The versatile director who made Moonstruck
Norman Jewison 1926–2024
Norman Jewison could make a great film about anything. In a career spanning six decades, he directed the Doris Day comedy Send Me No Flowers (1964), the sexually charged heist film The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971), the dystopian sci-fi sports movie Rollerball (1975), and the bare-knuckle laborunion drama F.I.S.T. (1978). Perhaps his biggest film, and one of three that earned Best Director Oscar nominations, was Moonstruck (1987), a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy set in ItalianAmerican Brooklyn, starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. Jewison’s favorites, though, were those examining issues of race and social justice. Chief among these was In the Heat of the Night (1967), in which a Black Philadelphia detective and a racist white police chief investigate a murder in Mississippi. Another was The Hurricane (1999), about a Black boxer wrongfully imprisoned for murder. Jewison knew that talk of racism made Americans uncomfortable. But “it has to be confronted,” he said, “or we will never understand what is good and evil, right and wrong.”
Jewison was born in Toronto, where his parents ran a dry-goods store, said the Los Angeles
Times. He served in the Canadian Navy in World War II and while on leave traveled in the Southern U.S., “witnessing segregation up close.” After a stint writing and acting for the BBC in London, he became a TV director, directing musical variety shows in New York. That led to a contract with Universal, for which he made his first film, the Tony Curtis comedy 40 Pounds of Trouble, in 1962. After several more comedies, he “made his dramatic breakthrough” with The Cincinnati Kid, said The Washington Post. But it was In The Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, that won Best Picture and cemented his reputation as one of Hollywood’s top directors.
Disillusioned with the U.S. following the Kennedy and King assassinations, he moved to England in 1970 and spent the next seven years in Europe, said The Hollywood Reporter. Upon returning, he settled on a cattle farm in Ontario and “continued to explore weighty issues” in films, including his final movie, the Nazi thriller The Statement (2003). “For me, films are about ideas,” he said in 2011. “Every director should ask himself,
‘Why am I making this picture?’ And if you can’t answer that, you shouldn’t make it.”