Dick Guttman preferred the old term "press agent" to "publicist," and for more than seventy years he did that job for Audrey Hepburn, Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Clint Eastwood and hundreds of others. He died on September 19, 2026, in Los Altos, California, at the age of 93, his firm, Guttman Associates Public Relations, announced, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he moved with his family to Los Angeles after World War II, and as a boy he rode the streetcars to wait outside the stage doors of radio dramas, gathering cast-off scripts and autographs. At Fairfax High School he ran track and sent high school sports stories to the Los Angeles Examiner. At UCLA he studied film and psychology while working part-time at the agency Rogers & Cowan.

After graduating he worked in Europe as a unit publicist on pictures including Paris Holiday and The Key. On one of those assignments, Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon in Paris, he met Gisela, the woman he married in 1956. They were together for seventy years.

He came home to Rogers & Cowan just as Hollywood's old order was coming apart. The studios had stopped keeping stars under long contracts, and performers suddenly needed someone of their own to shape how the public saw them. Looking back on that turn in a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Business Journal, he put it simply: "The real change was in the mid-50s with the end of the studio contract system." In the same conversation he added, "That's when independent PR firms came of age, to position talent in that new normal." Over more than a decade there he worked for Gary Cooper, Natalie Wood, William Holden, Tony Curtis and Rex Harrison, among many others.

In 1971 he went into business with publicist Jerry Pam. Guttman & Pam ranked among the town's leading publicity houses for more than twenty years. In the early 1990s he opened Guttman Associates in Beverly Hills, where his clients came to include Streisand, Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Warren Beatty, Jay Leno, Janet Jackson and Christopher Reeve. Across his career he promoted films as different as Bonnie and Clyde, Dirty Harry, Kramer vs. Kramer, Unforgiven, Shakespeare in Love and The Artist.

His reach went past the movie stars. He worked for astronaut Buzz Aldrin and novelist Sidney Sheldon, for Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, for Harry Winston, and for Sanrio when it introduced Hello Kitty. He also represented Movietime, which later became E! Entertainment.

He wrote, too. He earned seven screen credits, among them the 1963 film Back Door to Hell, directed by Monte Hellman and starring Jack Nicholson, and including two television films with director Joseph Sargent, Passion Flower in 1986 and Ivory Hunters in 1990. In 2015 he published Starflacker, a memoir packed with more than a thousand stories from his working life. Asked once to total up the people he had represented, he gave an answer Variety recalled: "I've done the rough math, and my guess is probably 700 clients, and about 200 legends. I have been very blessed."

In the 2020 interview, at 87, he was asked what he would tell his 50-year-old self. His answer: "To work fewer nights and to spend more of them with my family."

Home for more than half a century was Malibu. He and Gisela stayed even after a 1993 wildfire destroyed their house there, and they left in 2025, after the Palisades Fire swept the community, to be near family in Los Altos. He is survived by Gisela; his daughters, Monika Guttman Robertson and Danielle Guttman Klein; granddaughters Alyssa Brucculeri and Claire Robertson; great-granddaughter Aria Brucculeri; and his sister, Joan Ostrow.

What he built is still working. Guttman Associates continues to represent performers under his longtime colleagues Susan Madore and Rona Menashe. Starflacker holds his thousand stories of the studio era and after. The Dick Guttman Memorial Fund at the Entertainment Industries Foundation, a charity he spent years promoting, now directs gifts in his name to people in the creative community, wildfire relief among them. For a man who lost one Malibu house to fire, that is a fitting use of his name.