NEW YORK: Robert Evans, the protean, fast-living Hollywood producer and former Paramount Pictures production chief who backed such seminal 1970s films as Chinatown, The Godfather and Harold and Maude, died on Sunday. He was 89.

His career was a story of comebacks and reinventions. Evans had launched a successful women’s clothing line with his brother, Charles, and was visiting Los Angeles on business when actress Norma Shearer saw him sunbathing by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She persuaded producers to hire the handsome, dark-haired 26-year-old to play her late husband, movie mogul Irving Thalberg, in Man of a Thousand Faces, a film about horror movie star Lon Chaney.

After acting roles faded, Evans re-emerged at Paramount and quickly converted the studio from a maker of mediocre films to the biggest hit machine in Hollywood, home to The Godfather and Love Story among others.

For decades, and with many flops in between, the ever-tanned, large glasses-wearing Evans was one of Hollywood’s most outsized and flamboyant personalities, encapsulating the romance of a now bygone movie era where films were greenlit more on instinct than market research. He was married and divorced seven times. He was the model for Dustin Hoffman’s petty-minded Hollywood producer in the 1997 satire Wag the Dog.

“The higher you get, the lower you can fall,” Evans mused in a 2003 interview. “You pick yourself up at the count of nine, you come back and win and be done with it. I believe in being a survivor.”

The title of his 1994 memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture (later turned into a 2002 documentary) came from an early story of his improbable success.

After he appeared in Man of a Thousand Faces, Darryl Zanuck signed Evans to a contract at Twentieth Cen­tu­­ry Fox and cast him as a bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises.

The filmmakers insisted the young actor wasn’t right for the role, so Zanuck went to Mexico City, where the film was being made, to see for himself. His verdict: “The kid stays in the picture.”

It was Evans who optioned The Godfather while Mario Puzo was writing it. As Paramount chief, Evans presided over Francis Ford Coppola’s production.

“He had strong instincts as evidenced by the long list of great films in his career. When I worked with Bob, some of his helpful ideas included suggesting John Marley as Woltz and Sterling Hayden as the Police Cap­tain, and his ultimate realisation that The Godfather could be two hours and 45 minutes in length,” said Coppola.

“May the kid always stay in the picture,” added Coppola.

Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2019