Alan J. Pakulas trilogy of films

Alan J. Pakula, Film Director, Dies at 70
By James Sterngold
Nov. 20, 1998

Alan J. Pakula, a director of many psychologically penetrating and celebrated films including ''Sophie's Choice,'' ''All the President's Men'' and ''Klute,'' died yesterday in a freak accident on the Long Island Expressway. He was 70 and had homes in Manhattan and East Hampton, N.Y.

Mr. Pakula was killed when a metal pipe smashed through the windshield of his black Volvo station wagon and struck him in the head at 11:15 A.M., Detective Sgt. Brian Traynor, a spokesman for the Suffolk County Police, said. The accident happened about a quarter mile east of the Melville exit on the Long Island Expressway.

Mr. Pakula's car swerved across a service road and hit a fence, the police said. He was taken to North Shore University Hospital at Plainview, in Nassau County, where he was pronounced dead at 12:22 P.M.

The police do not know where the seven-foot-long pipe came from, Sergeant Traynor said, but believe that it was already in the roadway when another car gave it a glancing blow, sending it through Mr. Pakula's windshield.

Mr. Pakula was on his way to his home in East Hampton to work on his next screenplay, ''No Ordinary Time,'' about the White House during the time of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, his family said.

Mr. Pakula, a tall, bearded, somewhat professorial man, produced or directed more than 20 movies in his career, many of them richly praised, but they had a knack for winning accolades more for his actors than for himself. That was one of the reasons he was occasionally referred to as an actor's director.

He produced ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' in 1962; it won Oscars for Gregory Peck and the screenwriter, Horton Foote. A 1963 film he helped produce, ''Love With the Proper Stranger,'' won several Academy Award nominations.

Liza Minnelli won an Oscar nomination for her role in the first picture he directed, ''The Sterile Cuckoo,'' in 1969. In other movies he directed, Jane Fonda won an Oscar for her starring role as a disillusioned call girl in Mr. Pakula's moody detective thriller, the 1971 ''Klute,'' and Meryl Streep won one of her Oscars for her role as Sophie, a tormented Nazi concentration camp survivor, in the 1982 ''Sophie's Choice.''

''All the President's Men,'' Mr. Pakula's 1976 dramatization of how two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, uncovered the Watergate scandal, won four Oscars: for the actor Jason Robards, for the screenwriter William Goldman and for art direction and sound. Mr. Pakula was nominated for an Oscar for ''All the President's Men'' and for his screenplay for ''Sophie's Choice,'' but he never won.