Ross Hunter

Born Martin Fuss in Cleveland, Hunter taught school and worked as a modest contract actor before finding his true calling as a producer at Universal in the 1950s. He had an unabashed love of glamour and set himself against the era's drift toward grit and realism, insisting that audiences wanted beauty, romance, and stars dressed to the nines.

His great collaboration was with director Douglas Sirk, for whom he produced a run of opulent Technicolor melodramas — Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, and the tearful remake of Imitation of Life — that were dismissed as "women's weepies" in their day and are now revered as sly, gorgeously stylized studies of American longing and repression. Hunter also masterminded the Doris Day and Rock Hudson romantic comedies, beginning with the enormously popular Pillow Talk, which repackaged Day as a glamorous career woman.

He produced a lavish remake of the old warhorse Madame X, the flapper musical Thoroughly Modern Millie, and then his biggest hit of all: Airport (1970), the star-packed disaster picture that spawned a whole genre and earned a fistful of Oscar nominations.

As the 1970s hardened Hollywood's tastes, Hunter's brand of glossy escapism fell from fashion and his fortunes faded. But he never apologized for giving audiences a beautiful time. He died in 1996, and the Sirk melodramas he produced are now studied as seriously as any prestige film of their moment.