Canadian director and three time Oscar Nominee, Norman Jewison dies at 97

Norman Jewison, director, actor and three-time Oscar nominee, passed away in his home in Toronto on Saturday.

Known for directing the award-winning film In The Heat Of The Night, Jewison also received an Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1999.

He also wrote an autobiography entitled This Terrible Business Has Been Good To Me in which he discussed his journey in the Canadian navy during World War II and then how hitchhiked through the south of the United States. It was here that he witnessed the difficulties of the Jim Crow segregation that plagued the south.

Due to his lived experience, Jewison, the work he did focused on themes of racism and injustice as they appealed to him on a deeply personal level.

“Every time a film deals with racism, many Americans feel uncomfortable,” Jewison wrote. “Yet it has to be confronted. We have to deal with prejudice and injustice or we will never understand what is good and evil, right and wrong; we need to feel how ‘the other’ feels.”

In The Heat Of The Night deals with many of these themes which is part of what landed it many Golden Globes, Academy Awards and a BAFTA Award. Actors like Rod Steiger in the film also received Oscars for Best Actor.

Jewison also received two Oscar nominations for his work in Fiddler On The Roof and Moonstruck. He has also worked on memorable films such as The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, The Thomas Crown Affair, A Soldier’s Story and The Hurricane.

Jewison and his wife Margaret Ann Dixon, who died in November of 2004, leave behind three children: Kevin Jewison, Michael Jewison and Jennifer Jewison. In 2010, Jewison remarried Lynne St David who he also leaves behind.

He founded the Canadian Film Centre in 1988 where they have hosted barbecues for the Toronto film festival for years. Then in 2003, Jewison was honoured by Canada with a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award.

When Jewison was not working on a film set, he lived on a 200-acre farm. Here he raised horses and cattle, as well as produced his own maple syrup.