"Sound of Music" Director Wise Dies

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye...

Robert Wise, the four-time Oscar-winning director and producer whose career spanned more than 50 years and included such classics as The Sound of Music, West Side Story and The Day the Earth Stood Still, died Wednesday in Los Angeles.

Friends say Wise appeared to be in fine health for his 91st birthday on Saturday, but the legendary filmmaker fell ill on Wednesday and was taken to UCLA Medical Center, where he died of heart failure.

After getting his start in Hollywood as an editor--he scored an Oscar nomination for cutting 1941's Citizen Kane--Wise became a skilled director, mastering many genres. His 39 films ranged from horror (1945's The Body Snatcher, 1963's The Haunting), thrillers (1951's The House on Telegraph Hill, 1975's The Hindenburg) and science fiction (1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1971's The Andromeda Strain, 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture), to topical drama (1958's I Want to Live!, 1959's Odds Against Tomorrow), war films (1953's The Desert Rats, 1958's Run Silent, Run Deep), westerns (1950's Two Flags West, 1956's Tribute to a Bad Man) and action/adventures (1953's Destination: Gobi, 1966's The Sand Pebbles).

But it was in musicals that Wise would make his indelible mark on Hollywood, winning a pair of Best Director Academy Awards for 1961's West Side Story (which he shared with codirector Jerome Robbins) and 1965's The Sound of Music. Each film was also named Best Picture, earning Wise two more Oscars for his role as producer.

Both films were huge box-office hits and became pop-culture touchstones. They won a combined 15 Oscars.

West Side Story, starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer and Rita Moreno, was a reworking of Romeo and Juliet set in New York City tenements. The film snagged 10 Academy Awards and featured the only score Leonard Bernstein ever wrote for the silver screen.

The Sound of Music, with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, focused around the Von Trapp family's flight from Nazi-controlled Austria. It not only won five Oscars but was for several years the highest grossing movie of all time.

But in his usual self-effacing manner, Wise attributed the musical's success to his stars.

"A big part of a director's job is done if he gets the right actors in the right roles," he once told the Associated Press. "That doesn't mean you don't help actors, but once we thought about Julie and Chris, we didn't seriously consider anyone else."

Wise was nominated for a total of seven Oscars. In 1967, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored him with the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement as a producer. He later served as the organization's president and also headed the Directors Guild of America.

"Bob's devotion to the craft of filmmaking and his wealth of head-and-heart knowledge about what we do and how we do it was a special gift to his fellow directors," current DGA president Michael Apted said in a statement.

Born Sept. 10, 1914 in Winchester, Indiana, Wise dropped out of college during the Depression and headed to Hollywood, where his brother managed to land him a job as a messenger in the editing department of RKO Pictures. Wise managed to work his way up to full-time editor, cutting such pictures as 5th Avenue Girl and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Wise got his first big break when Orson Welles hired him to edit Citizen Kane and then The Magnificent Ambersons.

Wise spoke wistfully of his work with the then-25-year-old wonderboy Welles, whom Wise considered a mentor even though he was only a year younger.

"Citizen Kane was a marvelous film to work on--well planned and well-shot," Wise once recalled.

But the collaboration didn't last long. The two had a bitter falling out over Ambersons, which ironically cut short Welles' career in Hollywood and simultaneously catapulted Wise into the director's chair.

After wrapping production on Ambersons in early 1942, Welles traveled to Brazil to work on a film promoting Pan-American relations on behalf of the State Department. Around the same time, RKO screened Ambersons before test audiences, who panned it.

At the request of the panicked studio, which was already losing money on the over-budget Ambersons, Wise reluctantly agreed to cut out 40 minutes of Welles' 132-minute original and reshoot some scenes, including the ending. An infuriated Welles futilely sought to have his cut restored and later remarked: "Ambersons was a much better picture than Kane--if they' just left it as it was."

Sensitive to charges he mutilated a masterpiece, Wise allowed that Welles' original version was better as a "work of art," but said the changes were necessary to keep the audience in their seats because in the days after World War II, no one wanted to see a dark tale about death and dying. The studio had even considered shelving the film altogether.

In a 2001 interview with Vanity Fair, the soft-spoken Wise also argued that the edited version of Ambersons is now considered by film buffs "something of a classic in its own right."

While Welles never quite regained his Hollywood footing, Wise's directing career took off when Val Lewton tapped him to helm the psychological cult thriller, Curse of the Cat People in 1944. A string of popular films followed, including 1947's Born to Kill, 1954's Executive Suite, 1956's Helen of Troy, before Wise hit his creative peak in the 1960s.

Critics sometimes dismissed Wise as a technically skilled filmmaker who preferred slick popcorn fare rather than personalized works of art denoting a personal style. But Wise was unfazed; he believed movie audiences were better served when a director turned his attention to crafting a good story and getting strong performances from his leads, which included the likes of Boris Karloff, Clark Gable, Jean Simmons, Richard Burton, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Shirley MacLaine.

But Wise did occasionally push the envelope.

For 1959's Odds Against Tomorrow, an anti-racist message film starring Sidney Poitier, Wise eschewed the usual fade-ins/outs and dissolves, because he believed such editing tools slowed the pacing of the story and detracted from the mood of the picture.

And Trekkers know him best as the man who brought Captain Kirk and crew out of mothballs and onto the big screen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Although the film paved the way for the relaunch of the franchise, Star Trek: The Motion Picture flopped at the box office and proved to be Wise's last major undertaking.

Wise's final film was 1989's Rooftops, a watered-down version of West Side Story. His last credit came via the 2000 TV movie A Storm in Summer.

He is survived by his current wife, Millicent; a son from a previous marriage, Robert E. Wise; a step-daughter and graddaughter.