Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of "Out of Africa" who achieved acclaim making popular, mainstream movies with A-list stars, including "The Way We Were" and "Tootsie," died Monday. He was 73. 
Beginning with "The Slender Thread," a 1965 drama starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, Mr. Pollack was credited with directing 20 films. Known for what New York Times film critic Janet Maslin once described as "his broadly commercial instincts and penchant for all-star casts," Mr. Pollack directed seven movies with Robert Redford, beginning with "This Property Is Condemned" in 1966. The Pollack-Redford collaboration also produced "The Way We Were," "Jeremiah Johnson," "Three Days of the Condor," "The Electric Horseman," "Out of Africa" and "Havana."
Mr. Pollack, who also was a producer and actor, died of cancer at his home in the Pacific Palisades district of the city, according to Leslee Dart, his publicist and friend.
"Sydney Pollack has made some of the most influential and best-remembered films of the last three decades," film scholar Jeanine Basinger told the Los Angeles Times recently.
In looking at Mr. Pollack's films, she said, "what you see is how he kept in step with the times. He doesn't get locked into one decade and left there. He had a very sharp political sensibility and a keen sense of what the issues of his world were, and he advanced and changed as the times advanced and changed."
After launching his career as an actor and acting teacher in New York City in the 1950s, Mr. Pollack moved West in the early '60s and began directing episodic television before turning to films.
Source: Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times