Few Hollywood directors have achieved such fame and success as the Oscar-winner George Roy Hill, who has died in Manhattan aged 81. Even fewer enjoyed such eminence for so short a time.
Hill made his first film at 40 and enjoyed two massive box-office hits, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). For the latter he won the best director and best picture Oscars. Sandwiched between the two blockbusters was a critical success, Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), taken from Kurt Vonnegut's wartime Dresden-set SF novel. Most of the remainder of his output, however, including a couple of interesting films, is largely forgotten, and his critical standing is negligible.
Hill came to movies late having enjoyed an intriguing early life, including long periods of study, some of it in Ireland, two stints as a pilot with the United States Marines and success in the theatre and television.
Born to a comfortably-off newspaper family in Minneapolis, he was educated at Blake School in Minnesota and Yale University, where he studied music. Then came service with the wartime Marines, flying transports in the south Pacific.
Postwar, after a reporting job in Texas, he took advantage of the GI Bill. This provided grants for higher education for servicemen and women, and Hill used it to study music and literature at Trinity College, Dublin. Needing money he auditioned for a role with Cyril Cusack's repertory company and made his theatrical debutin 1948 in a walk-on role in George Bernard Shaw's Devil's Disciple at the Gaiety and directing his first play, Biography, at the Gate Theatre later that year.
He married Louisa Horton and returned home to work as an off-Broadway actor and on tour in Shakespeare, supplementing his income with radio work and a small part in one of the anti-communist docudramas popular at the time, Walk East On Beacon! (1952).
During the Korean war he served as a pilot, leaving with the rank of major. He then became a television actor, writer and director, working on series such as Playhouse 90 and full-length dramas including Judgment At Nuremberg and A Night To Remember, which won him an Emmy for his screenplay and direction.
He returned - with a new-found status - to the theatre, working as a director mainly on Broadway between 1957 and 1961. His productions included Look Homeward Angel (1957), The Gang's All Here (1959), Period Of Adjustment (1960) and Moon On A Rainbow Shawl (1961). The success of the Tennessee Williams play led to a movie version and his big-screen debut was a softened treatment of Period Of Adjustment (1962), starring Jane Fonda.
Another of his stage successes, Toys In The Attic, a heated drama by Lillian Hellman, became his second film in 1963. This also suffered a melting down process, plus erratic casting, including Dean Martin and Yvette Mimieux opposite Wendy Hiller and Geraldine Page. Both movies remained resolutely theatrical, but happily he escaped the proscenium arch and made an engaging comedy, The World Of Henry Orient (1964) starring Peter Sellers.
This was in contrast to the calamitous Hawaii (1966), which he took over from Fred Zinnemann during the shoot. This pompous historical drama starred an ill-cast Julie Andrews, but she and Hill went on to the overlong, self-conscious, but successful period musical Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967).
Hill was emboldened to try a Broadway musical, an adaptation of the Sellers vehicle, retitled Henry, Sweet Henry. It soon closed and he returned west, hitting the jackpot with Butch Cassidy And the Sundance Kid.
William Goldman's witty script, based on the exploits of real-life outlaws, was originally cast with Paul Newman as the Kid and various actors - including Marlon Brando and Jack Lemmon - suggested for Butch. Hill's view prevailed and Robert Redford took the junior role and Newman became Cassidy.
The movie was to become one of the five biggest money-earners of its decade. Although Hill introduced the intrusive, silly musical interlude, with the Oscar-winning Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, to suggest a relationship with a woman for Butch, the movie's success rested on the glamorous locations and the asexual love story between the stars.
Hill took advantage of his status as an Oscar-nominee and persuaded Universal, to whom he was under contract, to finance a film of Slaughterhouse-Five.
His ambitious take on the seemingly unfilmable novel gained him the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival but sparse box office receipts.
Newman reluctantly agreed to a follow-up to the comedy western. The Sting, a depression-era caper movie, was a hit and won Hill an Oscar for direction.
With his enthusiasm for flying and good rapport with Redford, Hill persuaded the star to take the role of a stunt ace in The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) - a movie based on an original story he had written. Sadly, only vivid flying sequences helped the dull on-the-ground drama, scripted by Goldman.
Despite their edgy relationship, Newman worked with Hill again when presented with an outrageous, foul-mouthed screenplay about a hockey team in which he would play the coach - Slap Shot (1977).
Newman owed the director a favour for his help on Sometimes A Great Notion (1971). (Newman, already co-producer and star of this film, had taken over the direction and Hill travelled to the remote location and advised on necessary cover shots, while helping reassemble sequences.)
Slap Shot alienated some of Newman's fans and the raucous movie failed commercially. Hill went on to make a pale comedy, A Little Romance (1979) then showed his ambitious streak with The World According To Garp (1982) based on John Irving's darkly comic novel.
A miscast Robin Williams in the central role contributed to the film's lacklustre performance. His penultimate work, The Little Drummer Girl (1984), received poor reviews and little audience enthusiasm for an incoherent version of a John Le Carré novel.
His inability to stamp much personality on his movies was nowhere more apparent than with Funny Farm (1988).
After this uneven Chevy Chase vehicle, he returned to Yale - this time as a drama teacher. His fame had rested on a clutch of movies in a career characterised by inconsistency.
His notoriety among his peers came from an unwillingness ever to pay for a drink. So upset had Newman been during the filming of Butch Cassidy, that he took a chainsaw to the director's desk, chopping it in two. The incident perhaps tells us as much about the pecking order in Hollywood as it does about Newman's sense of humour and Hill's alleged stinginess.
He and Louisa Horton divorced three decades ago. They remained friends. She survives him as do two sons, two daughters, and 12 grandchildren.
George Roy Hill, born December 20th 1921; died December 27th, 2002.