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Singer-songwriter Toby Keith passed “peacefully last night on February 5th, surrounded by his family,” according to a statement on his official website. Tetris Kelly:Country legend Toby Keith has died at the age of 62. Toby Keith’s family released a statement letting fans know the singer passed away peacefully last night surrounded by his family after […]
Musicians are raising their red Solo cups in honor of Toby Keith after news broke that the country star died on Monday (Feb. 5) after a battle with stomach cancer. He was 62. The singer-songwriter had revealed his battle to fans in 2022, a year after he was diagnosed.
Keith’s death was announced Tuesday (Feb. 6) in a statement posted to the country star’s official website and social media accounts. “Toby Keith passed peacefully last night on February 5th, surrounded by his family,” the message read. “He fought his fight with grace and courage.”
His impact was felt among many artists, who spoke out to remember the seven-time Grammy nominee.
“Toby inspired millions and I was one of them,” Jelly Roll wrote in an Instagram story, noting that he covered Keith’s 1993 Billboard Hot 100-charting song “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” at “every show last year.”
“An American icon,” singer-songwriter Randy Houser called Keith in his Instagram post, which included a video of himself singing the late artist’s 2003 hit “I Love This Bar.” “They do not make em like him everyday in my opinion. One of my favorites that he and @Scottyemerick wrote. It’s late at night or early in the morning but I wanted to sing one in his honor no matter what time it is. Rest In Peace. Job well done.”
The Country Music Hall of Fame also reflected on Keith’s career and impact on the genre. “Toby Keith was big, brash, and never bowed down or slowed down for anyone,” said Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, in a statement. “His story is a distinctly American one — a former roughneck oil worker who carved out his own space in country music with a sinewy voice and an unbending will to succeed. He wrote his breakthrough songs and later formed his own record label when he felt underserved by Nashville. He relished being an outsider and doing things his way. Proudly patriotic, he didn’t mind if his clear-cut convictions ruffled your feathers. For three decades, he reflected the defiant strength of the country music audience. His memory will continue to stand tall.”
Read on for more heartfelt tributes from musicians:
“Saddle up the horses, Jesus, ‘cause a true blue COWBOY just made his ride up to heaven!!! Introduce him to all the Okies and sign that boy up for the choir! We’re gonna miss you, Toby, but my heart has no doubt that you are standing in the presence of our King right now!!! See you again someday, friend.” — Carrie Underwood on Instagram
“RIP. A Country Music and American Legend.” — Morgan Wallen on Instagram Stories
“Just waking up to the news of Toby Keith’s passing. Today is a sad day for Country music and its fans. Toby was a huge presence in our business and someone we all looked up to and respected. You and your music will be forever remembered big man.” — Jason Aldean on X
Waking up to the terrible news that our friend, and legend @tobykeith has passed away from cancer. He was a true Patriot, a first class singer/songwriter, and a bigger than life kind of guy. He will be greatly missed.— John Rich🇺🇸 (@johnrich) February 6, 2024
too many rides in my old man’s car listening to Toby Keith. really hard thing to hearrest in peace friend we love you— Zach Bryan (@zachlanebryan) February 6, 2024
Country music icon Toby Keith has died at 62 following a three-year battle with stomach cancer. The singer-songwriter known for such patriotic anthems as “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” and “Made in America” passed “peacefully last night on February 5th, surrounded by his family,” according to a statement on his official website. “He fought his fight with grace and courage.”
Keith was diagnosed with cancer in 2021 and revealed the news to fans a year later, telling them that he was undergoing chemotherapy, radiation and having surgery. He returned to the road to play a pair of pop-up gigs in his hometown of Norman, OK during the summer of 2023 and made his first TV appearance since the diagnosis in September, when he performed at the first-ever People’s Choice Country Awards, at which he received the Country Icon award.
