Robert Evans, Paramount executive who produced 'Chinatown' and 'Urban Cowboy,' died Saturday at age 89.
Several years later, however, his show business career was revived: In the perhaps apocryphal tale, he was spotted by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel by actress Norma Shearer, who asked him to play her deceased husband, the legendary MGM exec Irving Thalberg, in the film"The Man of a Thousand Faces." Darryl Zanuck then cast him as a bullfighter in the 1957 version of Ernest Hemingway's"The Sun Also Rises.
But they were more than offset by Evans' successes, starting with"Rosemary's Baby,""Romeo and Juliet,""Goodbye, Columbus,""Love Story" and"The Godfather" films. The degree to which he personally deserved credit for any of these has always been debated, and even Evans claims that some of the best decisions made during his tenure, particularly with respect to"The Godfather," were arrived at over his objections.
In 1980, at age 50, he was convicted of cocaine possession, during a period when widespread drug use was plaguing the industry and tarnishing its reputation nationally. Evans' Rat Pack-style behavior was by then quickly falling out of fashion in an increasingly buttoned-down corporate town.
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