72 | JULY 27 • 2023 

S

ue Marx, 92, of 
Birmingham, died 
July 17, 2023. 
 Marx, an essentially 
self-taught professional 
filmmaker who stunned 
Hollywood by winning an 
Academy Award in 1987 
for her documentary short 
film, Young at Heart, died 
July 17, 2023, at her home in 
Birmingham. 
 That film, perhaps 
the highlight of her long 
and varied media career, 
chronicled the love story 
and marriage of her own 
widowed father, then in his 
80s, and another widowed 
artist. The film is still often 
shown and studied today.
Years later, she loved to 
tell the story about how, 
after she triumphantly yelled 
“Hooray for Michigan!” to a 
national television audience 
when presented with her 
Oscar, a grumpy Detroit 
Mayor Coleman Young later 
told her she should have said 
“Detroit” instead.
 “Yes, Mr. Mayor,” she told 
him, and explained that she 
wanted to stretch out her 
brief time in the spotlight, 
and “Michigan has three 
syllables and Detroit has only 
two.” 
 Marx made over 200 films 
during her storied career. 
Her topics ranged widely, 
from artists like John Glick to 
architecture; from legendary 
Michigan author and crusty 
Supreme Court Justice John 
Voelker to The Relaxation 
Station, made to help 
children in crisis cope with 
stress and anxiety. 
 Marx founded Sue 
Marx Films in 1980 after 
a career as a professional 

photographer whose lens 
captured nearly every famous 
person (and some not so 
famous) who lived in or 
visited the Detroit area in 
the 1960s and ’70s, from the 
Kennedys to a young Bob 
Seger to Dr. Martin Luther 
King Jr. Her images have 
endured: Three years ago, the 
Birmingham-Bloomfield Art 
Center mounted an exhibit, 
“Photographs by Sue Marx: 
Images from History: People 
who Defined Detroit in 
the 1960s,” which managed 
to be a success despite the 
pandemic.
Remarkably, nothing 
in her early life hinted 
that she might become 
a photojournalist and 
filmmaker, let alone an 
Oscar-winning one. During 
much of her early childhood, 
her family might have been 
hard-pressed to afford tickets 
to a movie. 
Suzanne Elaine Gothelf 
was born on Nov. 17, 1930, 
in Yonkers, N.Y., to Louis 
and Leona Gothelf, who 
emigrated as children to 
America from what is 
now Belarus. The Great 
Depression was deepening 
when Marx was born, and 
her parents began working in 
a bakery to survive. 
During the New Deal, 
the WPA found her father 
work painting theater sets 
in Milwaukee, where her 
late and only sister Vivian 
was born. Eventually, 
the family settled in East 
Chicago, Indiana, where her 
mother managed hotels and 
apartment buildings. “We 
were dirt poor,” she later said. 
 Somehow, her parents 
managed to send her to 

Indiana University, where she 
majored in language arts and 
was a member of Sigma Delta 
Tau. 
After graduating in 1952, 
she moved to Detroit to live 
with an aunt and uncle and 
became a teacher in Oak 
Park. She soon met Stanley 
“Hank” Marx, the owner of 
a lead smelting company, 
who she always called “the 
greatest man in the world.” 
Hank and Sue were married 
Dec. 19, 1953, and enjoyed 
a happy and intensely loving 
partnership until his death in 
October 2007. 
Terry, the first of her 
three daughters, was born 
in 1955. Jane followed in 
1956 and Elizabeth in 1959. 
While raising her daughters, 
Marx earned a master’s 
degree in social psychology 
at Wayne State University. 
Soon afterward, Marx began 
working as a model. What 
she didn’t know is that this 
would lead to the next phase 
of her life. 
 “I met some of the 
photographers and got 
interested in photography 
and was so enthralled that I 
became a photographer and a 
photojournalist,” she said. 
She had a thriving 
freelance career before she 
was approached by WWJ-

TV (now WDIV) in 1970 
to produce and direct a 
groundbreaking weekly 
television show, Profiles in 
Black, the first real effort by 
local media to tell the stories 
and portray the lives of the 
metropolitan Detroit area’s 
African American residents. 
Marx savored this work 
as part of her continuing 
commitment to Detroit in 
light of the city’s changing 
demographics. 
 After the television 
program ended nearly a 
decade later, she opened Sue 
Marx Films in Detroit. While 
she excelled in making her 
own documentaries, she also 
produced films, commercials, 
and promotional and 
educational videos for a wide 
variety of clients. 
Marx produced films 
for more than 30 years. In 
addition to the Oscar, her 
numerous awards include 
more than 20 Emmys, 11 
Cine Golden Eagles, and 
other major honors from 
numerous film festivals, 
plus an Award of Excellence 
from American Women in 
Radio and Television (now 
the Alliance for Women in 
Media). 
Though she often claimed 
that she didn’t know anything 
about art, her films on 
art and artists are now in 
the film collection of the 
Museum of Modern Art in 
New York.
In recognition of her 
achievements, Marx 
was invited to join the 
International Women’s Forum 
- Michigan, and also received 
an entrepreneurial award 
from Harvard University 
and a distinguished women’s 

Famed Filmmaker & Photographer

OBITUARIES
OF BLESSED MEMORY

Sue Marx