At the time he gave an update on his condition, saying, “I’ve walked some dark hallways. Almighty’s riding shotgun. But I feel pretty good, you know? You have good days and bad days. It’s a little bit of a roller coaster. I’m doing a lot better than I was this time last year… I’ve always rode with a prayer. As long as I have Him with me, I’m cool. You just have to dig in. You don’t have a choice.” That night, the visibly skinnier singer elicited many tears in beers when he sang the moving “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” a track about a man facing death that he’d written for Clint Eastwood’s movie The Mule.
The 6′ 3″ singer who as born Toby Keith Covel on July 8, 1961 in Clinton, OK worked in the oil industry and played in the USFL football league before pivoting to music. Keith busked on Music Row in Nashville in an attempt to break through, handing out his demos to no avail and making a vow to get a contract before hitting 30 or quit the business. His big break came a short time later when a flight attendant handed his demo to Mercury Records exec Harold Shedd, who signed him to the label.
Keith’s 1993 self-titled Mercury debut featured such traditional country tunes as “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” and “A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action.”
Keith, who wrote or co-wrote many of his own songs and had a chart-topper out of the gate with “Cowboy,” a trad country song that harkened back to a dustier time with references to Gunsmoke, ropin’ and ridin’, six shooters and Gene Autry and Roy Rogers; it went on to be one of the most-played country songs of the decade.
His follow-up albums, 1994’s Boomtown and 1996’s Blue Moon continued his early streak of success with hits such as the No. 1 Billboard hot country songs charting “Who’s That Man” and “Big Ol’ Truck” (No. 15) from the former and “Does That Blue Moon Ever Shine on You?” (No. 2) and “Me Too” (No. 1) from the latter.
His fourth and final album on Mercury, Dream Walkin’, continued his hot run on the Billboard country songs chart with another passel of top 10 charting tracks, including “We Were in Love” (No. 2), “I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying” (No. 2) and the title track (No. 5). He moved over to Dreamworks Records in 1999 for How Do You Like Me Now?, whose title track proved to be his mainstream breakthrough, spending five weeks at No. 1 on the country chart and providing his first pop charting track when it hit No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100. He followed up with 2001’s Pull My Chain, which spun off three more hot country songs chart-toppers: “I’m Just Talkin’ About Tonight,” “I Wanna Talk About Me” and “My List.”
In a town where artists often rely on professional songwriters to help hone their voice, Keith was proud to write or co-write many of his own tracks, telling Billboard in 2018 that, “I wanted to be better at it and I wanted to write the best songs I could write. So if I wouldn’t have gotten a recording contract and had some success, I would have still been pitching songs. God forbid, if something ever happened to you and you couldn’t sing no more or perform, you could still write songs.”
The singer won the Academy of Country Music’s top male vocalist and album of the year award in 2001 and the following year his duet with hero Willie Nelson, “Beer For My Horses,” from 2003’s Unleashed album, peaked at No. 22 on the Hot 100, marking Keith’s highest-charting pop single to date. Despite the playful title, the lyrics penned by Keith and and frequent collaborator Scotty Emerick hinted at a a dark underbelly to the American dream, with images of people being shot, abused, someone blowing up a building and stealing a car.
The vengeful refrain tapped into a deep vein of outlaw values and patriotic themes Keith would become known for on lines such as, “Grandpappy told my pappy, back in the day, son/ A man had to answer for the wicked that he done/ Take all the rope in Texas find a tall oak tree/ Round up all them bad boys, hang ’em high in the street/ For all the people to see/ That justice is the one thing you should always find/ You got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line/ When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune/ And we’ll all meet back at the local saloon.”
Following the death of his father — a Navy veteran — in a traffic accident in 2001 and the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Keith channeled his rage and emotion into the controversial hit “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” from his 2022 Unleashed album. The jingoistic song hit No. 1 on the hot country singles & tracks chart and No. 25 on the Hot 100 and became a flag-waving staple of Keith shows thanks to the lyrics, “Justice will be served and the battle will rage/ This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage/ And you’ll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A./ ‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass/ It’s the American way.”
