Amanda Mackay Dies: Casting Director On ‘Gladiator’, ‘The Fugitive’, Dozens Of Other Films & TV Shows Was 70
31.08.2022 - 21:11
/ deadline.com
Amanda Mackay, the casting director behind Best Picture Oscar winner Gladiator and nominee The Fugitive who earned an Emmy nom for The Normal Heart and cast hundreds films and TV shows during a nearly four-decade career, has died. She was 70.
Her longtime friend and business partner Cathy Sandrich Gelfond told Deadline that Mackay died August 27 in her sleep of myelodysplastic syndrome, a form of blood cancer, at NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn.
“Amanda was a singular force — fiercely intelligent, impeccably stylish, wildly passionate about ideas, the state of the world and her work,” Sandrich Gelfond told Deadline. “She loved her daughters profoundly and was an unwaveringly steadfast friend and champion in a time when women weren’t as supportive to other women as they are now. She believed in me, lifted me up and gave me a career. She was the sister I never had and changed my life in countless ways. The world’s light is significantly dimmer without her in it.”
The Casting Society honored Mackay with Artios Awards for the films A League of Their Own (1993) and Smokin’ Aces (2006) among 15 career nominations. Her long list of credits as casting director also includes such popular films as Bad Moms and its sequel, Olympus Has Fallen, United 23, We Were Soldiers, Get Carter, Ronin, The Hunt for Red October, Sleepy Hollow, The Proposal, The Cooler While You Were Sleeping, Patriot Games, The Fugitive sequel U.S. Marshals, Star Trek: Nemesis and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Rocky IV.
Mackay cast and also executive produced A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which won the Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Cast in a Drama at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
She also cast such TV series including A Million Little Things, Claws,