Jay Kanter, the high-powered Hollywood agent who represented Brando, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe died Tuesday, Aug 7, at age 97.

He became famous (and infamous) for serving as the inspiration for Jack Lemmon’s character in Billy Wilder 1960Oscar film, The Apartment, .Kanter died at his home in Beverly Hills, a spokesperson for the Independent Artist Group announced. His son Adam Kanter is a partner at IAG.

A favorite of mighty Music Corporation of America mogul Lew Wasserman, Kanter also spent seven years in England in the 1960s greenlighting European movies for Universal, produced films including the Elizabeth Taylor-starring X, Y and Zee (1972) and had a long business relationship with Alan Ladd Jr. at Fox and MGM.

When Brando was slumming around Paris after breaking out on Broadway in Streetcar Named Desire in the late 1940s, Kanter‚ then an MCA junior agent, received a call from producer Stanley Kramer saying he wanted to hire the actor to make his film debut in The Men (1950) as a paralyzed ex-G.I.

Kanter was not the budding superstar’s agent — Edith Van Cleve was — but he picked him up at train station and took him to the home of Brando’s aunt and uncle in San Marino, California, and they all had dinner. The next day, Kanter drove the actor to meeting with Kramer, director Fred Zinnemann and writer Carl Foreman, then asked him to come to the MCA office to meet the other agents.

When Wasserman heard the story, “He really got a kick out of it because he was getting telephone calls from Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner, these heads of studios that wanted to meet Marlon,” Kanter noted. “And Lew said, ‘I can’t arrange it, you’d have to talk to his agent.’ They said, ‘Who’s that?’ And he said, ‘Jay Kanter.’ And they said, ‘Who’s he?’

“Suddenly I was getting phone calls from all these heads of studios, and that was it.”

Kanter gave a key to his Beverly Hills apartment to Jennings Lang,  the senior MCA exec, a place to continue his affair with one of his clients, actress Joan Bennett. “I don’t think he was borrowing it to take a nap,” Kanter said on 2018 episode of “Love Is a Crime” podocast.

The Apartment (1960) starred Lemmon as Bud Baxter, who lets his New York insurance company supervisors (including Fred MacMurray’s Jeff Sheldrake) use his Upper West Side digs to conduct their extramarital affairs.

The United Artists film won five Oscars, including Best Picture.

“I think [the Lang-Bennett-Wanger incident is] where Billy Wilder got the idea for the movie,” Kanter said. “He never told me. But it was quite obvious.”

Hugh Wilson based The Famous Teddy Z, his 1989-90 CBS sitcom about a big star (Dennis Lipscomb) who takes a liking to a mailroom guy (Jon Cryer), on the Kanter-Brando origin story.

Jay Ira Kanter was born in Chicago on Dec. 12, 1926. When he was 9, he came to Los Angeles with his mother, Muriel, after his father, Harry, died. At 17, he joined the Navy during World War II; following the service, he landed a mailroom job at MCA, then graduated to messenger and assistant to Wasserman.

“He treated me very well, he was kind of my mentor and would discuss various deals at the studios [with me],” Kanter remembered. “Eventually I drove him around when he would call on different studio heads. Then he finally said, ‘You better start earning your keep here, you’re an agent now.’”

He got the newcomer Kelly $750 a week for guaranteed six weeks of work in 1951 on the Kramer-produced, Zinnemann-directed, Foreman-written High Noon, and repped her when she signed seven-year deal with MGM in 1952.

In 1953, Kanter married his second wife, Judy Balaban–the daughter of Barney Balaban, the president of Paramount from 1936-64. The wedding was at The Plaza in New York, where Kelly and singer Rosemary Clooney were bridesmaids and Brando was the best man.

Kanter spent his first days repping Monroe driving along the Pacific coast with her after she didn’t want to report to the studio right way.

His other clients included Paul Newman, Jerome Robbins, Laurence Olivier, Warren Beatty, Ronald Reagan and Terence Rattigan.

After MCA was dissolved in 1962 in antitrust ruling, Kanter became  film production exec at sister company Universal.

He signed director Michael Winner to a six-picture deal and spent money on British films — 1967’s Charlie Bubbles, starring Albert Finney and Liza Minnelli, among them —but he never had a hit.

In 1975, he joined Ladd, who would soon give Star Wars (1977) a green light. The pair also worked together at The Ladd Co. on such movies as Chariots of Fire, Body Heat and Blade Runner) — MGM/UA (where Kanter was in charge of MGM) and MGM-Pathe. He set up his own independent production company in 1994.

After he and Balaban divorced in 1961, he married Kit Bennett from 1965 until her 2014 death.

In the 1990s, Mel Brooks and Kanter organized weekly lunch of their close friends. he meals included a circle of former Fox execs and filmmakers from the ’70s, among them Ladd, Richard Donner, Paul Mazursky, Freddie Fields and Michael Gruskoff; later, Jeff Cohen, Tim Deegan, Jay Cooper, Richard Benjamin, Fred Specktor and Ben Mankiewicz joined in.

The lunches have continued every Friday for more than 35 years, including last week at the regular location, Porta Via on the patio in Beverly Hills, and Kanter was there.