Through 19 albums, Keith repeatedly returned to themes of American life and symbolism on songs such as “American Soldier”and “Made in America.” He also mixed in many signature, more light-hearted drinking songs, including “I Love This Bar,” “Whiskey Girl,” “I Like Girls That Drink Beer,” “Get Drunk and Be Somebody” and one of his most enduring anthems, “Red Solo Cup,” which marked his peak Hot 100 success at that point when it reached No. 15.
In addition to his long music career, Keith also dabbled in acting, appearing Ford truck commercials and starring in the 2005 film Broken Bridges as country also-ran Bo Price, as well as 2008’s Beer For My Horses, which he wrote and starred in. The entrepreneurial singer also lent his name a chain of Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill restaurants, with outlets from Oklahoma to New York, Michigan, Las Vegas, Arizona, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Cincinnati and several other states.
Keith was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2021 and received the Merle Haggard Spirit Award from the ACM in 2020, as well as the National Medal of the Art in 2021. As a testament to his prodigious songwriting abilities — he scored 52 top 10 hits and 32 No. 1s — Keith released a 13-track collection entitled 100% Songwriter in November, featuring some of his biggest hits.
Wayne Kramer, the co-founder of the protopunk Detroit band the MC5 that thrashed out such hardcore anthems as “Kick Out the Jams” and influenced everyone from The Clash to Rage Against the Machine, has died at age 75.
Kramer died Friday (Feb. 2) at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, according to Jason Heath, a close friend and executive director of Kramer’s nonprofit Jail Guitar Doors. Heath said the cause of death was pancreatic cancer.
From the late 1960s to early 1970s, no band was closer to the revolutionary spirit of the time than the MC5, which featured Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith on guitars, Rob Tyner on vocals, Michael Davis on bass and Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson on drums. Managed for a time by White Panther co-founder John Sinclair, they were known for their raw, uncompromising music, which they envisioned as the soundtrack for the uprising to come.
“Brother Wayne Kramer was the best man I’ve ever known,” Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello wrote via Instagram on Friday. “He possessed a one of a kind mixture of deep wisdom & profound compassion, beautiful empathy and tenacious conviction. His band the MC5 basically invented punk rock music.”
The band had little commercial success and its core lineup did not last beyond the early 1970s, but its legacy endured, both for its sound and for its fusing of music to political action. Kramer, who had a long history of legal battles and substance abuse, would tell his story in the 2018 memoir The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities.
Thompson is now the band’s only surviving member.
Kramer and Smith had known each other since their teens and played with various other musicians around Detroit before the core lineup was in place, in the mid-1960s. At Tyner’s suggestions, they called themselves the MC5, short for Motor City Five, and emulated The Rolling Stones, the Who, and other hard rock bands of the era.
By 1968, they had built a substantial local following and were influenced by Marxism, the White Panthers, the Beats and other social-political movements. The MC5 was more radical politically than most of its peers, and otherwise louder and more daring. They were virtually the only band to perform during the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, where police were beating up anti-war protesters.
“Kick Out the Jams” was their most famous song, peaking at No. 82 on the Billboard Hot 100 and marking their only appearance on the chart, and opened with an unprintable call to arms: “Kick out the jams mother—-er!” A live album of the same name peaked at No. 30 on the Billboard 200 in 1969, their highest-charting release. They also released the studio albums Back in the USA and High Time before breaking up at the end of 1972.
Kramer would lead various incarnations of the MC5 over the following decades, and perform with Was (Not Was) among other groups. But for a time he sank into the life of what he called “a small-time Detroit criminal.” He was arrested on drug charges in 1975 and sentenced to four years in prison. Jail Guitar Doors is named for a Clash song that refers to his struggles: “Let me tell you ’bout Wayne and his deals of cocaine.”
Survivors include his wife, Margaret Saadi, and son, Francis.
