Actor, Director and Screenwriter Paul Mazursky 1930-2014

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Paul Mazursky, a five-time Oscar nominee who wrote and directed humorously compassionate films about male-female relationships, including “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “Blume in Love” and “An Unmarried Woman,” has died. He was 84.

Mazursky died of pulmonary cardiac arrest Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to family spokeswoman Nancy Willen.


Mazursky earned a place in the top ranks of Hollywood writer-directors for his gently satiric examinations of infidelity, wife-swapping, drug experimentation and other social trends of the late 1960s and the 1970s.

He wrote and directed most of his 17 films, including “Harry and Tonto” (1974), which brought Art Carney a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of a dejected retiree.

“I seem to have a natural bent toward humor and I seem to make people laugh,” Mazursky once told the Chicago Tribune, “but I think there is in me a duality. I like to make people cry also. … I like to deal with relationships. The perfect picture for me does all that.”


The filmmaker, who has been compared to Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013.