"Cool Hand Luke" director dead at 79

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Television and film director Stuart Rosenberg, whose best-known movies include the prison drama "Cool Hand Luke" and hit chiller "The Amityville Horror," has died of a heart attack at age 79, his family said on Monday.

Rosenberg, whose last directorial credit was for the 1991 contemporary western "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys," died on Thursday at his home in Beverly Hills, his wife Margot told Reuters.

The Brooklyn-born filmmaker spent a decade working on various TV series before making his big-studio debut as director of the 1967 film "Cool Hand Luke," starring Paul Newman as a rebellious inmate of a prison camp at odds with the sadistic "captain," played by Strother Martin.

The movie earned Newman the fourth Oscar nomination of his career and co-star George Kennedy won the Academy Award for his supporting role as a fellow prisoner. But it was Martin who delivered the movie's most memorable line: "What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

Rosenberg was nominated by the Directors Guild of America that year for its best film director award, but he lost out to Mike Nichols for his work on "The Graduate."

Rosenberg went on to direct Newman in three more films -- "WUSA," "Pocket Money" and "The Drowning Pool" -- and he directed Robert Redford's performance as a reform-minded prison warden in the 1980 drama "Brubaker."

"He was as good as anybody I ever worked with," Newman said in a statement released through his publicist.

Rosenberg also directed French actress Catherine Deneuve in her American motion picture debut, the 1969 romantic comedy "The April Fools," co-starring Jack Lemmon.

But his biggest commercial success was probably 1979's haunted-house drama "The Amityville Horror," which has spawned seven sequels to date.

Prior to his film career, Rosenberg directed numerous television series, mostly dramas, including such shows as "Naked City," "Ben Casey," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "The Twilight Zone" and "The Untouchables."