Stanley R. Jaffe, the veteran producer and studio executive who won the Best Picture Oscar for “Kramer vs. Kramer,” has died at his Rancho Mirage home at the age of 84, according to his daughter, Betsy.
Born in New Rochelle, New York, Jaffe was the son of Columbia Pictures chairman Leo Jaffe, who received the Film Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award in 1978. The younger Jaffe decided from an early age to follow his father in showbiz and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1962 before getting his start at Seven Arts as an assistant to studio co-founder Eliot Hyman.
Jaffe’s first film as a producer was the 1969 romantic drama “Goodbye, Columbus,” which stars Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw as an army vet who ends up in a turbulent relationship with the daughter of an entrepreneur who struck it rich.
Directed by Larry Peerce and based on the 1959 novella by Philip Roth, the film was optioned just before another Roth book, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” became a best-selling novel. “Goodbye, Columbus” became a box office hit for Paramount and led to Gulf and Western President Charles Bluhdorn to offer Jaffe the position of EVP and COO of Paramount Pictures.
Jaffe’s time at Paramount was short-lived, leaving the company in 1971. But in that brief time, Jaffe greenlit Paramount’s most famous hit of all time, “The Godfather,” which was ushered to greatness by Paramount’s head of production Robert Evans.
After leaving Paramount, Jaffe started his own production company Jaffilms, which became affiliated with his father’s Columbia Pictures. Among the films Jaffe produced there in the 1970s was the famed comedy “The Bad News Bears,” which starred Walter Matthau as an alcoholic ex-pitcher who becomes the coach of a terrible Little League team, and then-recent Oscar winner Tatum O’Neal as the snarky and talented pitcher who happens to be the best player on the team … and the only girl.
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A year after “The Bad News Bears,” Jaffe became EVP of Worldwide Production at Columbia Pictures. Shortly afterwards, the manuscript of Avery Corman’s “Kramer vs. Kramer” reached his desk. Directed and written by Robert Benton and starring Dustin Hoffman alongside a then-relative newcomer in Meryl Streep, “Kramer vs. Kramer” became a launch point in Streep’s legendary career and won five Oscars, including Best Picture.
After “Kramer,” Jaffe partnered with 20th Century Fox president Sherry Lansing to start the production company Jaffe-Lansing in 1983. Together, the pair earned another Oscar nomination with the 1987 thriller “Fatal Attraction” starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close.
In 1991, Jaffe returned to Paramount as chairman of Paramount Communications. In the company’s portfolio at the time were several New York sports teams, including the New York Rangers, which won the Stanley Cup in 1994. As one of the governors overseeing ownership of the team, Jaffe’s name was engraved alongside the players and coaches on the Stanley Cup.
Jaffe produced his final film, “The Four Feathers” starring Heath Ledger, in 2002. He is survived by his wife Melinda, children Bobby, Betsy, Alex and Kate, and five grandchildren.
