Sam Cohn, a powerful talent agent who dominated New York's talent business during his heyday, has died. He was 79.
Cohn, who was at International Creative Management since its inception in 1975 and headed the New York office for nearly 25 years, died Wednesday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital after a brief illness, said family friend David Richenthal, a Broadway producer. The family did not disclose the nature of the illness.
Over the years, his long list of clients included Paul Newman, Woody Allen, Meryl Streep, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Lily Tomlin, Nora Ephron, Bob Fosse, Robert Altman, Mike Nichols and E.L. Doctorow.
Dubbed by Time magazine in 1993 “the first super agent of the modern age," Cohn was “a finger-in-every-pie packager who represented the writer and the director and the stars of a given production."
A decade earlier, a New Yorker profile noted that in 1981 “ten feature films and nine Broadway or off-Broadway plays opened that were written, directed or produced by one of his clients or in which a Cohn client had a major acting role."
Cohn also was known for getting Columbia Pictures to pay a record $9.5 million for the movie rights to the Broadway musical “Annie."
“When I first met Sam as a young producer and asked him why he had become an agent, his answer was very to the point," Richenthal said. “He said, 'I like being on the side of the artists.' And I think that certainly summarized his work point of view. He wanted to be an advocate for great artists."
