Perry Miller Adato, who began her award-winning career as a documentary director in the late 1960s, when few women were in the field, and went on to make films about Georgia O’Keeffe, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and other cultural figures, died on Sept. 16 at her home in Westport, Conn. She was 97.
Her niece Brooke Garber Neidich confirmed her death.
Perry Miller Adato in 2007. (File Photo).Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images
“She was a great filmmaker and an absolute perfectionist,” Susan Lacy, the creator of the PBS documentary series American Masters, who worked with Ms. Adato on two films in that series, said in an interview. “She stood equal with men in an industry that wasn’t always welcoming to women.”
Ms. Adato, whose first film was Dylan Thomas: The World I Breathe (1968), was known for her vivid storytelling, which used on-screen and off-screen voices, photographs and scenes from plays – techniques that have since become commonplace in documentaries.
Her Thomas film won an Emmy Award for outstanding cultural documentary. Georgia O’Keeffe (1977) brought her a Directors Guild of America Award, the first for a documentary by a woman. She would win a total of four DGA awards.
“If you want to change people’s minds and their attitudes, if you want to teach them or tell them anything,” Ms. Adato said in a video interview on her archive’s website in 2011, “you can’t lecture to them. You have to entertain them.”
She got her first chance to entertain people in 1967. Until then, she had worked as a film researcher. When she urged Jac Venza, a cultural producer at NET, to make a documentary about Thomas, the Welsh poet known for Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, he suggested she produce and direct it.
“I had seen so many films on art,” she recalled on her website, “that I obviously had learned something, and I guess I maybe had a feel for it.”
The documentary, part of the series NET Journal, blended interviews with Thomas’s friends, audio recordings of him, photos and notebooks. Reviewing it in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Harry Harris wrote that it “had all the fascination of superior drama as it traced Thomas’s tumultuous career.”
In 1970, she made Gertrude Stein: When This You See, Remember Me, which emerged from her idea for a documentary about Paris as a fecund cultural catalyst between 1905 and 1930. Told that Paris was too broad a subject, she chose Stein, the bold avant-garde writer, as someone whose life and work embodied that period.
Documentarian Ken Burns recalled watching the Stein film in the 1970s as a student.
“I had this ‘aha’ moment where I said, ‘Don’t show the actors, just use the chorus of voices under the photos,’” Mr. Burns said in a telephone interview. “She opened the door to using first-person voices, so my first film, Brooklyn Bridge, had a third-person narrator and a chorus of first-person narrators, all off camera.”
“You need to find your way,” he continued, “and she permitted me to find mine.”
Lillian Perry Miller was born Dec. 22, 1920, in Yonkers, N.Y. She pursued an acting career during and after high school. After the war, she worked for the UN as a film consultant. In 1950, after a brief marriage ended in divorce, she moved to Paris, where she developed an expertise in European documentaries, including those by undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau.
She subsequently created the Film Advisory Center to import European documentaries to the United States, but left the centre in 1953 to join CBS as a film researcher.
Ms. Adato leaves two daughters and two grandchildren. Her husband, Neil Adato, died last year.