Sydney Pollack directed some of the most successful Hollywood movies of the 1970s and 1980s, harnessing big budgets and big stars and winning a brace of Oscars, as director and producer, for Out of Africa (1985), the lavish romantic drama set in colonial Africa. There were further nominations for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) and the classic cross-dressing comedy Tootsie (1982).

He was known as a meticulous craftsman, working very much within the mainstream, rather than as an auteur with a distinct specialism or style, which is why he never became as well known with the general public as the likes of Hitchcock, Spielberg and Tarantino.

But in recent years he raised his public profile through his work as a character actor. He had a recurring role as Will’s father in the sitcom Will and Grace (2000-06) and was seen as Patrick Dempsey’s much married father in the comedy Made of Honor, which came out in the UK this month.

His films were highly commercial, mainly dramas and comedies. When he made westerns and war films it was with an underlying social message. His movies were characterised both by high production values and a liberal sensibility, which extended to his work as a producer, including the recent George Clooney film Michael Clayton. It brought him one final Oscar nomination this year.

He was an actors’ director and a noted perfectionist. He reputedly spent two days filming a kiss between Robert Redford and Jane Fonda on The Electric Horseman (1979). When he came up against fellow perfectionist Dustin Hoffman on the set of the comedy Tootsie, their clashes became the stuff of Hollywood legend.

Hoffman plays an actor who passes himself off as a woman to get work. He persuaded Pollack to play his agent and they continued their bickering on screen, an element that undoubtedly added to the film’s appeal. Pollack, who had begun his showbiz career as an actor, won a New York Film Critics Circle award for best director for Tootsie, but said: “I’d give it up, if I could have back the nine months of my life I spent with Dustin making it.”

He worked repeatedly with other major stars, however, and his career became inextricably linked with that of Redford. They met as actors on the Korean War movie War Hunt (1962). Pollack first directed Redford in This Property is Condemned (1966). Redford subsequently became one of the world’s biggest stars and continued to place great trust in Pollack.

They made seven feature films together, as director and star, including Out of Africa and The Way We Were (1973), and Pollack helped Redford to found his Sundance Institute to encourage new film-makers.

Pollack also produced or co-produced dozens of films in the US and UK, including Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and Cold Mountain (2003). The last two were directed by Anthony Minghella (obituary, March 19, 2008), who also made the BBC film The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (2008), on which Pollack was executive producer.

Pollack’s public profile rose as he developed his career as an actor once more. He proved popular with directors who did have reputations as auteurs, appearing in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992) and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Sydney Irwin Pollack was born into a Russian-Jewish family in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1934. His father was a pharmacist. His parents divorced when he was a child and his mother struggled with alcoholism and died when he was in his teens. His father had hoped that Pollack would become a dentist, but he was determined to become an actor, studied with Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York and subsequently taught there.

He appeared on Broadway and on television, notably in a 1959 adaptation of For Whom the Bell Tolls, directed by John Frankenheimer. However, teaching remained his main source of income and he had no illusions that he was about to become a major star. “The way I looked I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend,” he told one interviewer.