Meyer Gottlieb obit

Meyer Gottlieb Dies: Samuel Goldwyn Films Chief, ‘Master And Commander’ Producer & Holocaust Survivor Was 86

 

He was not on the list.

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, the company went through a pair of 1990s acquisitions by Orion Pictures and then MGM, and 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.

“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.”

He added, “The truth of the matter is that the weapons of massive destruction are not bombs — they’re hatred, intolerance and bigotry.

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 TV series Flipper.

Later, he helped to promote Rosenstrasse, a 2003 war drama by the celebrated German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta. Featuring a number of flashbacks, the film focuses on the adult of a woman who as involved in the 1943 Rosenstrasse protests, during which non-Jewish women demonstrated against the Third Reich’s detainment of their Jewish husbands in Berlin. After a week of protests, the Nazis released some 1,800 of the detainees.

“As a [Holocaust] survivor, you have to prove that there is a reason for your existence,” Gottlieb told THR. “You are driven to justify the fact that you survived what others did not. And part of that justification is to do something that will help repair the world.”