Robert Mulligan, who was nominated for an Academy Award for directing the 1962 film “To Kill a Mockingbird,” died Saturday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 83.
Mulligan had heart disease, said his nephew Robert Rosenthal.
The director began working in live television in New York in the early 1950s and won an Emmy Award for the TV movie “The Moon and Sixpence” in 1960. His first film, “Fear Strikes Out,” was released in 1957 and told the story of mentally ill baseball player Jimmy Piersall, played by Anthony Perkins.
Mulligan directed 19 more films, including “Summer of ’42,” “The Other” and “Same Time, Next Year” before capping his career in 1991 with “The Man in the Moon,” featuring actress Reese Witherspoon in her movie debut.
The highlight of Mulligan’s career was “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a courtroom drama adapted from Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and centered on Southern attorney Atticus Finch and his children, Scout and Jem. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture, and won three: best actor (Gregory Peck), best screenplay (Horton Foote) and art direction (Alexander Golitzen, Henry Bumstead and Oliver Emert). (“Lawrence of Arabia” was named best picture and David Lean best director for that film.)
“Mockingbird” was one of seven films Mulligan made in collaboration with producer Alan J. Pakula between 1957 and 1969, among them “Love With the Proper Stranger” (1963) starring Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen and “Up the Down Staircase” (1967) with Sandy Dennis.
As a director, Mulligan became known for his sensitive treatment of the emotional highs and lows experienced by children and adolescents when confronting traumatic circumstances. The Finch children see their father defend an innocent black man against his bigoted white accuser in “Mockingbird”; Hermie falls in love with a slightly older woman whose husband has been sent off to war in the nostalgic 1971 film “Summer of ’42” (with Mulligan serving as the narrator); a young white boy played by Neil Patrick Harris and his Jamaican nanny (Whoopi Goldberg) find common ground amid family turmoil in “Clara’s Heart” (1988); and Witherspoon’s character discovers the pain of teenage heartbreak in “The Man in the Moon.”
“Ordinarily they say that cliche, a ‘coming-of-age movie,’ and I reject that term,” Mulligan said in a 1991 interview with The Dallas Morning News. “I think it’s ‘coming to life.’ I felt, when I looked back on it, that I really didn’t know what life was about until I was somewhere in my teens, when you become aware that sooner or later you’re going to have to walk out the front door. Mother and Father are not going to be there, you’re not going to be protected. All those things become exciting and terrifying at the same time.”
Born in 1925 in New York City, Mulligan described his upbringing as “Bronx Irish.” He attended Fordham University and for a time studied to become a priest.
Mulligan is survived by his wife of 37 years, Sandy; three children from a previous marriage, Kevin, Beth and Christopher; his brother, James; and two grandchildren.
Other Deaths
William W. Kaufmann, 90, a close adviser to seven defense secretaries and a major proponent of a shift away from the early Cold War strategy of mass nuclear retaliation against the Soviet Union, died Dec. 14 in Woburn, Mass., said his wife, the former Julia Alexander.
Kaufmann was a special assistant to every secretary of defense in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, responsible for preparing the annual report to Congress on the Defense Department’s overall military strategy and budget.
“He was one of those shadowy people from the Cold War era who had a great deal of influence behind the scenes and no appetite for the limelight,” said Fred M. Kaplan, the national defense columnist for Slate magazine.
Sir Bernard Crick, 79, a prominent democratic socialist and political theorist who also wrote the first complete biography of George Orwell, one of his heroes, died Friday in Edinburgh, Scotland, of cancer, The Guardian of London reported.
Crick, a moderate socialist, believed in gradual reform, social equality and the importance of citizen participation.
He often served as an adviser to top Labor politicians and in recent years devised the civics exam that new arrivals to Britain must pass before becoming citizens or permanent residents.
But it was “George Orwell: A Life,” published in 1980 and widely praised for its wealth of detail and its shrewd analysis of Orwell’s politics, that stood as his finest achievement.
In 2002, he was knighted for “services to citizenship in schools and to political studies.”
The New York Times
