Biography

Herbert Ross

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Herbert Ross started as a dancer. While in America he broke an ankle. Leaving the theatre was unthinkable for him, so he started doing choreography. He was 23 when his first ballet, Capriccios was performed to rave reviews in New York. Ballet Theatre was so impressed that they included it in their repertoire and commissioned him to create additional ballets for them. He went on to choreograph numerous Broadway shows, including On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Golden Boy, House of Flowers, I Can Get It For You Wholesale and Funny Girl, which was the test of super stardom for him and the key to his ultimate goal of directing.
- IMDb mini biography by: Tonyman 5

Directed 12 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Peter O'Toole, George Burns, Walter Matthau, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Anne Bancroft, Shirley MacLaine, Leslie Browne, Richard Dreyfuss, Marsha Mason, Quinn Cummings, Maggie Smith and Julia Roberts. Burns, Dreyfuss and Smith won Oscars for their performances in one of Ross' movies. He hit his peak in 1977, directing seven of the twenty nominated performances, including Dreyfuss and three of the five Best Actress nominees.
Brother-in-law of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from 1988 until her death in 1994.
He died of the same ailment that killed his father.
As of 2011, he is the only director to have directed both the Golden Globe winner for Best Drama and Best Musical/Comedy of the same year (The Turning Point (1977) and The Goodbye Girl (1977); he also won the Golden Globe for Best Director that year for the former.).
Former uncle of Caroline Kennedy and John Kennedy Jr.

[explaining why he quit ballet as a professional career] I was too tall and big-boned and never had good feet.
[on his father's death from heart failure after Ross dropped out of school] The truth will look very ugly in print, but the fact is that I don't feel guilty about what happened. I say this in spite of the fact that certain relatives--fortunately not my sister or my stepmother--accused me of causing my father's death. I would do the same thing again, because there was no other alternative for me. It was almost a primordial urge, like getting back to the sea.
[on working with Goldie Hawn on Protocol (1984)] Everyone knows that the woman is super-talented. She is also a saint. "Protocol" was a difficult production with lots of locations, a big cast and a tight schedule. Goldie was wonderful throughout.
[on T.R. Baskin (1971)] I was fooled by the script. I discovered in working on the script that it was like quicksand: the harder we worked, the more we investigated, the more damage we did.
I spent all those years in ballet, and as Balanchine [ballet dancer George Balanchine] said, ballet is women. I'm used to perceiving women as independent and often more than our equals.

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