Carl Weathers, the former NFL star known for his roles as Apollo Creed in the Rocky franchise and Derick “Chubbs” Peterson in Happy Gilmore, died on Thursday (Feb. 1). He was 76 years old. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Weathers died in his sleep at his […]
Melinda Ledbetter Wilson, wife of Beach Boys star Brian Wilson has died. She was 77 years old. Wilson took to Instagram on Tuesday (Jan. 30) to announce the devastating news, alongside two photos of his wife. “My heart is broken. Melinda, my beloved wife of 28 years, passed away this morning,” he wrote, without indicating […]
It’s so hard to say goodbye … especially to talented creators who have contributed beautiful works of art that have made the world a brighter place. But while no one can live forever, musicians’ compositions will go on to be enjoyed by future generations. The world of music had a rough start when on Jan. […]
Melanie, the pop singer behind tracks “Brand New Key” and “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” who performed at Woodstock, has died. She was 76 years old.
The singer’s three children — Leilah, Jeordie, and Beau Jarred — shared a message on Facebook this week, writing: “We are heartbroken, but want to thank each and every one of you for the affection you have for our Mother, and to tell you that she loved all of you so much! She was one of the most talented, strong and passionate women of the era and every word she wrote, every note she sang reflected that. Our world is much dimmer, the colors of a dreary, rainy Tennessee pale with her absence today, but we know that she is still here, smiling down on all of us, on all of you, from the stars.”
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No cause of death was given in the post, but the siblings made a request for fans, that on Wednesday (Jan. 24), at 10 p.m. CT, “each of you lights a candle in honor of Melanie. Raise, raise them high, high up again. Illuminate the darkness, and let us all be connected in remembrance of the extraordinary woman who was wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and friend to so very many people.”
Melanie — full name Melanie Safka — was born in Astoria, New York, and had two top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart throughout her career, “Brand New Key” and “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).” According to Variety, she was in the studio earlier this month working on her 32nd album, which was a project of cover songs.
Frank Farian, the Wizard of Oz-like Svengali behind the rise and fall of disgraced late 1980s musical duo Milli Vanilli has died at age 82. BBC News reported that Farian’s family released a statement on Tuesday (Jan. 23) that the elusive German producer/songwriter had passed away at his home in Miami of undisclosed causes; at press time Billboard had not independently confirmed Farian’s death.
The studio maestro born in Kirn, Germany on July 18, 1941 began his career in the mid-1960s as a vocalist for the rock band Frankie Boys Schatten. After struggling to break through, Farian hit upon the formula that would twice take him to the highest heights of global success via his first musical sleight of hand vehicle, pop group Boney M.
A talented vocalist and arranger with a golden ear for hooks, Farian assembled the 1970s disco funk group featuring three female vocalist — Marcia Barrett, Liz Mitchell and Maizie Williams — and fronted by Aruban go-go dancer Bobby Farrell after breaking through in a number of European markets in 1975 with the bouncy “Do You Wanna Bump.” The song was credited to “Boney M,” despite Farian singing all the high and low vocal parts. In a genius marketing move, Farian decided to put a face to his creation in time to release Boney M’s 1976 debut album, Take the Heat Off Me.
Unbeknownst to the group’s fans, Farian sang all the male lead vocals for the group that would go on to sell more than 100 million records thanks to such quirky, but undeniable dance floor jams as “Rasputin,” “Daddy Cool,” the Bobby Hebb cover “Sunny” and the swaying, reggae-lite “Rivers of Babylon.” The group released two more albums in quick succession and achieved global success, with seemingly little concern for the open secret that Farrell — who died in 2010 at 61 — was not its actual lead singer, but rather a gifted performer who fronted the band with the assist of more polished backing vocalists.
Farian also later revealed that in addition to Farrell, Williams had not sung on the group’s albums either. By 1981 fractures had formed in Boney M and Farrell split following a fall-out with Farian, cueing up another soon-to-be-familiar trope in the producer’s modus operandi: replacing the non-singing lead singer with a fresh face, in this case singer Reggie Tsiboe. Boney M released eight studio albums in total to diminishing returns, reuniting and splitting up a number of times throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Credited with helping to popularize the Eurodisco sound and establishing one of Germany’s most technologically advanced 1980s recording studios with his Frankfurt-based FAR Studios, Farian had another, even bigger, trick up his sleeve. FAR was where Farian cooked up his second, and even more globally successful second act: Milli Vanilli. After hearing the hip-hop/R&B track “Girl You Know It’s True” by Baltimore-based hip-hop group Numarx in a German nightclub, Farian hatched his another studio creation, again recording the basic tracks on his own and hiring a group of mostly ex-pat American session singers, rappers and musicians to lay down the vocals for the group that would score three No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100.
