Sam Cohn

Super-agent who helped shape the careers of a raft of stars, directors and writers

What factor links the directors Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols; the actors Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Sigourney Weaver and Whoopi Goldberg; and the writers Arthur Miller, Nora Ephron and EL Doctorow? They were all represented by the super-agent Sam Cohn, who has died aged 79.

Although, in show-business myth-ology, the agent holds an ignominious position, Cohn won the respect of his clients by helping, as an "auteur agent", to shape their careers creatively.

For three decades, he was a leading player at International Creative Management, usually known as ICM, though he did not conform to the stereotypical image of a "ten percenter". Paradoxically, he disdained Hollywood, hardly ever leaving New York. "I wouldn't want to live in LA any more than I would want to live in Los Alamos," he once stated. Cohn, a devotee of the theatre, opera and classical music concerts, considered the west coast to be lacking in culture.

Nonetheless, he did have his eccentricities. One was an annoying tendency not to return phone calls. Some clients would call dozens of times a day, to no avail. When asked once why he did this, he replied: "I hate giving bad news." But his main idiosyncrasy was eating paper. He would put pieces of napkins, screenplays, newspapers and magazines into his mouth, chew and swallow them.

Ephron lampooned this peculiar habit in her first directorial effort, This Is My Life (1992), in which Dan Aykroyd played a paper-munching agent, dressed in the sort of threadbare sweaters and slacks Cohn would wear. Cohn did not object to this portrayal. On the other hand, when Altman was asked why there was not a single reference to an agent in The Player, his Hollywood satire of the same year, the director said he preferred not to give agents the satisfaction of being thought important.

Cohn was important in many ways. One of his strengths was as a talent spotter. He signed up Goldberg, whom he saw in a small workshop production, and facilitated the launch of Cher as a serious actor. He also took on Streep after seeing her play the maid Dunyasha in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at Lincoln Center, New York, in 1977.

Among his other achievements was getting a no-interference deal with United Artists for Allen, who admitted that "I've traded the idea of making millions in return for artistic control". Cohn also managed to get studios to approve obviously non-commercial projects such as Nichols's Carnal Knowledge (1971), Lumet's Equus (1977), Allen's Interiors (1978) and Altman's Quintet (1979). In addition, he would spend hours with clients, going through parts and dissecting scripts, while the phone messages from frustrated wheelers and dealers out in Los Angeles piled up on his desk.

Invariably, he could be found lunching and holding court at Table No 1 in the Russian Tea Room, a short walk from his 57th Street office. Few who knew him could have failed to recognise something of Cohn in Sydney Pollack's portrayal of Dustin Hoffman's agent in Pollack's Tootsie (1982), especially in the scene in the Russian Tea Room at Cohn's table. "I'm your agent, not your mother! I'm not supposed to find plays for you to star in. I'm supposed to field offers!"

Cohn was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, into a wealthy family who made a fortune from oil. At 14, he was sent to Culver military academy in Indiana, from where he graduated as private first class. He then went on to Princeton University, New Jersey, where he majored in English and German literature, and qualified as a lawyer at Yale law school in New Haven, Connecticut. This led to his appointment as legal adviser at CBS and then the talent agency General Artists Corp. Being a lawyer himself, Cohn refused to work with entertainment attorneys, cutting them out of the deal-making process whenever he could.

His first coup was setting up the deal for the Broadway musical Annie, which cost $800,000 and made $20m during its six-year run. In 1982, he got Columbia Pictures to pay an astonishing $9.5m for the movie rights. According to the New Yorker magazine: "In 1981, 10 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."

He is survived by his third wife Jane, a son, Peter ,and a daughter, Marya.

Samuel Charles Cohn, show-business agent, born 11 May 1929; died 6 May 2009