RIP Stanley R Jaffe

 

Stanley R. Jaffe Dies: ‘Kramer Vs. Kramer’ Oscar Winner Who Also Produced ‘Fatal Attraction’ & More Was 84

DEADLINE

By Erik Pederson

March 10, 2925

 

Stanley R. Jaffe, a film executive and producer who won a Best Picture Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer and was nominated for Fatal Attraction during a career that also including producing such films as The Bad News Bears, Taps, Black Rain and Goodbye, Columbus, died today. He was 84.

CAA, which repped Jaffe, confirmed his death to Deadline.

Jaffe was a decade into his career when he produced Kramer vs. Kramer, the riveting 1979 child-custody drama starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, both winning lead acting Oscars — Streep’s first of three. It also scored Best Director and Adapted Screenplay Oscars for director Robert Benton.

He followed that by producing Taps for Paramount, where Jaffe at 29 had become the youngest major-studio head ever in 1969. The latter film about a mutiny at a soon-to-close military academy, starred Timothy Hutton and launched the careers of such future stars as Tom Cruise, Sean Penn and Giancarlo Esposito.

Those films came after Jaffe produced the 1969 Richard Benjamin-Ali MacGraw drama Goodbye, Columbus; I Start Counting (1970); the Jeff Bridges Civil War-era Bad Company (1972); and raunchy but revered 1976 Little League baseball comedy The Bad News Bears, starring Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal.

He went on to produce other films including the Kelly McGillis-Jodie Foster legal drama The Accused (1988), the Michael Douglas action thriller Black Rain (1989), the Brendan Fraser-Matt Damon period drama School Ties (1992), I Dreamed of Africa starring Kim Basinger (2000) and Shekhar Kapur’s 2002 The Four Feathers led by Heath Ledger.

Jaffe also produced and had his lone directing credit on the 1983 missing-child drama Without a Trace. “The decision to direct it myself didn’t reflect any discontent I had with any of the directors I’d worked with,” he told The New York Times that year. “Selfishly, I just wanted to stretch myself out, like anyone else.”

His executive producing credits include the 2023 Paramount+ series Fatal Attraction along with the features Madeline (1998), Michael Apted’s Firstborn starring Teri Garr, Peter Weller and Corey Haim — in his big-screen debut — and others.

Jaffe was born on July 31, 1940, in New Rochelle, NY, into a showbiz family. His father was Leo Jaffe, who worked at Columbia Pictures for more than a half-century, moving up from accountant to president and CEO and chairman of the board. He received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 1978 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Stanley Jaffe’s sister was Andrea Jaffe, a powerhouse PR exec later Fox marketing chief who died in 2016.

Stanley Jaffe began his career at Seven Arts Associates in the early 1960s and left for CBS after Warner Bros acquired Seven Arts in 1967. Three years later, Jaffe was named EVP and COO at Paramount Pictures — and just three months after that, he rose to president of the studio.

But he left Paramount in 1971 to launch Jaffilms, where he produced Bad Company and The Bad News Bears, before being named EVP Worldwide Production at Columbia Pictures — a post he held for only a couple of years before focusing on his producing career.

JAFFE, Stanley R. (Stanley Richard Jaffe)

Born: 7/31/1940, New Rochelle, New York, U.S.A.

Died: 3/10/2025, Rancho Mirage, California, U.S.A.

 

Stanley R. Jaffe’s western – producer:

Bad Company - 1972