Needing a face for the band whose version of “Girl You Know It’s True” was blowing up all over Europe, Farian spotted aspiring singers dancers Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan in a club and hired them to perform as the frontmen of his latest phantom act. The photogenic, high-energy pair perfectly fit the part, with their signature flowing braids, skintight bicycle shorts and peppy dance moves. The songs on the European debut album, All or Nothing, were so catchy, in fact, that legendary American record label boss Clive Davis of Arista Records licensed the collection and released a revamped version in March 1989 called Girl You Know It’s True.
With the addition of the soon-to-be No. 1 Diane Warren-penned balled “Blame It on the Rain” — alongside No. 1 hits “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” and “Baby Don’t Forget My Number” — Milli mania took over the world. The American version spent 78 weeks on the Billboard 200 albums chart — peaking at No. 1 for 8 weeks, making Milli Vanilli one of the year’s most dominant pop acts.
But if anyone had been listening to the press interviews the duo were doing in Europe they would have quickly surmised that something was rotten in Frankfurt, given the thick accents and thin command of the English language by Munich-bred Pilatus and Paris-born Morvan. Once the group joined the Club MTV tour in 1989, where repeated equipment failures with the pre-recorded vocals made it crystal clear that Rob and Fab were lip synching, the charade began to fall apart.
With both men pushing hard to sing on the follow-up album — a request that Farian vehemently shut down — their growing intransigence created a tension that would result in one of the biggest scandals in Grammy Awards history. After winning the Grammy for best new artist at the 1990 awards, where they also bucked history by lip synching during their performance, Farian admitted to the ruse in a Nov. 15, 1990 press conference. That admission resulted in Milli Vanilli getting dumped from Arista and having the ignoble asterisk as the only act in Grammy history to have their award taken back.
Farian shrugged off the pearl clutching by some in the American media — as well as a handful of fans who sued Arista and parent Company BMG in a class action that resulted in refunds for concert tickets and albums purchased — by blithely telling the Washington Post at the time that the group was, “one part was visual, one part recorded. Such projects are an art form in themselves, and the fans were happy with the music.”
In addition to his work with MV and Boney M, Farian produced and mixed Meat Loaf’s 1986 album Blind Before I Stop and his high-tech FAR studio was where Stevie Wonder recorded his best-selling single ever, 1984’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Farian kept a low profile throughout much of the 2000s and revealed in 2022 that he’d undergone heart surgery that reportedly included the implanting of a pig heart valve. His former assistant/girlfriend Ingrid “Milli” Segieth, who provided the inspiration for MV’s name, told German paper Bild that she’d seen Farian over the new year in Miami and that he was “physically very weak, but was still full of energy” and working the studio all day on new music.
The producer was markedly absent in this year’s Milli Vanilli biopic — which featured commentary from this writer — after the film’s director was unable to get the reclusive music maker to agree to an interview.
Norman Jewison, the multifaceted filmmaker who could direct a racial drama (In the Heat of the Night), stylish thriller (The Thomas Crown Affair), musical (Fiddler on the Roof) or romantic comedy (Moonstruck) with the best of them, has died. He was 97.
Jewison died Saturday at home — his family does not want to specify exactly where — publicist Jeff Sanderson announced.
A seven-time Oscar nominee, Jewison received the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences in 1999.
Known for his ability to coax great performances out of his actors — 12 of his players were nominated for Oscars, while five of his features made the cut for best picture — the most distinguished film director in Canadian history often used conventional genre plots to take on social injustice.
Improbably, he got his start directing musical specials on television.
Jewison earned best director and best picture nominations for Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Moonstruck (1987); received another nom for helming In the Heat of the Night (1967), a winner for best picture; and added two others for producing the wacky Red Scare comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) and A Soldier’s Story (1984).
