Rise to Fame
He started as a child actor in Yiddish theater, but acting was never really the point. By the early 1950s, he was directing live drama at CBS, where a mistake went out to millions and there was no editing around it afterward. That discipline went straight into 12 Angry Men (1957): shot fast on a single soundstage, it earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director. He became one of the first TV directors to make the jump to film and not disappoint, which sounds like a low bar until you see how many of them tried.
In the Spotlight
His body of work is the argument. Four Oscar nominations for Best Director across three decades: 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict. His actors collected 18 Oscar nominations. In 2005, the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. His final film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), shot when he was 82, is one of his best. The New York films (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City) hold up not as nostalgia but as evidence of what a director can do when he refuses to compromise.
Side Notes
His family tree reads like a tabloid pitch. His second wife was Gloria Vanderbilt; his third was Gail Jones, daughter of Lena Horne. He and Jones had two daughters, including Jenny Lumet, who grew up to write Rachel Getting Married (2008). As a child actor he played Jesus on Broadway. None of it matches the image he projected onscreen: the methodical New York moralist making 40+ films about institutional rot. The private life was considerably messier.
Final Chapter
A memorial at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall drew Christopher Walken, James Gandolfini, Lauren Bacall, and David Mamet among the speakers. The Film Society of Lincoln Center held a week-long retrospective, screening 16 of his films. In October 2011, Human Rights First inaugurated the Sidney Lumet Award for Integrity in Entertainment, giving its first honor to The Good Wife.