Lynn Stalmaster, a compassionate and tenacious casting director who changed the careers of hundreds of actors including John Travolta, Jeff Bridges and Christopher Reeve and who cast hundreds of Hollywood films and television programs, died on February 12th at his Los home Angeles. He was 93 years old.
The cause was heart failure, said his son Lincoln.
Billy Wilder, Robert Wise, Hal Ashby, Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, and Norman Jewison all relied on Mr. Stalmaster’s ability to identify a character’s inner workings and match it to the thousands of actors who lived in his mental rolodex. This alchemical process, as Tom Donahue, the filmmaker of “Casting By,” a 2012 documentary about the craft put it, made Mr. Stalmaster’s work a fine art.
“Lynn had a wonderful gift,” said Mr. Jewison, the director and producer of such films as “In The Heat of the Night” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” both of which were cast by Mr. Stalmaster. Mr. Jewison was the first filmmaker to give a casting director his own film credit when he starred Mr. Stalmaster in “The Thomas Crown Affair” (released in 1968).
“I always encouraged him to find unusual people,” Jewison said. “For ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ I had to find actors who could speak Russian. Lynn found her in San Francisco, where there was a large Russian community. None of them were actors. He was so awesome. And he was very good at reading with actors. He could keep her calm and safe. “
A shy teenager who trained as an actor in the 1950s and was in the trenches of audition and worked on television and radio, Mr Stalmaster was focused on the actor’s experience and became a fierce advocate for those he referred to believed. After meeting As 18-year-old John Travolta, he pushed for the role that was eventually cast on Randy Quaid in “The Last Detail,” the 1973 Hal Ashby film starring Jack Nicholson.
There was a dead heat between the actors, Mr Travolta recalled in a telephone interview, but Mr Quaid’s physical presence was more like that of the character, as Mr Ashby and Mr Stalmaster told Mr Travolta on a midnight phone call praising his work.
At the time, Mr. Travolta was doing theater and advertising in New York, but Mr. Stalmaster was so believing in him that he persecuted him for two years. When a role for a character in a comedy television pilot emerged at a Brooklyn high school, Mr. Stalmaster urged him to turn down a lead role on a Broadway show and return to Los Angeles for an audition.
He got the role – which turned out to be the boastful punk manqué Vinnie Barbarino on a show that would find its own place in television history: “Welcome Back, Kotter”.
“He was pretty determined,” said Mr. Travolta of Mr. Stalmaster. “He didn’t let anyone consider her. After ‘The Last Detail’ he told me, ‘Don’t worry. That will happen.'”
Mr. Stalmaster has been involved in countless other careers.
He nudged Mike Nichols to cast a young Dustin Hoffman on “The Graduate”. LeVar Burton was in college when Mr. Stalmaster cast him as a lead in the 1977 hit television series “Roots”.
Geena Davis was trained as an actress but worked as a model when Mr. Stalmaster cast her in a supporting role in Tootsie, Sydney Pollack’s 1982 romantic comedy starring Mr. Hoffman. It was her first audition and the role would be her film debut.
After seeing Christopher Reeve in a play with Katharine Hepburn, Mr. Stalmaster suggested him for a small role in “Gray Lady Down” (1978), Mr. Reeve’s first film role, and then successfully campaigned for him to be the Starring in “Superman,” ”Released that same year.
“Lynn understood the actor’s process and the actor’s plight,” said David Rubin, another casting director and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (Mr. Stalmaster was his former boss and mentor.) Mr. Stalmaster’s career has shown that “a success in Hollywood and a person are not mutually exclusive”.
In 2016, Mr. Stalmaster was the first and so far only casting director to receive an honorary Oscar for his work. At the Academy Awards, Mr. Bridges recalled how Mr. Stalmaster started his own career in the early 1970s. At the time, Mr. Bridges was in his early twenties and was trying to figure out whether he wanted a life in business when Mr. Stalmaster offered him a role in “The Iceman Cometh,” who would play John Frankenheimer’s 1973 film about Eugene O’Neill.
“These are some hard things,” Mr. Bridges recalled thinking when telling the audience of the awards. “It scared me as hell. I didn’t mean to do it to tell you the truth. I didn’t think I could do it. “
But he did, and the experience – terrifying but joyful too, he said – made him realize that he could live a life in acting. “I have to thank you, man,” said Mr. Bridges, nodding to Mr. Stalmaster, “for showing me this street. Lynn Stalmaster is the master caster. “
Lynn Arlen Stalmaster was born on November 17, 1927 in Omaha, Neb. His father, Irvin Stalmaster, was a judge on the Nebraska Supreme Court. his mother Estelle (Lapidus) Stalmaster was a housewife. Lynn had severe asthma and when he was 12 the family moved to Los Angeles because of the temperate climate.
A student at Beverly Hills High School, he took an interest in theater and radio and, after completing his military service, earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television in Los Angeles.
Mr. Stalmaster has had roles in a number of films, including “Flying Leathernecks,” a 1951 picture of John Wayne, and a job as a production assistant at Gross-Krasne, a company that made films for television in the early 1950s. When his casting director retired, he was promoted to the job and soon opened his own agency.
“I would spend the days meeting new actors, all this great new talent,” he said on Casting By, the documentary. He was working on Gunsmoke and other hit television shows in 1956 when Robert Wise, the director who directed “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music” asked him to cast the 1958 film “I Want to Live” Susan Hayward based on the story of Barbara Graham, a prostitute who was sentenced to death row.
Mr. Wise wanted actors who looked like the actual characters in Graham’s life. It was Mr. Stalmaster’s big break, he recalled, as he found new faces to round out the cast and gave the film “a truthfulness, the truth” the director wanted to achieve.
His marriage to Lea Alexander ended in divorce, as did an early, short marriage. In addition to his son Lincoln, Mr. Stalmaster survived his daughter Lara Beebower. two grandchildren; and his brother Hal.
Mr. Stalmaster’s friendliness was as much an element of his art as his matchmaking skills, Mr. Rubin said. But he wasn’t a pushover and he was enormously persuasive, “firm in his creative point of view,” said Mr Rubin, “but extremely adept at convincing others that it was indeed their idea.”
