Focus Features

One of the quiet men of Hollywood, Alan J. Pakula, tragically died in a road accident on this day in 1998. The director, most famous for his trilogy of paranoid thrillers made in the 1970s, died when he was driving on the Long Island Expressway in Melville, New York, and another car hit a metal pipe in the road, causing it fly through Pakula’s windshield. He was struck in the head by the pipe, swerved off the road into a fence, and died instantly. Pakula's death, a freak accident, was almost like a scene from one of his three films from the 70s that came to define his career: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President's Men (1976). Except that in those movies, the audience would have suspected foul play. A passionate lover of cinema, Yale drama grad Pakula started off in the business working as an assistant in Warner Bros' cartoon division, before progressing to a role as a producer (most notably on To Kill a Mockingbird) and, finally, a director. He made his debut in 1969 with The Sterile Cuckoo, for which star Liza Minelli was Oscar nominated, the first of eight performances in his films singled out at the Academy Awards. His paranoid trilogy brilliantly captured the sense of unease in Nixon-era America and established him as one of the most gifted directors around. He was fittingly nominated for Best Director for President's Men, and in 1982 got a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay for Sophie's Choice. As a director, Pakula created films that were smart and tight, but unshowy. He had something of an old-school sensibility and once said that his movies reflected "going to films in the '40s and loving a story. They're far from avant-garde, although I experiment with techniques. I'd say I'm from a kind of Charles Dickens school of filmmaking."

One of the quiet men of Hollywood, Alan J. Pakula, tragically died in a road accident on this day in 1998. The director, most famous for his trilogy of paranoid thrillers made in the 1970s, died when he was driving on the Long Island Expressway in Melville, New York, and another car hit a metal pipe in the road, causing it fly through Pakula’s windshield. He was struck in the head by the pipe, swerved off the road into a fence, and died instantly. Pakula's death, a freak accident, was almost like a scene from one of his three films from the 70s that came to define his career: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President's Men (1976). Except that in those movies, the audience would have suspected foul play. A passionate lover of cinema, Yale drama grad Pakula started off in the business working as an assistant in Warner Bros' cartoon division, before progressing to a role as a producer (most notably on To Kill a Mockingbird) and, finally, a director. He made his debut in 1969 with The Sterile Cuckoo, for which star Liza Minelli was Oscar nominated, the first of eight performances in his films singled out at the Academy Awards. His paranoid trilogy brilliantly captured the sense of unease in Nixon-era America and established him as one of the most gifted directors around. He was fittingly nominated for Best Director for President's Men, and in 1982 got a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay for Sophie's Choice. As a director, Pakula created films that were smart and tight, but unshowy. He had something of an old-school sensibility and once said that his movies reflected "going to films in the '40s and loving a story. They're far from avant-garde, although I experiment with techniques. I'd say I'm from a kind of Charles Dickens school of filmmaking."