POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y., July 9 (UPI) — Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and subject of the Oscar-winning film “The Killing Fields,” Sydney Schanberg died at the age of 82.
The New York Times reports that Schanberg’s death was confirmed by friend and former Times reporter Charles Kaiser. Schanberg had a heart attack on Tuesday before dying in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. on Saturday, Kaiser said.
Kaiser, who worked with Schanberg for more than 30 years, told Newsday that Shanberg served as a mentor to him at the beginning of their time together.
“He was genuinely charismatic. There was an electricity about him unlike any other journalist I’ve ever known,” he said. “He was also incredibly generous, supporting all his former colleagues in everything that they did.”
He is survived by his two daughters Jessica Schanberg, 46, and Rebecca Schanberg, 45, three grandchildren and his wife Jane Freiman who rembered him as “a wonderful, wonderful husband” who was “hilariously funny.”
“He was brilliant. He was the best reporter with the best news sense I ever knew,” she said. “He considered journalism his religion. He loved newspapers and working for newspapers, writing for newspapers and reading newspapers.”
Schanberg won his Pulitzer prize for reporting on the fall of Cambodia when he and his colleague Dith Pran were seized by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 after refusing to evacuate Cambodia along with most other Western journalists.
He also published a book titled The Death and Life of Dith Pran about the torture and starvation his friend faced during his four-year struggle to escape the Khmer in Cambodia.
Their story inspired the 1984 film titled “The Killing Fields” after the term coined by Pran, which won three Academy Awards and was screened in Cambodia in 1989.
