Charles K. Feldman

An orphaned New York boy raised in California, Feldman trained as a lawyer before founding the Famous Artists agency and remaking the business of talent. As the town's first true "super-agent," he represented hundreds of stars — Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, and Greta Garbo among them — and pioneered arrangements that would reshape Hollywood: the one-picture deal that freed actors from studio bondage, and the "package," bundling a story, a star, and a director into a single sellable unit. It is essentially the way the industry still works.

Feldman parlayed that leverage into producing, and his taste ran to the daring. He gambled on Tennessee Williams when the playwright was box-office poison, producing The Glass Menagerie and then the incendiary A Streetcar Named Desire, which earned him a Best Picture nomination and helped make Marlon Brando a phenomenon. He produced the sly Billy Wilder comedy The Seven Year Itch, with its indelible image of Monroe over a subway grate, and the gritty Walk on the Wild Side.

In the 1960s his taste turned playful and mod. He produced the anything-goes comedy What's New Pussycat, which gave Woody Allen his first screenplay, and the sprawling, chaotic James Bond spoof Casino Royale, a famously troubled all-star production released in 1967.

He died of cancer in 1968, weeks after remarrying. Feldman is remembered as much for reengineering the machinery of Hollywood dealmaking as for the bold pictures he backed — an agent who understood, before almost anyone, where the real power in the movie business would come to rest.