Walter Mirisch, a film producer and executive whose name is synonymous with numerous canonized 20th-century works, has died, as was confirmed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Saturday evening. The independent film producer won the Oscar for best picture at the 40th Academy Awards for the police drama In The Heat of the Night, and received the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award 10 years later. At the 55th Academy Awards, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, making him the only person in history to receive all three. He was 101 years old.

Mirisch served as president of the Academy from 1973 to 1977. In their joint statement, AMPAS CEO Bill Kramer and President Janet Yang said, “Walter was a true visionary, both as a producer and as an industry leader,” adding, “He had a powerful impact on the film community and the Academy, serving as our president and as an Academy governor for many years. His passion for filmmaking and the Academy never wavered, and he remained a dear friend and adviser.”

Mirisch was born in New York City in 1921. His father was an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, as were his maternal grandparents. His first gig in show business as a teenager was an usher at the now-demolished State Theater in Jersey City, commuting seven days a week from The Bronx for 25¢ an hour. During the Second World War, he worked in a Department of Defense plant in Burbank, California, and afterward attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration. In 1947 he produced his first feature, Fall Guy, a low-budget crime drama starring Leo Penn (father of Sean Penn), and soon thereafter became head of production at Allied Artists Studio.

While there, he supervised the production of some well-known projects of the Eisenhower era, like Wichita, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Love in the Afternoon. In 1957, he and his older brothers, Harold and Marvin Mirisch, founded The Mirisch Company, entering a distribution agreement with United Artists. 

Having already worked with director Billy Wilder on Love in the Afternoon, Mirisch continued the relationship with the Austrian-born writer-director. Their first collaboration under the Mirisch banner was the mid-century masterpiece Some Like It Hot, which ranked number one on the American Film Institute’s best comedies list in 2000. The following year, 1960, The Mirisch Company produced Wilder’s The Apartment, the Shirley MacLaine-Jack Lemmon “adult” romantic comedy, which won five Academy Awards, including best picture. Wilder followed up with the Cold War comedy One, Two, Three, sleazy lawyer satire The Fortune Cookie, the generation gap Italian-set romance Avanti!, and many others.

With Billy Wilder focusing on urbanites and their romantic affairs, The Mirisch Company also had great success in the Wild West. In 1960 they produced John Sturges’s adaptation of The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven. Three years later, Sturges and Mirisch made The Great Escape, something of a superhero team-up film set in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp. 

Other remarkable projects of the time include the Pink Panther/Inspector Clouseau series (which The Mirisch Company continued for years, including as animation, maximizing every dollar), and other comedies of the era like The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, plus some of the better Elvis Presley titles (Kid Galahad being one of them.) In 1961, The Mirisch Company produced West Side Story, the Oscar-winning adaptation of Leonard Bernstein’s musical.

Walter Mirisch himself was not credited as a producer on every Mirisch Company project, through he was on several. Among them, the Western Cast A Long Shadow, Toys in the Attic, a 190-minute adaptation of James A. Michener’s Hawaii starring Max von Sydow and Julie Andrews (which, weirdly, this writer has seen three times), the World War II epic Midway, and the Alan Alda-Ellen Burstyn romantic dramedy Same Time, Next Year. It was in 1967, though, in which he made history as the producer of In The Heat of the Night.

Based on a novel by John Ball and directed by Norman Jewison, In The Heat of the Night starred Sidney Poitier as a Philadelphia police detective who ends up involved in a murder investigation in a small Mississippi town. Rod Steiger starred opposite Poitier as a bigoted police chief. The movie was revolutionary in its depiction of racism and Black heroism. A lesser movie may have just had the line or the slap, but this had both (see below.)

In accepting the Oscar, Mirisch called the film “a labor of love for all those of us who've been part of it.”

In 1998, the film was honored at the Oscars ceremony on the 30th anniversary of its win. Mirisch remarked that “instead of mounting a soapbox and making speeches, it makes its point by dramatizing how a southern redneck sheriff and an eastern, Black detective are finally able to see one another not as stereotypes but as individuals.” In 2008, Mirisch published his memoir I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, with a foreword by Poitier. In it, the actor called him a “legendary producer, visionary filmmaker, courageous seeker of truth, especially in troubling times.”

As he accepted the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, acknowledging his win of the Irving G. Thalberg award five years prior, he spoke of “the responsibilities of good citizenship.” Upon his passing, his family members suggested people make donations to the Motion Picture & Television Fund charity.