 The Hollywood director Robert Mulligan died yesterday at the age of 83. After attending Fordham University and serving with the Marines in World War II, Mulligan broke into directing for television, working his way up from a job as messenger boy. During the era of live TV plays, he directed such notable broadcasts as Gore Vidal's 1954 adaptation of William Faulkner's Barn Burning; Vidal's The Death of Billy the Kid starring Paul Newman, which would provide the basis for the Arthur Penn movie The Left-Handed Gun, also with Newman; the 1955 A Man Is Ten Feet Tall, starring Sidney Poitier; and, in 1959, The Moon and Sixpence, which marked the first of Laurence Olivier's rare appearances on American TV. (Both Mulligan and Olivier won Emmys for it.) By then, Mulligan had already made the leap to feature films with the 1957 Fear Strikes Out, a biopic starring Anthony Perkins as the emotionally troubled baseball player player Jimmy Piersall. That success helped established his reputation as a gifted director with actors who could apply a delicate hand to sensitive material.
 Those virtues would come in handy with Mulligan's best-remembered film, the 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird. Read More...
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