George Roy Hill in 1974 with his Oscar for The Sting (1973).

George Roy Hill

1921-2002

Oscar-Winning Director George Roy Hill Dies at 81

In Manhattan of complications from Parkinson's disease. Better than any other director Hill managed to make Paul Newman funny in films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and Slap Shot.

George Roy Hill was born December 20, 1921, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hill, who won an Oscar for directing Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the 1973 box office hit The Sting, died Friday in his New York apartment of complications from Parkinson's disease; he was 81.

Hill also directed Newman and Redford in their first film together, the hugely popular comedy-western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), which received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Director, and won four, including one for the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head." Hill is survived by his former wife, Louisa Horton, as well as two sons, two daughters, and twelve grandchildren.

Between 1962 and 1988 Hill directed only 14 films:

Leonard Maltin say hey! "Veteran director who began in TV's "Golden Age" and went on to make some of the most popular American films of the last three decades. After studying music at Yale and literature at Trinity College in Dublin (and serving as a Marine pilot in World War 2 and the Korean conflict) Hill began a career in acting. In the early 1950s he started directing for television, and later performed similar chores for stage productions.

"His first films were reverent adaptations of plays he had directed on Broadway: Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment (1962) and Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic (1963). It was not until The World of Henry Orient (1964), a delightful comedy starring Peter Sellers, that Hill showed his flair for directing actors in breezy situations, a trademark in many of his later films, notably Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a hip revisionist Western that made a superstar of Robert Redford (and earned Hill a Best Director Oscar nomination), and the multi-Oscar-winning con-artist comedy The Sting (1973), which reunited Redford and Paul Newman, and won Hill a Best Director Academy Award.

"He also adapted to the screen two difficult, realitybending books: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), and John Irving's The World According to Garp (1982). His other films have run the gamut from epic sagas to political thrillers: Hawaii (1966), Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975, with Redford), Slap Shot (1977, with Newman), A Little Romance (1979), The Little Drummer Girl (1984), and Funny Farm (1989)."

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