NORMAN JEWISON

Imake a lot of different movies and I love them all,’ said Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison, whose genre-hopping career took in such diverse features as In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair and Moonstruck. ‘The movies that address civil rights and social justice are the ones that are dearest to me.’

Born on 21 July 1926 in Toronto, Canada, Norman Frederick Jewison was raised Methodist but bullied by schoolmates who mistakenly thought he was Jewish because of his surname. At the end of his military service during World War Two, Jewison got another taste of social bigotry when he hitchhiked through the American south with its Jim Crow segregation. These experiences would inform the social dramas for which he became best known.

In 1967, Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night investigated racial tension through the lens of a murder story. Set in Mississippi, it pitches Sidney Poitier’s Philadelphia police detective against Rod Steiger’s racist police chief. A touchstone picture in American cinema, it won five Oscars, including Best Picture. Jewison had previously cut his teeth in Canadian, British and American TV, and had directed Doris Day feature comedies The Thrill of it All and Send Me No Flowers, along with Steve McQueen drama The Cincinnati Kid and comedy war film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. But it was In the Heat of the Night that established him as a major filmmaker.

During a four-decade film career that culminated with political thriller The Statement starring Michael Caine (2003) as a former Nazi executioner, Jewison’s films won 12 Oscars from 46 nominations. He was himself nominated three times and won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999. His best-known films include early 70s musicals Fiddler on theRoof and Jesus Christ Superstar, sci-fi actionadventure Rollerball, and beguiling romantic comedies Moonstruck, which won Cher her Oscar, and Only You. Also of note are two hard-hitting dramas with Denzel Washington, A Soldier’s Story and The Hurricane.

‘I have tended to show humanity as fallible, sensitive, befuddled, misled but redeemable,’ he wrote in his 2004 autobiography, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me. ‘I want people to recognise themselves in the movies I make.’ Of his frequent return to the subject of racism, Jewison wrote: ‘We have to deal with prejudice and injustice, or we will never understand what is good and evil, right and wrong.’

Jewison died peacefully at his home on Saturday 20 January, aged 97. He is survived by his second wife, Lynne St. David, and by his three children and five grandchildren from his 51-year marriage to the late Margaret Ann Dixon.