When Bette Midler remembered director Mark Rydell after his death, she didn’t begin by listing his movies.

She went back to what happened between them on a set.

Rydell had directed Midler in The Rose and later in For the Boys, two performances that brought her Academy Award nominations. After decades of working with him, she reduced his gift to three words.

He was “the actor’s whisperer.”

Rydell died of natural causes at 97 in Woodland Hills, California, his daughter Amy Rydell confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. She also shared a tribute to her father on Aug. 14.

He Knew the Other Side of the Camera

Before Rydell became known for directing some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, he had been an actor himself.

His career included work in television, including As the World Turns, before he moved behind the camera. That background stayed important to the way other performers later described working with him.

Midler made that connection directly in her tribute.

“He was an actor of note before he became a director,” she wrote.

For her, that experience seemed to give Rydell a way of talking to performers without burying them in instructions. He could tell an actor what a scene needed in a few words and trust that the performer would find the rest.

“He was the actor’s whisperer,” Midler wrote. “Just a few words was all it took to understand what was needed.”

That description helps explain why Rydell’s career can be measured through performances as much as through titles.

His movies put actors in roles that would follow them for decades.

One Film Produced 10 Oscar Nominations

The clearest example came with On Golden Pond.

Rydell’s 1981 drama starred Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda. The film received 10 Academy Award nominations, including one for Rydell as director.

Two of his stars went home with Oscars.

Henry Fonda won Best Actor for his performance as Norman Thayer, while Hepburn won Best Actress for playing his wife, Ethel. The movie also won for its adapted screenplay.

For Rydell, the challenge was hardly small. He was directing performers who had already spent decades becoming screen legends.

Yet the finished film was built around intimate exchanges rather than spectacle: an aging couple, a strained father-daughter relationship and a family spending time together at a New England lake.

Henry Fonda’s performance became his final movie role.

Rydell did not win the directing Oscar himself. But the work in front of his camera became part of Academy Awards history, with both Fonda and Hepburn taking home acting honors from the same film.

That pattern appeared elsewhere in his career.

Bette Midler Gave Him Credit for Both of Her Nominations

Midler’s relationship with Rydell began with a much different movie.

The Rose, released in 1979, gave Midler her first major film role as a troubled rock singer. The performance earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Years later, Rydell directed her again in For the Boys, and she received another nomination.

After his death, Midler did not treat those nominations as separate from the director who had been beside her.

“Two Oscar nominations both because of him,” she wrote.

It was an unusually direct piece of credit from a performer whose name appeared on the ballot.

Midler also remembered Rydell as someone devoted to the Meisner acting technique, a detail that fit the way she described his direction. The point was not to give an actor a long speech about how to perform a scene.

A few words could be enough.

Across Rydell’s work, other actors also earned Academy Award attention. His directing credits included Cinderella Liberty, The Reivers and The River, alongside The Rose and On Golden Pond.

But a list of nominations still doesn’t quite capture the quality Midler was describing.

She was talking about what happened before the award ceremony, before reviews and box-office numbers, in the private exchange between a director and an actor trying to make a moment work.

His Daughter Remembered the Man Outside the Movies

For Amy Rydell, the loss had nothing to do with an Oscar count.

After her father died, she wrote about him as the person she had known away from the films and performances that made his name familiar.

“Hard to put into words how much I loved my dad,” she wrote in her Aug. 14 tribute.

She called him “truly one of a kind” and described him as the funniest and most talented person she had ever known.

Rydell was 97.

His career stretched from acting to television directing and then to films featuring stars including Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn and Midler. His own work brought him an Oscar nomination for directing On Golden Pond, while actors working under him repeatedly found themselves recognized by the Academy.

Midler’s tribute, though, returned to something smaller than all of that.

There was a director standing beside an actor, watching a scene and knowing what to say.

“Just a few words was all it took,” she wrote.