A celebrated stage and film director, Ulu Grosbard became renowned for features with intense character studies and in which actors give superb performances. Originally trained as a diamond cutter--which some may call the birthright of the Jews of his native Antwerp, Belgium--he emigrated to the USA in the late 1940s. After attending the University of Chicago and Yale School of Drama and a brief stint in the US Army, Grosbard made his stage directorial debut with a production of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge" on Long Island, NY (and later earned critical plaudits and accolades for a 1965 Off-Broadway production of the same play). He entered feature films as an assistant director working with such masters as Elia Kazan on "Splendor in the Grass", Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins on "West Side Story" and Robert Rossen on "The Hustler" (all 1961) and Arthur Penn on "The Miracle Worker" (1962).

Grosbard made his Off-Broadway directorial debut in 1962 with "The Days & Nights of Bebee Fenstermaker" and triumphed with his handling of the Broadway production of Frank Gilroy's Pulitzer Prize-winner "The Subject Was Roses" two years later. In 1968, Grosbard was at the helm of the feature version that marked Patricia Neal's return to acting after a series of near-fatal strokes and saw Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen recreate their stage roles. His subsequent feature work included offbeat productions such as "Who Is Harry Kellerman, and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?" (1971), in which Dustin Hoffman was a composer who finds success does not bring happiness, "Straight Time" (1978), again with Hoffman cast as an ex-con, and "True Confessions" (1981) with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall in a tale of brothers and power. Less successful was the melodrama "Falling in Love" (1984) in which De Niro and Meryl Streep are strangers who meet on a train and eventually find themselves compelled to be together. After a decade's absence, Grosbard returned to films as producer and director of "Georgia" (1995), a character study of two sisters, the self-destructive no-talent singer Sadie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her successful and seemingly perfect sibling Georgia (Mare Winningham in an Oscar-nominated turn). He followed with "The Deep End of the Ocean" (lensed 1997-98), about a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) searching for her kidnapped son.