Andrea Eastman Dead: ‘Godfather’ Casting Director, ICM Agent Was 86

Andrea Eastman, who as the head of casting at Paramount Pictures brought Ali MacGraw to Goodbye, Columbus and James Caan to The Godfather before serving as a manager and longtime ICM agent, has died. She was 86.

Eastman died Wednesday in her sleep at her home in Santa Barbara, publicist Jill Fritzo told The Hollywood Reporter.

A real straight-shooter, Eastman discovered Jaclyn Smith, got Steven Spielberg and Roy Scheider together for Jaws (1975), managed Sylvester Stallone in his Rocky heyday and talked Rob Reiner into hiring her client — and his best friend — Billy Crystal for When Harry Met Sally … (1989).

With a long stint at ICM in Los Angeles and New York, she also repped and/or managed Barbra Streisand, Burt Reynolds, Peter Boyle, Chevy Chase, Henry Winkler, Jamie Lee Curtis, Christopher Reeve, Katharine Ross, Christopher Plummer, James Brolin, Dustin Hoffman, Dyan Cannon, Gabriel Byrne, Brenda Vaccaro, Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Kathleen Turner, Stockard Channing, Tony Danza, Wes Craven, Katherine Heigl, Katie Couric, Elle MacPherson, Marshall Brickman and Charlie Rose, among many others over the years.

Eastman fought to cast MacGraw, then a 30-year-old photographer’s assistant and model new to acting, for the role of the younger Jewish-American princess Brenda Patimkin opposite Richard Benjamin as her romantic interest Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus (1969), directed by Larry Peerce.

Natalie Wood had already turned down the part, and the studio had looked at hundreds of other actresses before MacGraw came aboard. (The year the movie hit theaters, MacGraw wed Paramount Studios chief Robert Evans.)

Eastman initiated the casting for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and worked with Fred Roos to hire actors for the eventual Oscar winner for best picture.

“You make endless lists when you are a casting director,” she said in 2023. “When you do a movie, you try to think out of the box. For The Godfather, it was endless casting. We worked seven days a week. I was dreaming of Italians all night every night.”

Eastman thought Italian producer Carlo Ponti would make a great Vito Corleone before Godfather author Mario Puzo came up with the idea to cast Marlon Brando.

Caan had excelled in his screen test for the film and was slated to play Michael Corleone opposite the hulking Carmine Caridi as Sonny Corleone (Coppola had offered him the role in a bar). But when Al Pacino was hired to play Michael, Caan was out of the movie.

Caridi “was a big guy but not menacing. He was like a big Saint Bernard,” Eastman said. “Luckily, he’d never formally signed a deal, and Coppola trusted me. He was leaving for Sicily [to scout locations], so he told me, ‘Just cast my fucking movie!’”

After getting Charlie Bluhdorn, head of Paramount parent Gulf + Western, and Evans to sign off on Caan as Sonny and Pacino as Michael, Eastman hurriedly got Caan to sign a contract before someone changed their mind.

“We all worked as a team, but I am responsible for Jimmy Caan getting the part of Sonny,” she said. This era was the happiest time in her career, she often noted, but she would quit the studio in early 1973.

Born on June 15, 1940, Eastman grew up in Westport, Connecticut, where she attended Staples High School. She graduated from Ohio State University and married producer and backgammon expert Bruce Becker; after they divorced, she moved to California.

In summer 1968, she was working as an assistant for $150 a week for Paramount head of casting Joyce Selznick when the niece of Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick was fired. Eastman, then 28, took her place and made $300 a week.

She first spotted Smith when both were in the audience at the stage musical Hallelujah, Baby! “She was gorgeous,” Eastman said in an interview last year. “I walked up to her and gave her my card. She looked at me like, ‘Who is this person? She’s my age.’ And then I brought her in and she met Charlie Bluhdorn and Bob Evans and we put her under contract.” (Smith would play as a wedding guest in Goodbye, Columbus.)

Eastman’s tenure at Paramount also saw the release of such notable films as True Grit (1969), Downhill Racer (1969), the box office sensation Love Story (1970), Catch 22 (1970), T.R. Baskin (1971) and Play It Again, Sam (1972).

She said she quit Paramount when Frank Yablans, who had recently replaced Stanley R. Jaffe as studio chief, threatened to fire her if she attended the 1973 Academy Awards, where The Godfather was nominated for 11 Oscars.

She took a job at double her previous salary as an agent at International Famous Agency; her clients back then included Ross, Boyle, Curtis, Benjamin and Paula Prentiss.

She left to become Stallone’s manager, and that led to her agreeing in 1977 to form a joint personal management company with Jeff Wald, Ron DiBlasio and Herb Nanas. But soon after introducing Stallone to Wald, she was told by DiBlasio that “we don’t want to go forward with you, Jeff’s going to have his own company,” she recalled in 2023.

She said she was offered $25,000 but turned that down, and she would file a $1 million suit against Wald and DiBlasio for damages. She formed her own company, Andrea Eastman Management, before joining ICM in 1983.

She said Spielberg offered Scheider the role of police chief Martin Brody in Jaws at one of her dinner parties and that Reiner gave Crystal his script to When Harry Met Sally at one of her weddings. Later, she convinced Streisand to appear in an unglamorous role in Meet the Frockers (2004).

Eastman moved to Bozeman, Montana, full-time in 2005 and retired from ICM in 2010.

Survivors include her husband, attorney Richard Wilsker; she earlier was married to Paul N. Lazarus III (Westworld, Capricorn One).

In the 2022 Paramount+ miniseries The Offer, Eastman was portrayed by Stephanie Koenig. She said she did not appreciate that she and Godfather producer Al Ruddy were depicted as having a one-night stand when it fact they had love affair that lasted more than a year.

She established a sanctuary in Montana near Big Sky Resort dedicated to rescuing, rehabilitating and sheltering maltreated, abandoned and abused horses and dogs, and her impact as an animal advocate was chronicled in Jill Rappaport’s 2004 book, People We Know, Horses They Love.

In the late 1990s, she enlisted Robert Redford’s help in getting the nation’s first state initiative to ban the slaughter of horses for human consumption passed.

She spent three months in 2020 at the Beverly Hills Hotel recovering from open-heart surgery. Her late golden retriever had the run of the place, which was operating at a limited capacity during COVID, and a kids picture book written from the pooch’s perspective, Trooper at the Beverly Hills Hotel, was published in 2022.

After some tough early years in Hollywood, Eastman proved to be as tough as they come. “One of the things [you learn] being an agent is you don’t give up,” she said in 2014. “You never take no for an answer.”