Norman Jewison, the versatile filmmaker who directed a racial drama (In the Heat of the Night), stylish thriller (The Thomas Crown Affair), musical (Fiddler on the Roof) or romantic comedy (Moonstruck), has died. He was 97.

Jewison died Saturday at home, his publicist Jeff Sanderson announced.

A seven-time Oscar nominee, Jewison received the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences in 1999.

Jewison earned best director and best picture nominations for Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Moonstruck (1987); received another nom for helming In the Heat of the Night (1967), a winner for best picture; and added 3 others for producing the comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) and A Soldier’s Story (1984).

In the Heat of the Night starred Sidney Poitier as Black detective from Philadelphia and Rod Steiger as a racist police chief. Both have to work together to solve a murder in a Southern town.

Four days before the 1968 Oscars, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the Oscars were postponed for two days.

Jewison attended King’s funeral, and though he lost out best director to Mike Nichols of The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night won five statuettes.

Racism also was central to two other films: The wartime-set A Soldier’s Story and The Hurricane (1999), the latter starring Denzel Washington as Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the real-life boxer wrongly imprisoned for murder.

Jewison also had a flair for comedies, as seen with Moonstruck, based on the John Patrick Shanley play and starring best actress winner Cher. Focusing on an Italian American family in Brooklyn, Moonstruck was a box office and critical success.

Jewison also was behind such varied pictures as Send Me No Flowers (1964), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Rollerball (1975), F.I.S.T. (1978), … And Justice for All (1979), Agnes of God (1985) and Other People’s Money (1991).

After graduation, Jewison made his professional debut in minstrel show, which he also directed and co-wrote, then served in Canada’s Navy during World War II. Back home, he graduated from the University of Toronto’s Victoria College in 1949 with a B.A. in general arts.

Jewison worked as cab driver in Toronto and performed as a radio actor for the CBC. In 1950, he moved to London for a two-year work-study stint with the BBC.

The CBC called him back to work in the new medium of television, and Jewison wrote, directed and produced some  popular shows and specials.

He hired Reuben Shipp, a writer from Montreal who had been deported from the U.S. after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, to work on the variety show The Barris Beat.

In 1950, CBS invited Jewison to New York to update the venerable TV musical Your Hit Parade. After he booked African-American singer Tommy Edwards, who had a hit with “It’s All in the Game,” to be on the program, he was called to Madison Avenue meeting with a representative from Lucky Strike cigarettes, the show’s South Carolina-based sponsor.

Angry Jewison threatened to take this story to the press, but Lucky Strike caved and Edwards appeared on the show. His integrity was evident, and big names wanted to work with him.

Jewison directed a 1960 special with Harry Belfonte, the first on American TV starring a Black performer; guided comeback star Judy Garland on a 1961 TV special; helmed The Million Dollar Incident, a comedy that saw Jackie Gleason kidnapped and held for ransom; and did The Broadway of Lerner and Loewe, with performances by Julie Andrews and Maurice Chevalier.

Jewison left for L.A. and was hired to direct Universal Pictures’ 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962), which starred Tony Curtis, Suzanne Pleshette and Phil Silvers in one of first films shot at Disneyland.

He received a contract from the studio and followed by helming the light comedies The Thrill of It All (1963), starring Doris Day and James Garner; Send Me No Flowers, with Day and Rock Hudson; and The Art of Love (1965), with Garner, Elke Sommer and Angie Dickinson.

When producer Martin Ransohoff fired Sam Peckinpah from The Cincinnati Kid, Jewison was hired to direct the Steve McQueen-Edward G. Robinson drama.

After In the Heat of the Night, Jewison produced and directed the stylishly erotic The Thomas Crown Affair, starring McQueen and Faye Dunaway; produced The Landlord (1970), racial dramedy directed by his former film editor, Hal Ashby; and produced and helmed Gaily, Gaily, starring Landlord star Beau Bridges.

He had met Kennedy in a hospital in Sun Valley, Idaho, when their sons were injured in a ski race, and he was supposed to meet with the presidential candidate on the night he was assassinated in Los Angeles.

“I was very disillusioned,” Jewison told the THR in 2011. “JFK had been assassinated, Bobby had been assassinated, I had marched in Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in Atlanta. This was 1970, so I packed everyone up in L.A. and went to England.”

Jewison spent the next seven years in Europe, making such films as the high-grossing musical Fiddler on the Roof, shot on location in Yugoslavia and at London’s Pinewood Studios, and Jesus Christ Superstar and Gregory Peck in Billy Two Hats (1974), both filmed in Israel.

Jewison went on to direct and produce the James Caan violent action film Rollerball, the Al Pacino courtroom thriller … And Justice for All and the charming romantic comedy Best Friends (1982), starring Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn.

Jewison also continued to explore weighty issues, with the plot of Agnes of God, starring Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft, centering on the struggle between logic and the Catholic Church. His last film was the Nazi thriller The Statement (2003), starring Michael Caine.

Jewison served as producer of the 1981 Oscars, which were rescheduled after President Reagan was shot.

He earned an Emmy nomination in 2002 for directing the HBO film Dinner With Friends.

In 1982, Jewison was made an officer of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian decoration, then set out to establish the Canadian equivalent of the American Film Institute.

Jewison’s Thalberg Speech:

“My one real regret about winning this prize is that, you know, it’s not like the Nobel or the Pulitzer. I mean, the Thalberg award comes with no money attached. If it did, if it did, I would share it with the Canadian Film Centre and the AFI, where the next generation of filmmakers are preparing to entertain the world in the new millennium.

“And my parting thought to all those young filmmakers is this: Just find some good stories. Never mind the gross, the top 10, bottom 10, what’s the rating, what’s the demographic. You know something? The biggest-grossing picture is not necessarily the best picture.”