Lynda Obst, the veteran film and TV producer whose work includes rom-com classics “Sleepless in Seattle” and “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” among many others, has died. She was 74 years old.
“My mom was a trailblazer and a fierce advocate for women. Also, she was an amazing mother, sister and best friend,” the industry stalwart’s son, Oly Obst, said in a statement to media. “[My wife] Julie and I are incredibly grateful that she was my mom and that my daughters got to have her as a grandmother. We will miss her.”
Obst died Tuesday while surrounded by loved ones in her Los Angeles home.
In addition to her work on romantic comedies like “One Fine Day,” “Hope Floats,” “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” the latter of which she served as executive producer with Gary Foster producing, Obst’s four decades of credits also include producing sci-fi classics “Interstellar” and “Contact” and TV series like “Hot in Cleveland,” “Good Girls Revolt” and most recently “The Hot Zone.”
The Hollywood Reporter first broke the news.
The producer revealed to that same publication in February her diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, more commonly known as COPD, an often fatal respiratory disease often brought on by smoking — a habit that Obst credited at the time to her diagnosis.
According to her website, Obst had two projects in development at the time of her death: “Voyagers” and “K-Pop: Lost in America.” The former is directed and co-written by Sebastián Lelio with Jessica Goldberg and “follows Carl Sagan during the creation of the golden record for the Voyager interplanetary mission, and the disruptive yet extremely romantic love story at its core,” according to an official logline. The latter follows a K-Pop band who incidentally become stranded in Texas after performing at Coachella and is directed by JK Youn (“Hero”).
As beloved in Hollywood for her contributions to American film as she was for her advocacy work for women in the medium, Obst also took pride in her cinematic contributions to sci-fi and the ways she and her collaborators pushed the genre while staying true to the science. Both “Contact,” which boasted Carl Sagan as an executive producer, and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” were notably discerning about dramatizing science in profound — but accurate — ways.
In career retrospective interview with The City University of New York, Obst said that scientific accuracy in those cases “is everything to me.”
“I was so enamored with science and had been since I was a philosophy of science student at Columbia graduate school,” she said. “I realized that the real thing was fundamentally more interesting than anything that a screenwriter could make up, and if you were patient enough to do the real thing and worked with a screenwriter who was patient enough to learn the real thing, then you could portray on the screen things that were far more astonishing and awesome than anything a special effects person could make up, anything a production designer could make up, or anything a screenwriter could make up.”
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