On leave from the Royal Canadian Navy, Jewison, then 18, started out hitchhiking in Chicago and eventually made it to Memphis, Tennessee, where he jumped on a bus during a hot day. As the naive Toronto native headed toward a seat in the back next to an open window, the bus started and then stopped, he recalled in a 2011 interview with NPR.
“The bus driver looked at me,” he said. “He said, ‘Can’t you read the sign?’ And there was a little sign, made of tin, swinging off a wire in the center of the bus and it said, ‘Colored people to the rear.’
“And I turned around and I saw two or three Black citizens sitting around me, and … a few white people sitting way at the top of the bus. And I didn’t know what to do, I was just embarrassed. So I just got off the bus and he left me there. I was left standing in this hot sun and thinking about what I had just been through. That this was my first experience with racial prejudice. And it really stuck with me.”
Years later, heeding the advice of Robert F. Kennedy, who thought America was ready for a film about racial injustice, Jewison took on In the Heat of the Night, which starred Sidney Poitier as a Black detective from Philadelphia and Rod Steiger as a racist police chief. Both have to work together to solve a murder in a Southern town.
Four days before the 1968 Academy Awards, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the Oscars were postponed for two days. Jewison attended King’s funeral, and though he lost out to Mike Nichols of The Graduate in the director race, In the Heat of the Night won five statuettes.
Racism also was central to two other Jewison films: The wartime-set A Soldier’s Story and The Hurricane (1999), the latter starring Denzel Washington as Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the real-life boxer wrongly imprisoned for murder.
Yet Jewison also had a flair for comedies, as seen with Moonstruck, based on the John Patrick Shanley play and starring best actress winner Cher. Focusing on an Italian American family in Brooklyn, Moonstruck was a box office and critical success.
Jewison also was behind such varied pictures as Send Me No Flowers (1964), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Rollerball (1975), F.I.S.T. (1978), … And Justice for All (1979), Agnes of God (1985) and Other People’s Money (1991).
Norman Frederick Jewison was born on July 21, 1926, in Toronto, where his parents ran a general store/post office. He developed an early interest in the arts, studying piano and music theory at the Royal Conservatory, and staged and appeared in shows and musical comedies in high school.
Following graduation, Jewison made his professional debut in a minstrel show, which he also directed and co-wrote, then served in Canada’s Navy during World War II. Back home, he graduated from the University of Toronto’s Victoria College in 1949 with a B.A. in general arts.
Jewison worked as a cab driver in Toronto and occasionally performed as a radio actor for the CBC. In 1950, he moved to London for a two-year work-study stint with the BBC.
The CBC called him back to work in the new medium of television, and Jewison wrote, directed and produced some of his country’s most popular shows and specials. He hired Reuben Shipp, a writer from Montreal who had been deported from the U.S. after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, to work on the variety show The Barris Beat.
In 1950, CBS invited Jewison to New York to update the venerable TV musical Your Hit Parade. After he booked African-American singer Tommy Edwards, who had a hit with “It’s All in the Game,” to be on the program, he was called to a Madison Avenue meeting with a representative from Lucky Strike cigarettes, the show’s South Carolina-based sponsor.
“We’ve been doing Your Hit Parade on the radio and on television for many a year,” the exec told Jewison in an incident he recalled in his 2004 autobiography, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me. “We had Sinatra, rock ’n’ roll and soft stuff, but we never had a Black and, young fella, we ain’t about to start now.”
After an angry Jewison threatened to take this story to the newspapers, Lucky Strike caved and Edwards appeared on the show as scheduled. His integrity was evident, and big names wanted to work with him.
Jewison directed a 1960 special with the red-hot Harry Belafonte, the first on American television starring a Black performer; guided comeback star Judy Garland on a 1961 TV special and episodes of her CBS variety show; helmed The Million Dollar Incident, a comedy that saw Jackie Gleason kidnapped and held for ransom; and did The Broadway of Lerner and Loewe, with performances by Julie Andrews and Maurice Chevalier.
