LOS ANGELES - Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor, died at home here on Monday. He was 73 and the cause was cancer, diagnosed about nine months ago.

His movies like The Way We Were (1973), Tootsie (1982) and Out of Africa (1985) were among the most successful of the 1970s and 1980s.

His career defined an era in which big stars (Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty) and the film-makers who knew how to wrangle them (Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols) retooled the Hollywood system.

Savvy operators, they played studio against studio, staking their fortunes on pictures that served commerce without wholly abandoning art.

As a director, Pollack won an Oscar for the epic romance Out Of Africa and nominations for the Depression-era drama They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and the cross-dressing comedy Tootsie.

Michael Clayton (2007), a legal thriller which he produced and acted in, was nominated for a best picture Oscar earlier this year. He delivered a trademark performance as an old-bull lawyer who demands dark deeds from a subordinate played by George Clooney.

Most recently, Pollack portrayed the serial-dating father of Patrick Dempsey's character in the romantic comedy Made Of Honor.

Apart from the documentary, Sketches Of Frank Gehry (2007), about the famed architect, he never directed a movie without stars. His first feature, The Slender Thread (1965), starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft.

In his next 19 films - every one a romance or drama but for the single comedy, Tootsie - he worked with Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford and others.

The Indiana native was born to first-generation Russian-Americans. After high school he enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in New York.

He studied there for two years under Sanford Meisner, who taught the 'Method' acting technique, and remained for five more as his assistant, teaching acting but also appearing on stage and in TV.

'I knew I wasn't going to be any great shakes as an actor - the way I looked, I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend,' he once said.

Director John Frankenheimer brought him to Hollywood in 1961 to work as a dialogue coach on the juvenile delinquency drama The Young Savages.

Pollack said he bonded with the film's star, Lancaster, over the fact that neither had been to college. He took the actor's advice and turned to directing.

He began his first long run of hits with They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a bleak fable of love and death among marathon dancers in the Great Depression.

Most reviewers found Tootsie, with Dustin Hoffman as an out-of-work actor masquerading as a woman to get a job on a TV soap opera, probably his finest achievement.

And as an actor, his most notable role may have been as Hoffman's long-suffering agent in Tootsie, a part he took only after the actor, in female character, hounded him with roses and notes that read: 'Please be my agent! Love, Dorothy.'

Among Pollack's survivors are six grandchildren, two daughters, and his wife, Claire Griswold, who was once his acting student.

AP