Meyer Gottlieb, the Holocaust survivor who helped relaunch Samuel Goldwyn Films, where he produced features including Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and the 2013 remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, has died. He was 86.
Meyer died Monday at his home in Los Angeles, his wife, Pattikay Gottlieb, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Gottlieb was named president and COO of Samuel Goldwyn Co. in 1988, having assisted Samuel Goldwyn Jr., son of the Oscar winner and legendary Hollywood mogul, in reviving the label a decade earlier.
He served as a co-producer on Master and Commander (2003), a co-production with 20th Century Fox, Miramax and Universal that was directed by Peter Weir and starred Russell Crowe as a brash Royal Navy captain doing battle during the Napoleonic Wars.
The epic — a passion project of then-Fox executive Tom Rothman — won two Oscars and was a critical and commercial hit.
“Meyer was a gentleman of the old school,” Rothman, now chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, said in a statement. “I was fortunate to work for him when he ran the Samuel Goldwyn Co., 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.”
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based on James Thurber’s 1939 short story, starred Ben Stiller in the role of the daydreamer made famous by Danny Kaye in the 1947 Samuel Goldwyn original.
As an executive, Gottlieb also had a hand in such other films as Mystic Pizza (1988), Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994), The Preacher’s Wife (1996), Lolita (1997), Tortilla Soup (2001), Super Size Me (2004), The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Amazing Grace (2006).
Gottlieb was born in Poland in September 1939, shortly before Germany invaded his country. After the Nazis’ rout, he and his family went on the run for months, retreating with the Russians before winding up in Ukrainian labor camps for four years.
In a 2016 interview with THR’s Peter Flax, Gottlieb recalled the wintry night when he was 3 or 4 and his father — a carpenter who had become an officer in the Polish army — wrapped the body of his baby brother in a tallis (prayer shawl) and carried it from a camp into the woods for a proper burial. (Ninety percent of his family was killed by the Nazis, he said.)
Gottlieb also remembered watching his dad being taken away in a black bus, conscripted by the Russian military to fight the Germans near the end of the war. He died while fighting in 1945. Meyer and his seamstress mother would be expelled with thousands of others to a displaced-person camp in the U.S. sector in Germany.
Meyer Gottlieb’s parents, Nechama and Schlomo, circa 1936.
WESLEY MANN/COURTESY OF SUBJECT
“I have a very vivid memory of running after a truck to get some food and being so weak from hunger that I passed out,” Gottlieb said in 2007. “When I see news footage today of what is happening in Africa and other countries where genocide is taking place, it brings back the same horrible memories.”
After another stretch behind barbed wire, he and his mom were about to immigrate to Israel when a great aunt in Los Angeles spotted their name on a Red Cross list and sponsored their journey on the USS Pershing to the U.S.
“I feel like I have two lives,” Gottlieb said. “I was born in Poland initially, and I was born again in America.”
They arrived in Boston, then took a train to Los Angeles. Gottlieb spoke only Yiddish but learned English from schoolmates and went on to receive his undergraduate degree and his master’s from UCLA. He served as a senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP before he helped launch the new Samuel Goldwyn Films in June 1978, shortly after Goldwyn Jr. had gained possession of a library of 52 classic films from his dad’s studio. (Goldwyn Jr. died in 1988.)
In 2007, inspired by the Margarethe von Trotta-directed film Rosenstrasse (2003), a true story about German women who protested in Berlin in 1943 to save their Jewish husbands, Gottlieb began to speak publicly about his Holocaust experience. Later, he would make appearances on behalf of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Los Angeles.
“As a survivor, you have to prove that there is a reason for your existence,” he told Flax. “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.”
In addition to his wife, survivors include his daughters, Deborah and Robin, and their husbands, Steve and Golan; and his grandchildren, Sabrina and Eric.