With a recommendation from Tony Curtis, Jewison left for L.A. and was hired to direct Universal Pictures’ 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962), which starred Curtis, Suzanne Pleshette and Phil Silvers in one of the first films shot at Disneyland.
He received a contract from the studio and followed by helming the light comedies The Thrill of It All (1963), starring Doris Day and James Garner; Send Me No Flowers, with Day and Rock Hudson; and The Art of Love (1965), with Garner, Elke Sommer and Angie Dickinson.
When producer Martin Ransohoff fired director Sam Peckinpah from The Cincinnati Kid, Jewison was given the reins to the Steve McQueen-Edward G. Robinson drama. The Hollywood Reporter called his work “daring, imaginative and assured,” and he was on a roll.
He produced his first film (and directed, too) The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming!, a wild spoof of Russian paranoia that starred Alan Arkin and Carl Reiner (who had written Thrill of It All and Art of Love).
After In the Heat of the Night, Jewison produced and directed the stylishly erotic The Thomas Crown Affair, starring McQueen and Faye Dunaway; produced The Landlord (1970), a racial dramedy directed by his former film editor, Hal Ashby; and produced and helmed Gaily, Gaily, starring Landlord star Beau Bridges.
He had met Kennedy in a hospital in Sun Valley, Idaho, when their sons were injured while competing in a ski race, and he was supposed to meet with the presidential candidate on the night he was assassinated in Los Angeles.
“I was very disillusioned,” Jewison told THR’s Kevin Cassidy in a 2011 interview. “JFK had been assassinated, Bobby had been assassinated, I had marched in Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in Atlanta. This was 1970, so I packed everyone up in L.A. and went to England.”
Jewison spent the next seven years in Europe, making such films as the high-grossing musical Fiddler on the Roof, shot on location in Yugoslavia and at London’s Pinewood Studios, and Jesus Christ Superstar and the Gregory Peck starrer Billy Two Hats (1974), both filmed in Israel.
Jewison went on to direct and produce the James Caan violent action film Rollerball, the Al Pacino courtroom thriller … And Justice for All and the charming romantic comedy Best Friends (1982), starring Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn.
Jewison also continued to explore weighty issues, with the plot of Agnes of God, starring Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft, centering on the struggle between logic and the Catholic Church. His last film was the Nazi thriller The Statement (2003), starring Michael Caine.
Jewison served as producer of the 1981 Academy Awards, which were rescheduled after President Reagan was shot, and he earned an Emmy nomination in 2002 for directing the HBO telefilm Dinner With Friends.
Jewison returned to Toronto in 1978 and lived on a 240-acre farm in Ontario. He hosted a gala picnic for years at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In 1982, Jewison was made an officer of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian decoration, then set out to establish the Canadian equivalent of the American Film Institute.
“I got a phone call to visit the AFI in Beverly Hills,” Jewison told THR. “So I went up there and there’s a group of young filmmakers sitting on the floor and there’s John Ford with a bottle of whiskey. And he’s answering all their questions. I was just blown away. It was very exciting. So I thought, ‘Gee, if I could set up something like this in Canada, that would be great.’”
The result was the Canadian Film Centre, founded in 1988 in Toronto.
Survivors include his second wife, Lynne St. David; his children, Kevin (and his wife, Suzanne), Michael (Anita) and Jenny (David); and his grandchildren Ella, Megan, Alexandra, Sam and Henry. Celebrations of his life will be held in Los Angeles and Toronto.
Said Jewison in his Thalberg acceptance speech:
“My one real regret about winning this prize is that, you know, it’s not like the Nobel or the Pulitzer. I mean, the Thalberg award comes with no money attached. If it did, if it did, I would share it with the Canadian Film Centre and the AFI, where the next generation of filmmakers are preparing to entertain the world in the new millennium.
“And my parting thought to all those young filmmakers is this: Just find some good stories. Never mind the gross, the top 10, bottom 10, what’s the rating, what’s the demographic. You know something? The biggest-grossing picture is not necessarily the best picture.”
This story was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.