Bert Fields Remembered as a Loyal and Fearsome Protector of Hollywood Stars
October 2, 2022 – Media MentionBert Fields, one of the nation's esteemed and top entertainment attorneys known for representing the who's who of Hollywood and his "fearless" nature, was celebrated by his clients, family, and colleagues at a memorial service in Santa Monica on Sunday, October 2, 2022. Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, and Michael Ovitz were among those that paid tribute to the industry powerhouse. Barbara Guggenheim, Fields' widow, also shared a heartfelt tribute to her late husband.
Excerpts:
“Bert scared people with good reason,” Susan Estrich said. “With Bert on my side, I always felt safe."
Cruise, a longtime client of Fields, remembered him as “a person who I knew I could always count on.”
“I think we all know how valuable that is in this world — when someone says they’re going to do something and they actually do it,” Cruise said. “I’m just very grateful to him.”
“He loved an audience,” Hoffman recalled. “He often talked to me about how the courtroom was a form of theater. He knew his audience. He knew how to relate to them, and he knew how to connect to them emotionally and intellectually…. What I respected most was his loyalty — he was a friend, a true friend. I miss him.”
“He took his practice very seriously,” Ovitz said. “He loved Davids. He hated Goliaths… He never looked stressed. He never looked like he was bothered by going into a court case. In all of the hundreds of meetings that I sat in with him, no matter how tense they were, Bert had a smile on his face. Maybe because he knew he was going to win."
“He was a Renaissance man,” Guggenheim said of Fields, who in addition to cobbling high-powered deals together somehow found the time to write fiction and non-fiction books. “He listened, he didn’t talk much.”