Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of “Out of Africa” who achieved acclaim making popular, mainstream movies with A-list stars, including “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie,” died yesterday. He was 73.

Pollack, who also was a producer and actor, died of cancer at his home in the Pacific Palisades district of the city.

After launching his show-business career as an actor and acting teacher in New York City in the 1950s, Pollack moved west in the early ’60s and began directing television before turning to films.

Beginning with “The Slender Thread,” a 1965 drama starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, Pollack was credited with directing 20 films, including “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” a 1969 drama about Depression-era marathon dancers starring Jane Fonda that earned Pollack an Oscar nomination for best director.

Pollack directed seven movies with Robert Redford, beginning with “This Property Is Condemned” (with Natalie Wood) in 1966. The Pollack-Redford collaboration also produced “The Way We Were” (with Barbra Streisand), “Jeremiah Johnson,” “Three Days of the Condor” (with Faye Dunaway), “The Electric Horseman” (with Ms. Fonda), “Out of Africa” (with Meryl Streep), and “Havana.”

As a filmmaker, Pollack had a reputation for being a painstaking craftsman — “relentless and meticulous,” screenwriter and friend Robert Towne once said.

“His films have a lyrical quality like great music, and the timing is impeccable,” cinematographer Owen Roizman, who shot five films directed by Pollack, including “Tootsie” and “Havana,” said in 2005 when it was announced that Pollack would receive the 2006 American Society of Cinematographers Board of Governors Award for his contributions to the art of filmmaking.

“Out of Africa,” the 1985 drama based on Danish author Isak Dinesen’s experiences in Kenya during the early part of the 20th century and her romance with English big-game hunter-adventurer Denys Finch Hatton, earned Pollack two Academy Awards: as director and as producer of the film, which won the best picture Oscar.

Pollack also received a best director Oscar nomination — and a New York Film Critics Circle Award — for “Tootsie,” about an out-of-work actor who transforms his luck by dressing in drag. The making of the film was marked by creative dissension between Pollack and Mr. Hoffman — and unexpected difficulties.

“It’s like working with the mechanical shark in ‘Jaws,'” Pollack told the New York Times in 1982. “Dustin’s breasts fall down. The high heels hurt his feet. The makeup causes pimples, and the heat makes his beard show through after a couple of hours. It’s a 3 1/2-hour makeup job, and then the makeup only has a life of four or five hours. We didn’t anticipate that.”

Pressed by Mr. Hoffman to play his actor-character’s exasperated agent in “Tootsie,” Pollack finally consented to his first big-screen acting role since the 1962 film “War Hunt,” during which he met Mr. Redford, who also was making his film debut.

As an actor, Pollack later appeared in a number of films, including Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives,” Robert Altman’s “The Player,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” and the recent Oscar-nominated Tony Gilroy film “Michael Clayton.”

“I don’t care much about acting,” he told the South Bend Tribune in 2002. “It’s more about watching other directors work.”

Pollack’s experience as an actor and acting teacher helped earn him a reputation as an “actor’s director.”

Ms. Fonda, who earned an Oscar nomination for her leading role in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” has said the darkly dramatic film was “a turning point for me, both professionally and personally.”

With Pollack’s guidance, she said, “I probed deeper into the character and into myself than I had before, and I gained confidence as an actor,” she wrote in her autobiography, “My Life So Far.”

The son of a pharmacist, Pollack was born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and later moved with his family to South Bend.

“It was a real cultural desert,” he said of his experiences in South Bend in a 1993 interview with the New York Times. “There weren’t many Jews like us, and it was real anti-Semitic.”

His parents divorced while he was growing up, and his mother, who “had emotional problems and became an alcoholic,” died when Pollack was 16. Although his father envisioned him becoming a dentist, Pollack left home after graduating from high school and moved to New York to become an actor. After studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, Pollack became Meisner’s assistant.

Pollack had a small role in the 1955 Broadway comedy “The Dark Is Light Enough” and later appeared television roles.

As an actor he viewed teaching as his meal ticket. But after working with him as a dialect coach, Burt Lancaster convinced Pollack to try directing television. In 1966, Pollack won an Emmy for his direction of “The Game,” an episode of “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.”

His most recent film was a departure: “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” a documentary released in this country in 2006 about his friend, the renowned architect.