Al Ruddy, Oscar-Winning producer of ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Million Dollar Baby,’ dies at 94

Al Rudy, who won the Academy Awards for producing the best picture winners ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Million Dollar Baby’, has died at 94. Ruddy died on May 25 following a brief illness at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, his family announced through a publicist.

As soon as the news of his death was shared, stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood paid tribute to him on social media.

Calling him his ‘dear friend and a mentor’, Arnold said he’s filled with gratitude that he had the opportunity to get to know such a great man with such a big heart.

More about Al Ruddy

Al Ruddy co-created the famed CBS sitcom ‘Hogan’s Heroes’. He is also credited as one of the creators of the long-running CBS police drama ‘Walker, Texas Ranger’.

Following The Godfather (1972), Ruddy produced another hit, The Longest Yard (1974), a prison football movie starring Burt Reynolds. The duo then reunited for the action-comedy films The Cannonball Run (1981) and its 1984 sequel, both directed by stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham.

The personable Ruddy, known for his ‘penchant for four-letter words,’ also produced Bad Girls (1994), the first Western with all-female leads (Madeleine Stowe, Mary Stuart Masterson, Andie MacDowell, and Drew Barrymore); the baseball comedy The Scout (1994) starring Albert Brooks and Brendan Fraser; and Matilda (1978), a comedy featuring Elliott Gould and a boxing kangaroo, which Ruddy also wrote.

In the early 1960s, Kelly’s Heroes director Brian Hutton introduced Ruddy to Bernard Fein, who had played Pvt. Gomez opposite Phil Silvers as Sgt. Bilko on television. The duo created a sitcom pilot about prisoners who outsmart their warden and leave jail at will. Initially, there were no takers, but when they learned NBC was working on a comedy set in an Italian POW camp, they changed their setting to a German POW camp. CBS and Bing Crosby Productions picked up the series, which starred Bob Crane and debuted in September 1965, running for six seasons.

Ruddy turned down the chance to produce or write for Hogan’s Heroes to pursue a career in films. ‘When the show became a smash, I got calls from every studio in town, asking for ideas for other shows that I had,’ he said in the 2005 book The Godfather Legacy.

At Paramount, Ruddy met Robert Evans, who gave him an office on the lot. He then enticed Robert Redford and Michael J. Pollard to star in Big Fauss and Little Halsy (1970) and produced the teen dramedy Making It (1971). Though neither was a big hit, Ruddy brought both films under budget.

Ruddy’s other producing efforts included Death Hunt (1981); the campy Megaforce (1982), also directed by Needham; Lassiter (1984), starring Tom Selleck; the Rodney Dangerfield soccer movie Ladybugs (1992); Heaven’s Prisoners (1996); Mean Machine (2001), another prison-set yarn; Camille (2008); Sabotage (2014); and Eastwood’s Cry Macho (2021).

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