Don Mischer, one of the preeminent live event directors of the past five decades, died peacefully in his sleep last night, April 11, in Los Angeles. The 15-time Emmy winner was 85.

Mischer did not stop working until the end and passed away just as he was finally planning to retire for good.

“I want you to know that, after more than six decades in television, I will be doing my last show tomorrow on Saturday, April 5th here in Los Angeles,” he told Deadline last week. “I started at the PBS station in Austin at the University of Texas campus in 1963, and I turned 85 last week. Man it feels like time has just flown by.”

Mischer’s final show was the 2025 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony, hosted by James Corden, which took place at Barker Hangar Santa Monica with tech titans and A-list celebrity attending and Katy Perry among those performing. The show, nicknamed the Oscars of Science, is streaming on YouTube today. You can watch it here.

Mischer’s live television career is unparalleled and features directing and producing just about every major event, including two Academy Awards, 15 Emmy ceremonies, multiple Kennedy Center Honors, People’s Choice Awards and Breakthrough Prize Ceremonies, the annual 9/11 memorials at Ground Zero in New York as well as numerous other specials, with his directing credits exceeding 100.

His extensive resume includes the Opening Ceremonies of both the 1996 Summer Olympics and 2002 Winter Olympics; the Super Bowl Halftime Shows with Michael Jackson, Prince, Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen; the Obama Inaugural Concert at the Lincoln Memorial where 750,000 gathered on the National Mall; Motown 25; the Democratic National Convention; and Carnegie Hall: Live at 100.

In 2023, Mischer published his autobiography, :10 Seconds To Air: My Life In The Director’s Chair, in which he shared the stories behind some of the most iconic TV moments that he helmed, including Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean performance on the Motown 25 special and Prince’s Super Bowl half-time performance in the pouring rain. He also wrote about working with Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra and other legends.

In an interview with Deadline’s Pete Hammond at the launch of the book, Mischer, a University of Texas at Austin graduate with a Bachelor and Master of Art degrees, shared how he fell in live with live TV.

“I was 9 years old when television came to my hometown, which was San Antonio, Texas, and I remember going to the very first (TV show),” he recalled. “I was in a big gym, and on the floor, there were cameras, lights, booms, and mariachi bands, and square dancers, and country bands, and all of this. The entire basketball court was ringed with monitors so we could sit in the stands, see it happening live on the floor, and see it on television. And it planted the seed, I became infatuated with television.”

Mischer relished the unpredictable, high-risk nature of big live television events.

“There is no feeling like counting down the final seconds to a live broadcast of the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympic Games, knowing that 80% of the planet will be watching it live and you have only one shot to pull it off,” he said. “There are no retakes. No fixes. No editing. And watching it will be a huge stadium of people, heads of state, the world press, and nearly every pair of eyes in the world, and it’s over in a flash. This is the thrill and challenge live television.”

Mischer won 15 Emmy Awards (including 13 Primetime Emmys), a record 10 DGA Awards, a Peabody, two NAACP Image Awards, the 2012 Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television from the PGA, and the 2019 DGA Lifetime Achievement Award for Television, along with a slew of other accolades. In 2014, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“It’s been quite a personal journey for me from the very beginning of television in 1949 – from Super Bowl halftimes with Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, The Stones, Prince (in the rain), and  Bruce Springsteen; to Olympic Opening Ceremonies; Carnegie Hall’s 100th Anniversary and Obama’s Inaugural Concert at the Lincoln Memorial,” Mischer wrote Deadline last week. “And from the Oscars; to The Kennedy Center Honors and  Muhammad Ali’s lighting the Olympic Cauldron) and in Atlanta. But now Mother Nature is telling me to slow down!”

He never got to do that, dying just days later.

Mischer is survived by his wife Suzan, his four children, Heather, Jennifer, Charlie and Lily, as well as two grandchildren, Everly and Tallulah.

Pete Hammond contributed to this report.