LOS ANGELES, (Reuters Life!) – Award-winning producer David L. Wolper, who won numerous awards over a long career that included his African American mini-series “Roots”, has died doing what he loved, watching TV. He was 82.
Wolper, whose career included producing the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Olympic games in Los Angeles, died quietly on Tuesday night of congestive heart disease and complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his spokesman Dale Olson.
The producer was at home in Beverly Hills with his wife of 36 years, Gloria, by his side.
In some 50 years in show business, Wolper and his company made more than 300 films and TV programs, accumulating over 150 awards including Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes and Peabody’s, and he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Television Hall of Fame.
Wolper earned an Oscar, the film industry’s top honor, for his 1959 documentary “The Race for Space,” and was a producer or executive producer on several movies including 1971’s “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” and 1997’s “L.A. Confidential.”
But it was “Roots” that may well have been his high-water mark. The 1977 mini-series was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Alex Haley and traced the history of a family dating to its forefather, an African man named Kunta Kinte, who is sold into slavery in America.
The show followed his family through numerous episodes of U.S. history seen through the perspective of black Americans, and the large cast included actors such as Ben Vereen, Leslie Uggams, Cicely Tyson and LeVar Burton.
Born January 11, 1928, in New York City, Wolper attended Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and the University of Southern California, where he studied Cinema and Journalism.
