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Time in Yerevan: 11:07,   28 March 2024

Arthur Hiller, ‘Love Story’ Director Dies at 92

Arthur Hiller, ‘Love Story’ Director Dies at 92

YEREVAN, AUGUST 18, ARMENPRESS. Arthur Hiller, an Academy Award-nominated director whose long career began in live television and flourished in the movies in the 1970s with crowd-pleasers like the phenomenally successful “Love Story,” died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 92, NY Times reported.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced his death.

Mr. Hiller, who for a time was one of Hollywood’s most commercially potent directors, piloted nearly 70 feature films, television movies and series episodes in a wide range of genres, from the Holocaust drama “The Man in the Glass Booth” (1975) to the screwball comedy “The In-Laws”(1979).

He made two hit films from Neil Simon scripts — “The-Out-of-Towners” (1970) and “Plaza Suite” (1971) — and two with the popular comic team of Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder: “Silver Streak” (1976) and “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” (1989).

But Mr. Hiller’s greatest commercial success was “Love Story” (1970), which grossed an imposing $106 million when it was released in 1970, the equivalent of about $665 million today. Based on a screenplay by Erich Segal, a Yale classics scholar (who turned it into a best-selling novel that sold more than five million copies), the film portrayed the tragic romance of a wealthy Harvard law student (Ryan O’Neal) and a Radcliffe music major (Ali MacGraw), the product of a working-class Italian-American family.

In a time of bruising social upheaval, “Love Story” offered a strong, simple palliative, turning audiences teary-eyed (though some found it sappy) and catapulting the careers of Mr. O’Neal and Ms. MacGraw.

Writing about the movie after the novel was published, the critic Roger Ebert was as admiring of one as he was withering about the other. “The film of ‘Love Story’ is infinitely better than the book,” he wrote. “I think it has something to do with the quiet taste of Arthur Hiller, its director, who has put in all the things that Segal thought he was being clever to leave out. Things like color, character, personality, detail and background.”

Mr. Hiller’s emphatic, uncomplicated direction brought home the themes of class and generational reconciliation embedded in Mr. Segal’s story, while Francis Lai’s score took care of the sentiment.

The Canadian critic Robert Fulford, writing in The National Post, saw the movie as a product of its time: “Its plot is a checklist of 1970 obsessions: furious generational conflict, a rich and guilty old man symbolizing the Establishment, and death claiming the young and the beautiful. It’s a Vietnam film in which Vietnam remains offscreen.”

Mr. Hiller was born on Nov. 13, 1923, in Edmonton, Alberta, one of three children of Harry Hiller and the former Rose Garfin, Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father ran a secondhand musical instrument store in Edmonton.

His first contact with show business came through his parents, who formed a community theater in Edmonton to present plays in Yiddish. He helped his parents build and paint sets, and made his acting debut at age 11.

Mr. Hiller is survived by his daughter, Erica Hiller Carpenter; his son, Henryk; and five grandchildren.

His wife, Gwen Hiller, a social worker and librarian, died in June, also at 92. She was born in Edmonton 10 days before her husband. Their family has noted that when they were schoolmates, he proposed to her when they were 8 years old. Their marriage lasted 68 years.

 








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