sexuality, to star in Madame Rosa as an aging former prostitute and Holocaust survivor – a frumpy character with frizzy hair who wears unappealing make-up and dresses – she put aside her resistance because she admired his work.

“I tried to persuade him to do something else,” Signoret told the New York Times in 1978. “I tried to buy him, but he bought me.” Citing his upbringing in Egypt and Palestine (and, subsequently, Israel), she added: “He’s immersed in the two cultures, Arab and Jews. They’re his two loves. I surrendered.”

Based on a novel by Romain Gary, the movie follows Rosa as she raises the children of other prostitutes in a small apartment in Paris.

The Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin wrote in his review that “one of the most impressive aspects of Mizrahi’s skills as a filmmaker is his ability to convey the real world at its most sordid without creating a movie that is itself sordid, or nearly so”.

Signoret won the César Award, France’s Oscar, for best actress. And Madame Rosa remains the only winner of the Oscar for best foreignlanguage film directed by an Israeli (although it counted as France’s victory).

As an Israeli, Mizrahi felt ambivalence about winning the award because his film was made in France, and one of the four films it beat was Operation Thunderbolt, Israel’s entry in the category. “Because I won for a nonisraeli film, it made me ‘not one of us’,” he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2009.

He would continue to make films in Israel, France and elsewhere. He directed Every Time We Say Goodbye (1986), with Tom Hanks, on location in Jerusalem, and War and Love (1985), a Holocaust story set in Poland that featured Kyra Sedgwick, was filmed in Hungary.

Moshe Mizrahi was born on 5 September 1931 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Haim Victor and Dora (Behar) Mizrahi. His father, a store clerk, died of an abscess when Moshe was nine, forcing his mother to do housework to support her four children.

Entranced by movies early on, Moshe saw as many as seven films a week in Alexandria, mostly from the United States.

“At some point,” he told Haaretz, “I discovered there was such a thing as directors, and that they were the magicians who made the movies.”

Son Daniel Mizrahi said his father “credited growing up in cosmopolitan Alexandria as being decisive in establishing his humanistic and pluralistic worldview, and he was a firm believer and supporter of the possibility of good will and understanding between Arabs and Jews.”

The family left for Palestine in 1946. During the Israeli war for independence two years later, Mizrahi’s brother, Shabtay, was killed in an Egyptian bombing raid. In 1950, courtesy of a Jewish group that paid his way, he moved to Paris, where he satiated himself on films noir and westerns and dreamed of one day working in America.

Returning to Israel, he worked as a newspaper reporter and wrote Hebrew movie subtitles before heading back to Paris in 1958, where he found work in television. Starting as an assistant working on sets, he was eventually hired by Telfrance Films, where he rose to production manager and producer. When he turned from producing TV programming to film directing, he put some of his family’s lore into cinematic stories. For Iloveyourosa,hedrewonhis maternal great-grandmother’s experience for a story set in the late 19th century about a young widow (Michal Batadam) obliged by Old Testament law to marry her brother-in-law, who is only 11.

In his review for the New York Times, AH Weiler wrote that Mizrahi “sticks to his theme and avoids religious or distaff proselytising,” adding: “He is a refreshingly professional craftsman who allows a viewer his own judgments.”

A year later, Mizrahi directed The House on Chelouche Street, whose story echoed his own: A widow moves her family from Alexandria to Israel before its independence.

Those films helped establish his reputation for creating strong matriarchal characters. “I was raised in a Mediterranean-type of culture where women were predominant,” he said in 1982. “The households were filled with powerful mother figures – grandmothers, aunts and all the rest. It was the kind of background that helped me feel my material thematically.”

He married Bat-adam, a screenwriter, actress and director, in 1980, after she had appeared in five of his pictures. They continued to collaborate for many years, she as an actor in his films and he as an actor and producer in some of hers. In Rachel’s Man (1975), Bat-adam played the title role, while Mizrahi directed and wrote the script with his former wife, Rachel Fabian.

In addition to his son and wife, Mizrahi is survived by his daughter, Orit Mizrahi; two sisters and two grandchildren.

Mizrahi continued to direct until 2007, when he made Weekend in the Galilee in Israel, his first film in 11 years – and also his final one. He had taught cinema at Tel Aviv University since the 1990s, which occupied him as directing assignments became scarce because of financing and other issues, his son said.

But it did not seem to bother him. “If you’ve directed quite a few movies,” he said, “it’s not that big of a tragedy if you never direct another one.” RICHARD SANDOMIR

“If you’ve directed quite a few movies, it’s not that big of a tragedy if you never direct another one”