When Stanley Jaffe read a pre-publication manuscript of Avery Corman’s novel Kramer vs. Kramer, he was so moved by the story about a divorcing couple and their heart-rending battle for custody of a seven-year-old boy that he knew instantly he wanted to turn it into a film.
Jaffe, who had his own production company and an executive role at Columbia Pictures where his father, Leo, was chairman, bought the rights before the book had even hit the stores and was determined from the outset that Dustin Hoffman should play Ted Kramer, the father at the heart of Corman’s story.
The problem was that Hoffman, who was himself going through a divorce at the time from Anne Byrne, with whom he had a daughter, didn’t want to do it. He was depressed and tired of Hollywood and its ways, he told Jaffe, and planned to quit film acting and return to the stage.
Reluctantly, Jaffe began to offer the part to other actors including James Caan, Al Pacino, and Jon Voight, all of whom also turned it down. Doggedly, he returned to his original plan and tailed Hoffman to England, where he was filming Agatha with Vanessa Redgrave in what he was insisting would be his last film.
Jaffe took Robert Benton with him, whom he had engaged to write the screenplay and direct the picture, and the two of them met Hoffman in a London hotel where they pleaded, cajoled and entreated the star, until he eventually accepted the role.
Casting Joanne Kramer, the wife who walks out on Hoffman’s character and their son Billy, proved equally difficult. Kate Jackson, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda and Ali MacGraw all turned down the part before Meryl Streep was cast in the role.
The result was a critical and commercial triumph. The exploration of the psychology and fallout of divorce was subtle and compelling, touching on social issues such as gender roles, fathers’ rights, work-life balance and single parenthood. Made on a $8 million budget, Kramer vs. Kramer went on to take $173 million at the box office and became the highest-grossing film of 1979 in North America.
The film also won five Academy Awards. Hoffman picked up his first Oscar as best actor and Streep won best supporting actress. Benton won two awards, as best director and for best screenplay, while Jaffe as the producer collected the Oscar for best picture.
In his acceptance speech, Hoffman thanked divorce, “that phenomenon of this latter part of the 20th century, which has somehow created a family in this film that I was part of”. He also credited Jaffe and Benton with rejuvenating his passion for film acting. Jaffe in his speech called it “a film that’s made with love about love”.
Further hit movies Jaffe produced included Fatal Attraction (1987), another legal drama in The Accused (1988), starring Jodie Foster, and the neo-noir thriller Black Rain (1989), directed by Ridley Scott.
He was planning to turn director on 1992’s School Ties, starring Matt Damon, but handed over to Robert Mandel when he was headhunted to become president of Paramount Communications. Jaffe had served as the studio’s president two decades earlier but this time he took charge not only of the film division but the conglomerate’s other interests including Simon & Schuster, the publishing company, the New York Knicks basketball team and the New York Rangers ice hockey team.
When Viacom bought Paramount in 1994, he lost his position and unsuccessfully sued the company for refusing to let him take up $20 million in stock options.
There was, he insisted, a firm distinction between his roles in the boardroom and on the film set. “What I chose to make as a studio head was professional. What I choose to make as a producer is personal,” he said.
After parting company with Paramount he returned to independent production, making I Dreamed of Africa (2000), starring Kim Basinger, and The Four Feathers (2002), based on AEW Mason’s Edwardian novel. He then retired to Rancho Mirage in California with his second wife Melinda Long, whom he married in 1986. She survives him along with their children: Alex Jaffe and Katie Norris. A daughter, Betsy, and son, Bobby, from his first marriage to Joan Goodman, which ended in divorce, also survive him.
Stanley Richard Jaffe was born in 1940 in New Rochelle, New York, the son of Dora (née Bressler), who died when he was five, and Leo Jaffe, who had begun working in the mailroom at Columbia Pictures in 1930 and rose to become the studio’s chairman. At first, he had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania, with thoughts of becoming a lawyer. By the time he graduated in 1962, he had changed his mind and joined the production company Seven Arts. When Warner Bros bought out the company in 1967, he joined CBS before leaving to produce, independently and on borrowed cash, his first full-length feature Goodbye Columbus (1969), starring Ali MacGraw.
The following year he joined Paramount Pictures and within three months had been named president, becoming at the age of 29 one of the youngest studio heads in Hollywood history. He stayed long enough to oversee Love Story and to commission The Godfather but wanted a more hands-on role and resigned after little more than a year. “It wasn’t that I was afraid we couldn’t maintain the company,” he told The New York Times. “It was that at 30, you shouldn’t know what you’re going to be doing at 50 and I wanted out.”
He formed his own production company, Jaffilms, which while ostensibly independent, enjoyed a close association with Columbia Pictures, where by 1977 his father had appointed him executive vice-president of worldwide production.
The combination of pere et fils sometimes caused confusion, not least in a celebrated and much-retold story involving the director Martin Scorsese and his fury when in 1976 Columbia demanded he re-edit Taxi Driver and cut some of the violence.
“The legend goes that Scorsese stayed up all night getting drunk with a loaded gun,” said Quentin Tarantino. “And his purpose was, in the morning, he was going to shoot the executive at Columbia for making him cut his masterpiece.” According to Steven Spielberg, Scorsese “pointed a finger at Stanley Jaffe and said, ‘He’s the head of the studio, he’s the guy I’m angry at, so I’m gonna get a gun and shoot him’ ”.
As it was Leo Jaffe who was head of the studio, Spielberg may have got father and son mixed up and Scorsese has never clarified who it was he wanted to shoot. Fortunately, such drastic action was rendered unnecessary when Columbia wisely agreed to keep most of the director’s original cut with only minimal excisions.
Stanley Jaffe, film producer, was born on July 31, 1940. He died of undisclosed causes on March 10, 2025, aged 84
