The last link to the legendary Hollywood family was 88
Producer Daniel Selznick, the last direct link to one of Hollywood’s founding families, died Aug. 1 at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Country Home campus in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Selznick grew up in Beverly Hills as showbiz royalty. He was the younger of two sons of “Gone With the Wind” producer David O. Selznick and stage producer Irene Mayer Selznick. His grandfather was Louis B. Mayer, the gregarious Canadian immigrant who led Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to the height of art and commerce during Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. By the time Daniel Selznick was a young teenager, his parents had divorced and his father had remarried to Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Jones.
In his own career, Selznick worked to champion the arts and preserve his family’s legacy. Daniel Selznick was a production manager at Universal Studios for four years. He produced the 1988 Peabody-winning documentary “The Making of a Legend: ‘Gone With the Wind” with his older brother, Jeffrey Selznick. Jeffrey Selznick was three years older than his brother and died in 1997.
As a producer, Daniel Selznick’s credits include the 1983 TV miniseries “Blood Feud,” directed by Mike Newell and starring Robert Blake as Jimmy Hoffa and Cotter Smith as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He also produced the miniseries ‘Hoover vs. the Kennedys,” the 1987 TV movie thriller “Night Drive” starring Valerie Harper, and the 1981 docudrama “Reagan’s Way: Pathway to the Presidency.”
Selznick was a longtime director of the Louis B. Mayer Foundation and a resident of the MPTF’s Country Home. He helped oversee the construction of the facility’s Louis B. Mayer Theater in 1967, and he also spoke at the opening of the renovated theater complex in 2017.
“Residents and employees of the Motion Picture & Television Fund will remember him for his intelligence, charm, kindness and generosity,” the MPTF said. Selznick wrote a memoir, “Walking With Kings,” in which he recounts his early years as “a young prince of Hollywood,” to be published next year by Alfred Knopf.
Selznick was married three times and left no immediate survivors, according to the MPTF.
The family is asking for donations in memory of Selznick to the MPTF.
