Judith Wyler Sheldon, a devoted San Francisco arts patron who carried a love of cinema from a celebrated Hollywood childhood into decades of cultural stewardship in the Bay Area, has died. She was 84.

Known to friends and colleagues as Judy, she was born in Los Angeles in 1942, the daughter of director William Wyler and the actress Margaret Tallichet. According to an interview she gave to the film writer behind Hell On Frisco Bay, she arrived just before the release of her father's wartime drama Mrs. Miniver and was named after the family character in that picture. She grew up among two sisters and a brother in a household where moviemaking was simply the family trade.

As a girl she stepped, briefly, in front of her father's camera. She could be glimpsed for a few seconds in a drugstore scene in The Best Years of Our Lives, and she appeared as one of the schoolgirls gathered at the Trevi Fountain in Roman Holiday, with a small spoken line about her camera. She rarely made much of those moments, preferring to speak of her father as a warm and funny man rather than a legend, recalling him in that same interview as a person of great kindness and humor.

Her deeper engagement with film came later and, fittingly, by way of the past. After attending the Pordenone silent film festival in Italy in the mid-1990s, where her father's own silent pictures were shown in retrospective, she found herself drawn into a world she had barely known. That spark grew into a sustained commitment. She went on to serve as Board Chair of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, lending her name, her time, and her family's history to the cause of preserving early cinema. The festival lists her among its leadership on its board roster, a role she held for many years.

She brought to that work a rare bridge between living memory and film history. At a festival gathering in 2018, recounted in the organization's 25 Years retrospective, she slipped away and returned carrying a handcrafted silk purse that Akira Kurosawa had once presented to her mother, a small treasure that linked the San Francisco audience to a quiet exchange of respect between two giants of world cinema.

Her generosity extended well beyond the screen. With her husband, Wylie Sheldon, she was a familiar and steady presence in San Francisco's cultural life, supporting the city's performing arts and counted among the benefactors of San Francisco Performances. The couple were regulars at concerts, galas, and gatherings across the city, the kind of patrons whose quiet, persistent backing keeps nonprofit arts institutions alive.

Judith Wyler Sheldon leaves a legacy measured not in headlines but in continuity: in restored films that will outlast her, in audiences who will sit in the dark and discover early cinema because she helped keep it on the screen, and in a community of artists and organizations she sustained with affection and resolve. She inherited a love of film and chose to give it away, again and again, to anyone willing to watch. In doing so she honored her father's art while building something distinctly her own, a generous, abiding stewardship that will go on speaking for her long after the lights come up.