David Brown

A New Yorker and Stanford-trained journalist, Brown spent his early career in magazines and then as a story editor and executive at 20th Century-Fox, where he developed material and rose through the ranks alongside Richard Zanuck, son of the studio's founder. When corporate upheaval pushed both men out, they formed a producing partnership that became one of the most successful in modern Hollywood.

The Zanuck/Brown team hit almost immediately with The Sting, the elegant Newman-and-Redford con-man caper that won the Best Picture Oscar for 1973. Two years later they took a chance on a young director named Steven Spielberg and a troubled adaptation of a beach-town thriller. Jaws (1975) became the film that invented the summer blockbuster, terrifying audiences and rewriting the economics of the whole industry.

Brown was the literate half of the partnership, a voracious reader with a nose for a story — fittingly, he was married for decades to Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan. The team also produced The Verdict and Cocoon before Brown struck out on his own, and he never slowed down. Well into his later years he produced Driving Miss Daisy, which won Best Picture for 1989, the courtroom hit A Few Good Men, and Chocolat.

Cultured, witty, and indefatigable, Brown was still producing for film and Broadway into his nineties. He died in 2010 at 93, one of the last producers whose career bridged the studio era and the age of the blockbuster.