Cyrus Yavneh, Producer on '24,' 'Supernatural' and 'It's Pat: The Movie,' Dies at 76

His credits also included Warren Beatty's 'Town & Country' and 'In the Army Now,' starring Pauly Shore.
Cyrus Yavneh, an Emmy-nominated producer who worked on such drama series as 24 and Supernatural and on films including Town & Country and It's Pat: The Movie, has died. He was 76.
Yavneh died Thursday of lung cancer at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, his cousin, screenwriter Robbie Fox, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Only two months ago, Yavneh was in Atlanta producing the new Netflix series Insatiable when he became ill, Fox said. He also did the pilot for the recent CBS reboot of MacGyver.
Yavneh worked on Fox's 24 during its first two seasons, producing 34 episodes in all. He received an Emmy nomination in 2002 and shared the Producers Guild Award for outstanding episodic television, drama, a year later.
Yavneh also produced 80 episodes of The CW's Supernatural during its first three seasons, from 2005-08, and earlier guided 19 installments of the 1997-98 Peabody Award-winning ABC series Nothing Sacred.

In addition to It's Pat: The Movie, the 1994 spinoff of a Saturday Night Live sketch that starred Julia Sweeney as an androgynous person, Yavneh produced In the Army Now (1994), starring Pauly Shore; The Arrival (1996), directed by David Twohy; and Warren Beatty's Town & Country (2001).
"When I was writing the Pauly Shore movie for Disney, they told me they had just put a great producer on the movie, that I'm going to love the guy," Fox said. "And I walked in the room and saw it was Cousin Cy. And our names next to each other on the poster mean more today than ever before."
Born in New York in 1942, Yavneh attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and then City College. He had a series of odd jobs — including dance-band musician and chief cook/bottle washer for a traveling magic illusionist show — before he "decided it was time to get a real job, by that I mean a weekly paycheck," he said in a July 2016 interview.
Yavneh was hired as a production manager for two New York companies that made TV commercials, then made his way to Hollywood. In 1977, he was an assistant director on the CBS drama Lou Grant.
Yavneh also worked on many miniseries and telefilms, including Judith Kranz's Princess Daisy (1983), on which he met his future wife, choreographer Lynne Taylor; 1991's Son of the Morning Star, about General George Armstrong Custer; and 2000's Baby, starring Farrah Fawcett.
He also produced Christmas in Connecticut, a 1992 telefilm for Turner that was directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. On that project, his wife was the choreographer, and the composer was his cousin, two-time Oscar nominee Charles Fox (The Other Side of the Mountain, Foul Play).
In addition to his wife and cousins, Yavneh is survived by his twins, Alexander and Rose.
A funeral is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. on Sunday at Mount Sinai in the Hollywood Hills.
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