Meyer Gottlieb, a Holocaust survivor who was the longtime chief of Samuel Goldwyn Films and produced such movies as Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and 2013’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, has died. He was 86.
Sources confirmed the news to Deadline’s Pete Hammond but did not provide details.
Gottlieb had worked with Hollywood scion Samuel Goldwyn Jr. to revive The Samuel Goldwyn Company in 1978 and became its president and COO in 1988. After that company went through a pair of 1990s acquisitions by Orion Pictures and then MGM, Samuel Goldwyn Films was launched in 2000, with Gottlieb at the helm. Specializing in indie and foreign pics, the Culver City-based company went on to produce and/or distribute hundreds of films ranging from The Big Blue and Me Without You to last year’s The Count of Monte Cristo and this year’s Venice-premiering The Last Viking.
Along with Master and Commander and the Secret Life of Walter Mitty remake, Gottlieb’s producing credits include the 2001 feature Tortilla Soup and the 1990s’s TV series Flipper.
“Meyer was a gentleman of the old school,” Sony Pictures chairman and CEO Tom Rothman told Deadline in a statement. “I was fortunate to work for him when he ran the Samuel Goldwyn Company, in the heyday of independent film. I learned an enormous amount from him — most importantly, that it is possible to make a life in Hollywood without sacrificing integrity and honesty, both of which he embodied entirely, along with smarts, wisdom and kindness.”
Gottlieb was born in Poland in 1939, around the time the Nazis invaded the country at the outset of World War II. His father had served as an officer in the Polish army and fled with the family. They were on the run for months. In a 2016 interview with our sister publication The Hollywood Reporter, Gottlieb said he 3 or 4 when watched his infant brother’s body taken into the Ukrainian woods by his father, who later was bused away by the Russian military to fight the Germans. The toddler would never see his father again.
“I have no memories of joyous events,” Gottlieb told THR. “The first real memories of a childhood I have are after I came to America.”
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