The Oscar-winning producer who made dozens of classics

Walter Mirisch was the creative one. His two brothers, with whom he founded the Mirisch Corporation production company, focused on the wheeling and dealing around Hollywood, while Walter cared for the artistic part of filmmaking. Known for allowing directors total autonomy, he oversaw a string of legendary films in the 1950s and 1960s, including The Apartment, West Side Story, Some Like It Hot, and The Pink Panther. Mirisch films earned 28 Oscar wins and 87 nominations. “We offered these filmmakers what they needed,” he said in 1983. “We became, in effect, partners with our directors.”

Mirisch was born in New York City to a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland, said Deadline. A movie usher as a teen, he studied at the University of Wisconsin and then at Harvard Business School. A family connection led to a producing job at Monogram Pictures in 1945, and he made “mostly B movies” until he and his brothers started their own production company in 1957. They had “runs of hits,” including The Magnificent Seven and In the Heat of the Night.

Mirisch remained “a strong presence in the Hollywood community” for decades, said the Los Angeles Times, becoming the longest-lived Oscar winner. He served four terms as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and three as president of the Producers Guild of America. In 2008, he published a memoir, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, detailing his years in the industry and his enduring interest in every aspect of the creative process. “To me, good taste means good taste,” he said, “in terms of writing, directing, acting, scoring, editing, and all the other phases of the picture business.”