Fifi Oscard, who died Saturday at 85, was one of New York’s leading talent and literary agents.

Oscard’s career was both lengthy and varied, dating from the late 1940s, when she finagled a job as George Kaufman’s agent, until just last week, when a heart attack put her in the hospital.

Along the way, she represented Orson Welles in his late-career “no wine before its time” phase; Jackson Beck, the voice that intoned, “Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane…”; and, early in their careers, Warren Beatty, Jack Palance, and Meg Ryan.

As a literary agent, she shepherded books like “Growing Up Brady” (1993) and “Debbie” (1988), the authorized biography of Debbie Reynolds, as well as the literary output of actors, including William Shatner and LeVar Burton. In recent years, she took on clients who possessed a more literary tone, including Mark Mathabane, and Margaret Edison, the Atlanta schoolteacher whose play “Wit” won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

An icon of her industry, Oscard was known for plain dress and plain speaking. When Ms. Edison decided to return to teaching kindergarten, she said that Oscard’s agency helped her. “The thing I appreciate most is their unwillingness to make me a star, so they’re an anti-agent,” Ms. Edison told Greenwich Magazine in 2001. “It would be easy for someone to try and exploit my success, but Fifi has always been deferential to what I do. She respects that I want to fulfill my obligations to the taxpayers of Georgia.”

Oscard, a native New Yorker, became an agent almost by accident. The story she told was that she was visiting an agent friend when George S. Kaufman called, in search of an agent. Slightly bored at age 29 with life as a mother of two, she took the job for free. A couple of years later, she moved to the Lucille Philips agency in a paid capacity. In 1959, she bought the agency and put her own name on the door.

Oscard agency initially specialized in commercials and acting. She represented Alexander Scourby, a Broadway talent, now deceased, whose books-ontape reading of the King James Bible still sells briskly. In the 1960s, she attracted Dick Cavett, Patty Duke, and Dustin Hoffmann.

Oscard’s first literary property was the book “What’s My Line,” a history of the panel game show, in 1978. Sensing a market in writing about actors, she developed the joint memoir of Marty Ingels and Shirley Jones. “Growing Up Brady” became a best seller.

The Oscard agency represented the U.S. Women’s Volleyball team from the 1984 Olympics, and also brought to market David Wells’s star autobiography, “Perfect I’m Not” (2003), in which the ostensible author claimed to have been misquoted in statements about his teammates on the Yankees. Arthur Ashe was another sports celebrity she represented, for his memoir “Days of Grace” (1993).

Mr. Shatner became a client soon after the cancellation of “Star Trek” and stayed with Oscard to make new television series, Star Trek films, Priceline commercials, and even write several books, both fiction and nonfiction.

“A difficult client is somebody who has an inaccurate picture of himself,” Oscard said in the interview with Greenwich Magazine, clearly not referring to the multitalented Mr. Shatner. “Clients think they can do more things than they can do. They think that they are more important than they are.”

Oscard did many things well. An enthusiastic tennis player, she maintained courts at her homes in Greenwich, Conn., and Martha’s Vineyard, where she was a redoubtable member of the Yacht Club. In Manhattan, she kept an apartment and was a member of the Hall of Science, the Mercantile Library, the Coffee House Club, the Women’s Forum, and more. Well into her 70s, she led a social life active enough to exhaust her own grandchildren, when they tried to keep up.

Fifi Oscard
Born July 16, 1920, in New York City; died November 12 of the effects of a heart attack; her husband, Harold Steinmetz, died in 1984; she was also predeceased by a daughter, Nancy Murray; she is survived by her son, Eric Steinmetz, and six grandchildren.