The director began working in live television in New York in the early 1950s and won an Emmy Award for the TV movie The Moon and Sixpence in 1960. His first film, Fear Strikes Out, was released in 1957 and told the story of mentally ill baseball player Jimmy Piersall, played by Anthony Perkins. Mulligan directed 19 more films, including Summer of '42,The Other and Same Time, Next Year"before capping his career in 1991 with Man in the Moon, featuring actress Reese Witherspoon in her movie debut.
The highlight of Mulligan's career was To Kill a Mockingbird, a courtroom drama adapted from Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and centered on Southern attorney Atticus Finch and his children, Scout and Jem. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture, and won three: best actor (Gregory Peck), best screenplay (Horton Foote) and art direction (Alexander Golitzen, Henry Bumstead and Oliver Emert). (Lawrence of Arabia was named best picture and David Lean best director for that film.)
Mockingbird was one of seven films Mulligan made in collaboration with producer Alan J. Pakula between 1957 and 1969, among them Love With the Proper Stranger (1963) starring Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen and Up the Down Staircase (1967) with Sandy Dennis.
As a director, Mulligan became known for his sensitive treatment of the emotional highs and lows experienced by children and adolescents when confronting traumatic circumstances. The Finch children see their father defending an innocent black man against his bigoted white accuser in Mockingbird; Hermie falls in love with a slightly older woman whose husband has been sent off to war in the nostalgic 1971 film Summer of '42 (with Mulligan serving as the narrator); a young white boy played by Neil Patrick Harris and his Jamaican nanny (Whoopi Goldberg) find common ground amid family turmoil in Clara's Heart (1988); and Witherspoon's character discovers the pain of teenage heartbreak in Man in the Moon.
“Ordinarily they say that cliche, a 'coming-of-age movie,' and I reject that term," Mulligan said in a 1991 interview with the Dallas Morning News. “I think it's 'coming to life.' I felt, when I looked back on it, that I really didn't know what life was about until I was somewhere in my teens, when you become aware that sooner or later you're going to have to walk out the front door. Mother and Father are not going to be there, you're not going to be protected. All those things become exciting and terrifying at the same time."
