Stanley R. Jaffe, a film executive and producer who won a Best Picture Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer and was nominated for Fatal Attraction during a career that also including producing such films as The Bad News Bears, Taps, Black Rain and Goodbye, Columbus, died today. He was 84. CAA, which repped Jaffe, confirmed his […]Stanley R. Jaffe, a film executive and producer who won a Best Picture Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer and was nominated for Fatal Attraction during a career that also including producing such films as The Bad News Bears, Taps, Black Rain and Goodbye, Columbus, died today. He was 84. CAA, which repped Jaffe, confirmed his
Stanley R. Jaffe, a film executive and producer who won a Best Picture Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer and was nominated for Fatal Attraction during a career that also including producing such films as The Bad News Bears, Taps, Black Rain and Goodbye, Columbus, died today. He was 84.
CAA, which repped Jaffe, confirmed his death to Deadline.
Jaffe was a decade into his career when he produced Kramer vs. Kramer, the riveting 1979 child-custody drama starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, both winning lead acting Oscars — Streep’s first of three. It also scored Best Director and Adapted Screenplay Oscars for director Robert Benton.
He followed that by producing Taps for Paramount, where Jaffe at 29 had become the youngest major-studio head ever in 1969. The latter film about a mutiny at a soon-to-close military academy, starred Timothy Hutton and launched the careers of such future stars as Tom Cruise, Sean Penn and Giancarlo Esposito.
Those films came after Jaffe produced the 1969 Richard Benjamin-Ali MacGraw drama Goodbye, Columbus; I Start Counting (1970); the Jeff Bridges Civil War-era Bad Company (1972); and raunchy but revered 1976 Little League baseball comedy The Bad News Bears, starring Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal.
He went on to produce other films including the Kelly McGillis-Jodie Foster legal drama The Accused (1988), the Michael Douglas action thriller Black Rain (1989), the Brendan Fraser-Matt Damon period drama School Ties (1992), I Dreamed of Africa starring Kim Basinger (2000) and Shekhar Kapur’s 2002 The Four Feathers led by Heath Ledger.
Jaffe also produced and had his lone directing credit on the 1983 missing-child drama Without a Trace. “The decision to direct it myself didn’t reflect any discontent I had with any of the directors I’d worked with,” he told The New York Times that year. “Selfishly, I just wanted to stretch myself out, like anyone else.”
His executive producing credits include the 2023Paramount+ series Fatal Attraction along with the features Madeline (1998), Michael Apted’s Firstborn starring Teri Garr, Peter Weller and Corey Haim — in his big-screen debut — and others.
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Jaffe was born on July 31, 1940, in New Rochelle, NY, into a showbiz family. His father was Leo Jaffe, who worked at Columbia Pictures for more than a half-century, moving up from accountant to president and CEO and chairman of the board. He received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 1978 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Stanley Jaffe’s sister was Andrea Jaffe, a powerhouse PR exec later Fox marketing chief who died in 2016.
Stanley Jaffe began his career at Seven Arts Associates in the early 1960s and left for CBS after Warner Bros acquired Seven Arts in 1967. Three years later, Jaffe was named EVP and COO at Paramount Pictures — and just three months after that, he rose to president of the studio.
“Jaffe brought tremendous zeal to filmmaking and gave great guidance and encouragement to many young filmmakers,” said Deadline’s Peter Bart, who was VP Production at Paramount while Jaffe was running the studio., “I cannot think of another company president who matched his passion and good taste for serious films.”
Jaffe left Paramount in 1971 to launch Jaffilms, where he produced Bad Company and The Bad News Bears, before being named EVP Worldwide Production at Columbia Pictures — a post he held for only a couple of years before focusing on his producing career.
After winning the Kramer vs. Kramer Oscar, Jaffe teamed with then-20th Century Fox production president Sherry Lansing to launch Jaffe-Lansing Productions in late 1982. Together they produced a few films before scoring big with Fatal Attraction, the chilling 1987 thriller about a Dan Gallagher, a married New York lawyer (Douglas) who has a one-nighter with a co-worker (Glenn Close) who becomes obsessed with him after he breaks it off. The features the unforgettable plotline of the spurned lover boiling the pet rabbit of Gallagher’s daughter.
Fatal Attraction was a commercial smash, spending eight week atop the domestic box office and 10 at No. 1 in the UK, becoming the No. 2 film of 1987 worldwide. Jaffe and Lansing were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, one of a half-dozen the movie received. It lost the marquee prize to The Last Emperor and was shut out of the winner’s circle.
Jaffe and Lansing shared the 1989 ICG Publicists’ Showmanship Award and continued to produce movies until 1991, when Jaffe was named president and COO of Paramount Communications. The following year, he would be named president of Paramount Pictures, replacing Brandon Tartikoff. Jaffe remained in the post until Viacom bought out Paramount in 1994, leading to his exit.
Jaffe sued over his ouster, claiming that efforts to discuss his status with Viacom brass went unanswered and that he denied access to Paramount stock to which he was entitled. He lost the legal battle in 1995.
During his reign atop Paramount, the company owned the NHL’s New York Rangers, which ended a 54-year championship drought by winning the 1994 Stanley Cup.
He is survived by his wife of 38 years, Melinda, and Bobby, Betsy, Alex and Katie,