Robert Fryer; Producer, Former Ahmanson Director

Former Ahmanson Theatre artistic director Robert Fryer, whose Broadway productions won 37 Tony awards and who produced several Oscar-nominated movies, died Sunday in Los Angeles of complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was 79.

From 1971 to 1989, Fryer brought 71 star-studded productions to the Ahmanson, in downtown Los Angeles. The list included five world premieres of Neil Simon comedies and shows featuring such box office draws as Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Rex Harrison and Angela Lansbury. Fryer’s productions won 36 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards. He received a lifetime achievement award at the Los Angeles Ovation Awards ceremony last fall.

“He was always there for me,” Simon said Tuesday. “He wouldn’t hold back [criticism], but he would say it so tactfully. He was a mentor.”

The films Fryer produced included “The Prime of Miss Jane Brodie,” “Travels With My Aunt,” “The Boys from Brazil” and “The Shining.”

“Movies pay the rent, but the stage is my true love,” Fryer told a Times reporter in 1974. Keeping one foot planted in the movies enriched his work in the theater, he added. Stars of his films would often follow him to the stage, as Maggie Smith did when she moved from the “Miss Brodie” movie to the Ahmanson to do “Design for Living.”

Charlton Heston credited Fryer with giving him his first professional breaks, when Fryer was working in live television in the early 1950s in New York. Later Heston starred in six Ahmanson productions and served on the theater’s board of directors. “I’ll miss him as a fine producer and a longtime friend,” Heston said Tuesday.

Gordon Davidson, who ran the Ahmanson’s sister theater, the Mark Taper Forum, while Fryer was at the Ahmanson and now runs both stages, said of Fryer: “He kept the Ahmanson alive and kicking in a pretty classy way. It was struggling for an identity before he arrived, and he gave it an identity: star actors and a good library of plays.”

Born in Washington, D.C., Fryer was from a theatrical family and knew at an early age that he wanted to work in the theater as a producer, recalled his younger sister, Eleanor Massell of Atlanta. Their father worked as a fashion designer for a department store, but he died when the children were young, and the family moved to Cleveland, where Fryer graduated from Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve).

After a few months teaching drama in a high school, Fryer volunteered for the Army. Because of his theatrical training, he was dispatched to produce shows for the troops during World War II. Soon after his Army service, he was hired by CBS Radio in New York and began to build friendships and contacts in theatrical as well as broadcasting circles.

One of his friends, Mary Sinclair, was married to the legendary producer George Abbott, who took Fryer under his wing. Abbott allowed Fryer to co-produce “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” directed by Abbott and starring Shirley Booth, in 1951.

Fryer’s next Broadway co-production, “Wonderful Town,” won eight Tony Awards. His other Broadway credits included “Auntie Mame” and the musical version “Mame,” “Redhead,” “Sweet Charity,” “The Norman Conquests,” “Chicago,” “On the Twentieth Century,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Noises Off,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Benefactors.”

Gwen Verdon, who starred in “Chicago,” “Redhead” and “Sweet Charity,” said Tuesday: “There are very few gentlemen producers, and he was all of that. He was never rude. He never made the artist feel guilty.”

Fryer soon extended his producing duties to the movies, where his credits ranged from “The Boston Strangler” and “Myra Breckinridge” to such upper-crust fare as “Travels With My Aunt” and “Great Expectations.”

The movies brought Fryer to Los Angeles. In the 1974 interview, Fryer analyzed theatrical audiences in the two cities where he maintained homes: “New York audiences are hopelessly bitchy. They want you to flop. . . . Here [in L.A.] the audiences are sophisticated and have high standards, but most important, they want you to succeed.”

Within theatrical circles, Fryer was noted for his relationships with stars. “My heart goes out to the great stars,” he said, “because they tend to be insecure. . . . The really top people, like Maggie [Smith], become terribly afflicted with stage fright, probably because they feel a deep sense of responsibility to the audience. But the rotten actors are never scared.” Nevertheless, Fryer added that actors “are permanent inhabitants of cuckooland” and “let me down more often than I like.”

Fryer acknowledged he was “on the quiet and subdued side. Many complain that I talk so softly they cannot hear me. But I am thinking theater all the time, so inside my head a showman is screaming to make his way out.”

Although Fryer brought Los Angeles such prestigious production as Peter Brook’s celebrated staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as well as the hugely popular “The Little Foxes” with Taylor, he confessed to never taking a chance on the unknown in his programming: “My failing is that I play it too safe. I am basically a member of the audience.”

“I look for stories that pack emotion, because I think we are obliged to make an audience laugh or cry, possibly both,” Fryer said. “An intellectual exercise is fine for some producers, but not for me, because it doesn’t involve an audience. My own approach is to choose stars who attract people by getting in front of the camera, or on the stage, and reliably, dependably breathing the magic fire of life into their roles. To me, that’s what drama is all about.”

In addition to his sister, Fryer is survived by two nephews and a niece. Memorial services in Los Angeles and New York are pending.