Melville Shavelson, a comedy writer, producer and director who worked with stars such as Cary Grant, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball and garnered two Academy Award nominations for his original screenplays, died Wednesday. He was 90.
Shavelson died of natural causes at his home in Studio City, said Warren Cowan, Shavelson's longtime friend and publicist.
A self-proclaimed writer by choice, producer by necessity and director in self-defense, Shavelson was a triple-threat, a rarity in the industry, writing more than 35 feature motion pictures either alone or in collaboration, directing 12 of them and creating two Emmy Award-winning television series, "Make Room for Daddy" and "My World and Welcome to It."
"Reed-thin and quietly reflective . . . he is a perpetual-emotion machine, a glib Vesuvius of insightful stories and wry commentary about humanity," a 1978 Times story said of Shavelson.
Kirk Douglas, who acted alongside John Wayne, Yul Brynner and Frank Sinatra in the 1966 film "Cast a Giant Shadow," which Shavelson wrote, produced and directed, remembered him as "a great guy" and "an excellent juggler."
"He never dropped an actor. I loved working with him," Douglas said in a statement released Wednesday.
Shavelson told Times columnist Patrick Goldstein this year that he and Douglas bickered so much on the Israeli set of that film that the director walked off for a day, prompting Douglas to send him a letter after the movie wrapped that Shavelson still had hanging on his office wall.
"Mel, I think it was a good picture," the letter read. "It could have been better if I had paid more attention to you."
Shavelson famously loved recounting the antics of Hollywood stars -- claiming, for example, that Cary Grant's pursuit of Sophia Loren on the set of their 1957 comedy, "Houseboat," caused the director to develop an ulcer.
"Very often the people who have the most talent are the most troublesome to deal with," he told The Times in 1978. "Maybe trouble and talent are interconnected. Maybe it takes a strong, demanding personality to stand in front of a camera and recite lines."
Shavelson began his career in Hollywood as a gag writer for Bob Hope's 1938 "Pepsodent Show" on the radio. In 1947, he would go on to write for Hope's first foray into television.
