David L. Wolper, an award-winning movie and television producer best known for the groundbreaking mini-series “Roots,” died on Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif.
He was 82.
The cause was congestive heart failure and complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Dale Olson, Mr. Wolper’s publicist.
Mr. Wolper produced hundreds of films and television shows, including the hit 1983 mini-series “The Thorn Birds,” a romantic drama set in Australia, with Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward. But the work with which he was most closely associated was “Roots,” shown in eight parts on ABC in 1977.
The saga of an African-American family’s journey from Africa to slavery and emancipation, based on the best-selling book by Alex Haley, “Roots,” with a cast including LeVar Burton, Ben Vereen and many others, was not the first mini-series, but it was the first to have a major influence not just in the ratings but in American culture. One of the highest-rated entertainment programs in television history, it went on to win nine Emmy Awards and ignited a lively national discussion about race.
Another of Mr. Wolper’s productions, “The Hellstrom Chronicle” (1971), a film concerned with mankind’s real and imagined difficulties with insects, won an Academy Award.
Mr. Wolper initially made his mark as a producer of documentaries and later focused on fictionalized accounts of historical events. He drew his share of criticism: it was sometimes suggested that his documentaries were not sufficiently probing, that his so-called docudramas took too many liberties with the facts, that he was more showman than historian.
Critics were also cool to many of his big-screen productions, which included “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969), “I Love My Wife” (1970) and “One Is a Lonely Number” (1972), although he received good reviews for some, notably “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” (1971) and “L.A. Confidential” (1997), which won two Oscars.
“The Bridge at Remagen” (1969), about a World War II battle in Germany, was probably the Wolper movie that attracted the most attention — not for what was on the screen, but because his production company was run out of Czechoslovakia when the Soviet Army invaded.
Mr. Wolper scored an early success in 1963 with the television documentary “The Making of the President 1960,” based on Theodore H. White’s best-selling book about John F. Kennedy’s quest for the White House. It won four Emmys, including program of the year.
Other noteworthy television projects in the 1960s included the series “Biography,” “Hollywood and the Stars” and “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” In the 1970s he branched out into sitcoms, producing “Chico and the Man” and “Welcome Back, Kotter” with James Komack.
Married three times, Mr. Wolper is survived by his wife of 36 years, the former Gloria Hill; two sons, Mark and Michael, and a daughter, Leslie, by his second wife, the former Margaret Dawn Richard; and 10 grandchildren.
Mr. Wolper remained active as a producer of mini-series and documentaries well into the 1990s. Besides “The Thorn Birds,” his noteworthy later productions included “North and South” (1985). In 2002 he revisited his most famous production with the television special “Roots: Celebrating 25 Years.”
Mr. Wolper was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 1989.