Albert S Ruddy

Albert S. Ruddy, who found early success in television as a creator of “Hogan’s Heroes,” the situation comedy about Allied prisoners outwitting their bumbling Nazi captors in a P.O.W. camp, and then became a movie producer who won Oscars for “The Godfather” and “Million Dollar Baby,” died on Saturday June 1 2024 in Los Angeles. He was 94. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Wanda McDaniel, and his daughter, Alexandra Ruddy. Ruddy was born Albert Stotland on March 28, 1930, in Montreal. His father, Hyman, manufactured uniforms. His mother, Ruth (Rudnikoff) Stotland, was a clothing and luxury fur designer. After his parents divorced when Albert was 6, his mother moved to New York City with him, his sister, Selma, and his brother, Gerald, and changed the family surname to Ruddy. After studying at the City College of New York, Albert attended the University of Southern California and graduated with an architecture degree in 1956. He was briefly the architect for a construction company in New Jersey but chose to go back to the West Coast. There he was a programmer for the RAND Corporation, a shoe salesman and the producer of the 1961 Los Angeles production of“The Connection,” a play about drug addiction, and of the movie “Wild Seed” (1965), about a teenage runaway searching for her biological father. He produced many other films, including “Farewell to the King,” with Nick Nolte; “The Cannonball Run,” with Burt Reynolds and Farrah Fawcett, and its sequel; and “The Scout,” with Albert Brooks. He also produced TV series, among them “Walker, Texas Ranger,” which he created. Ms. McDaniel, his wife, said that he had been proudest of conceiving “The Longest Yard,” a 1974 film about a nasty prison warden (Eddie Albert) who coerces an incarcerated ex-pro quarterback (Burt Reynolds) to put together a football team to play against a squad of sadistic guards. n addition to his wife, an executive vice president at Giorgio Armani, and his daughter, an actress, producer and writer and a partner at Albert S. Ruddy Productions, Mr. Ruddy is survived by a son, John. His marriages to Kaye Farrington, an actress, and Francoise Wizenberg Glaser ended in divorce.