Robert Evans

'Robert Evans' (qv) was born in New York City, to Florence (Krasne) and Archie Shapera, a dentist with a thriving practice in Harlem. His family was of Russian Jewish descent. He was raised on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He began his show-business career as a teenage radio actor. After flopping in his first attempt at movie acting, he took a job promoting sales of ladies' slacks for Evan-Picone, the clothing company founded and run by his brother. Some years later, 'Norma Shearer' (qv) spotted him hanging around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel; she successfully touted him for the role of 'Irving Thalberg' (qv) in _Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)_ (qv). In a New York nightclub, Evans also caught the eye of 'Darryl F. Zanuck' (qv), who cast him as a bullfighter in _The Sun Also Rises (1957)_ (qv). By the end of the fifties, Evans writes, "I was sure of one thing: I was a half-assed actor." He determined to recast himself as a producer.Before launching his first picture, though, he was hired by 'Charlie Bluhdorn' (qv), head of the Gulf + Western conglomerate, as part of a shakeup of Paramount Pictures.Within months Evans was head of production. In the late 1960s and early '70s, he became the quintessential "new Hollywood" executive, with: slickly packaged productions like _Rosemary's Baby (1968)_ (qv), _Love Story (1970)_ (qv) and _The Godfather (1972)_ (qv) revived Paramount. (The latter film and _Chinatown (1974)_ (qv) are the artistic highlights of Evans' Paramount career, though the amount of credit he deserves for them has been debated for decades.) Eased out of Paramount, he saw _The Cotton Club (1984)_ (qv) turn from a musical "Godfather" into a fiasco of front-page proportions. Evans righted his career with a new Paramount deal in the 1990s, with his last producing credit having been on the blockbuster romantic comedy _How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)_ (qv).He died on October 26, 2019.::David S. Smith