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Sydney Pollack was a successful actor and director whose career spanned four decades. He began his career as an actor in the early 1950s and made his directorial debut in 1965 with The Slender Thread. He went on to direct a number of critically and commercially successful films, including The Way We Were (1973), Tootsie (1982), and The Firm (1993). Pollack died in 2008 at the age of 73.