Robert Allan Ackerman Dies: Prolific Director Of Judy Garland Miniseries, Broadway’s ‘Bent’ Was 77
13.01.2022 - 21:53
/ deadline.com
Robert Allan Ackerman, the director whose television work scored five Emmy nominations and who directed acclaimed Broadway productions including Bent and Extremities, died Jan. 10 of kidney failure at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 77.
His death was announced by family through a spokesman.
“I love Bob. I loved being around him, his aurora, his steady peace,” said actor Al Pacino, who starred in Ackerman’s 1992 Broadway staging of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. “To work with him was joyous. He understood the language of theater art and communicated it with such ease. His gift was intangible and there’s no way of understanding how he created. When an artist has that special gift it is unexplainable, it just happens. When he stopped directing, he started writing again and his writing also had that same magic. He will be missed.”
In 2016, Pacino would re-team with Ackerman in a Pasadena Playhouse production of God Looked Away, in which the actor portrayed Tennessee Williams, with Judith Light co-starring.
Pacino is one of the many acting talents with whom Ackerman worked through the last five decades. Others include Ann Bancroft, Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Richard Gere, Richard Chamberlain, John Malkovich, Victor Garber, Farrah Fawcett, Kirstie Alley and Judy Davis.
Among Ackerman’s most notable TV credits: Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, starring Davis (2001); The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, with Mirren (2003); The Reagans, with Josh Brolin and Davis (2003) and, in 1994, David’s Mother, in which Alley played the mother of an autistic son.
The director’s Broadway credits include Martin Sherman’s Bent, with Gere, David Dukes and David Marshall Grant (1979); John