LOS ANGELES – Paul Mazursky, the Oscar-nominated writer-director who excelled at mining the urban middle class for laughs as well as tears in such movies as “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “Blume in Love,” “An Unmarried Woman” and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” died Monday at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 84.
The cause was pulmonary cardiac arrest, family spokeswoman Nancy Willen said.
A gentle satirist of contemporary society, Mazursky at his best chronicled the social trends of the late 1960s and ’70s, including the era’s touchy-feely self-improvement fads, drug experimentation and shifting rules for love and sex.
In the process he created characters memorable for their struggles and vanities: the well-heeled couples in his 1969 directorial debut “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” who believe spouse-swapping is the cure for their hang-ups; the divorce lawyer in “Blume in Love” who thinks sexual freedom is great until his wife wants it; and the divorcee in “An Unmarried Woman” who steps gingerly into the singles scene after 15 years of what she thought had been a happy marriage.
Like Woody Allen, Mazursky wrote and directed most of his 17 films and acted in nearly all of them. His acting credits spanned six decades, from a leading role in Stanley Kubrick’s first feature in 1953 to voicing a musical bunny in “Kung Fu Panda 2” in 2011. He also appeared in the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “The Sopranos.”