Former Academy president and legendary producer Walter Mirisch dies at 101

Walter Mirisch, the last of three Mirisch brothers who produced or oversaw production of a string of highly regarded films in the 1950s and ‘60s, including best picture Oscar winners “The Apartment,” “West Side Story” and “In the Heat of the Night,” as well as comedy classics like “Some Like It Hot” and “The Pink Panther,” has died. He was 101.

Mirisch, who also was a strong presence in the Hollywood community and served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1973 to 1977, died Friday in Los Angeles of natural causes per an academy statement.

“The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is deeply saddened to hear of Walter’s passing,” academy Chief Executive Bill Kramer and academy President Janet Yang said in a statement. “Walter was a true visionary, both as a producer and as an industry leader. He had a powerful impact on the film community and the Academy, serving as our President and as an Academy governor for many years. His passion for filmmaking and the Academy never wavered, and he remained a dear friend and advisor. We send our love and support to his family during this difficult time.”

In all, films with the stamp of brothers Walter, Harold and Marvin Mirisch garnered dozens of Oscar nominations. The tiny “studio without walls,” as Harold Mirisch called it, grew and contracted as needed and was so much a family operation that the brothers were sometimes called “the Mirii.” They were among the very first “independents.”

“I don’t know that there’s been a brother team that’s done as much for this industry as the Mirisch brothers,” veteran Paramount producer A.C. Lyles once said.

Mirisch films earned dozens of honors including best-director nominations for Billy Wilder (“Some Like It Hot,” “The Apartment”), Robert Wise (“The Sound of Music,” “West Side Story”), Jerome

Robbins (also “West Side Story”) and Norman Jewison (“In the Heat of the Night,” “Fiddler on the Roof”). Jewison’s “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!,” the first of several films he directed and/or produced with the Mirisches, also received a best-picture nomination.

The Mirisches also worked with many other fine directors, including John Ford (“The Horse Soldiers”), John Sturges (“The Magnificent Seven,” “By Love Possessed”, “The Great Escape”), George Roy Hill (“Toys in the Attic,” “Hawaii”), John Huston (“Sinful Davey”) and Blake Edwards (“The Pink Panther”).

Actors, too, fared well in Mirisch films, including Rod Steiger, the best-actor Oscar winner in 1967 for “In the Heat of the Night,” and George Chakiris and Rita Moreno, who won Academy Awards for supporting roles in the 1961 screen version of Broadway’s “West Side Story.”

Generally speaking, Harold was the wheeler-dealer with the big Hollywood personality, Marvin

was the quieter money man and Walter took the greatest interest in the artistic side of filmmaking.

As C. Robert Jennings wrote of the Mirisches in the Los Angeles Times in 1967, directors loved working with them because the brothers took care of “an awesome miasma of agents, properties, screen rights, salaries, star temperaments, contract negotiations, lawsuits, legal clearances, logistics, billings, budgets, ballyhoo, release dates and release cities.”

The Mirisches prospered because, as Harold Mirisch once said, “There’s an atmosphere of creative freedom here.”

Wilder, who made more than half a dozen films with the Mirisches, once called their approach “a bafflingly simple one.”

“Once out of the gate, the Mirisches give you full rein, and never use the whip,” Wilder told the Los Angeles Times in 1967. “When you win a race, they let you wear the wreath. And if you break your leg, they don’t shoot you — they let you do it yourself.”