One of Hollywood's most beloved directors, Sydney Pollack, died today in Los Angeles as the age of 73.

Pollack, director of Out of Africa (which won the 1986  Oscars for  best film and best director) and the Oscar-nominated  Tootsie, was seen on the big screen last year as lawyer Marty Bach in Michael Clayton,  a legal thriller  starring  George Clooney. He also appears  in the movie Made of Honor, which is currently playing in Vancouver theatres.

The Straight's last story about Pollack was published in February, 2007, coinciding with the  Vancouver release of Breaking and Entering, which he produced.  It was an intriguing tale of a London landscape architect (Jude Law), whose home is broken into by a Bosnian teenager. Law begins a relationship with the boy's mother.

“This is a movie that tackles the very complicated idea that sometimes you need to break something in order to fix it,” Pollack told the Straight. “Sometimes it’s the cracks and the breaks that heal the strongest. I’ve heard that idea expressed before years ago, I think it was Hemingway who said that a plate that’s broken and then fixed is stronger in the broken places. Anthony wrote a screenplay about the schisms in society between the cultures that come together. About a burglary which is a break—a breaking and entering—and about a relationship that breaks and gets healed.”