Pandro S. Berman

The son of an RKO executive, Berman grew up in the business and rose fast, editing and assistant-directing before becoming, still in his twenties, head of production at RKO. There he shepherded the studio's most beloved product: the Astaire-Rogers musicals. Top Hat, Swing Time, Shall We Dance and their companions — feathers, Art Deco sets, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern songs — set a standard of screen elegance that has never dated.

Berman's range, though, was the real marvel. At RKO he also produced the literary prestige of Of Human Bondage, which made Bette Davis a name, the rousing adventure Gunga Din, and the 1939 Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton. Chafing at RKO's chronic instability, he moved to MGM in 1940 and stayed for a quarter-century.

There the hits kept coming across every register: the wartime charmer National Velvet that made a child Elizabeth Taylor a star, the Technicolor swashbuckler Ivanhoe, the beloved comedy Father of the Bride, the tough social drama Blackboard Jungle with its rock-and-roll jolt, and the Taylor vehicle Butterfield 8. He produced dozens of pictures without a signature "look," his gifts being sound story sense, casting instinct, and unflappable professionalism.

Honored late in life with the Thalberg Award, Berman embodied the ideal studio producer — reliable, versatile, commercially sharp, and quietly essential to two studios' fortunes. He retired in the 1960s and died in 1996, one of the last living links to Hollywood's golden prime.