Sydney Pollack — the director, raised here

1934 – 2008 · raised in South Bend

The fame: Sydney Pollack directed Out of Africa (1985), which won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director; Tootsie (1982), in which he also acted; They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969); The Way We Were (1973); and Three Days of the Condor (1975). Through his company Mirage Enterprises he also produced films he did not direct, and he acted throughout his career. He was, for two decades, one of the defining directors of American studio filmmaking.

The tie, exactly: Pollack was not born in South Bend, and this section prints the correction plainly because aggregator biographies get it wrong: he was born on July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Indiana. He was raised in South Bend — that is the tie, and it is a real one. He acted in school drama at South Bend High School, graduated in 1952, and left at seventeen for New York, where he studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner. The formation the city can honestly claim is a South Bend boyhood and a South Bend stage; the birth certificate is Lafayette's.

The end: Pollack died on May 26, 2008, at Pacific Palisades, California.

Sources:

1. Standard biographical record of Pollack — the Lafayette birth, the South Bend upbringing, South Bend High School and the class of 1952, the Neighborhood Playhouse, the filmography and the Academy Awards for Out of Africa.
2. Aggregator biographies listing the birthplace as South Bend — carried here as a circulating error, corrected above.