Robert Evans, the Paramount executive who produced “Chinatown” and “Urban Cowboy” and whose life became as melodramatic and jaw-dropping as any of his films, died on Saturday night. He was 89. Even…
.” Eventually, his distinctive look and speaking style turned him into a cult figure, and he had the distinction of being the only film executive who starred in his own animated TV series.
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 played 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.
A personal dream, “The Cotton Club,” became a never-ending nightmare, taking up several years of Evans’ life and almost $50 million. The hybrid of music and gangsters found Evans begging Coppola to take over the reins. The results were uneven but artistically interesting; the production was tied to underworld money and, in attempting to raise more funds for the film, Evans became involved with Radin, whose murder seemed to be a case of life imitating art.
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