Sydney Pollack’s name may not be instantly familiar to moviegoers, but you might well recognize his face from the many films he also acted in.

His last role was as Patrick Dempsey’s much-married father in Made of Honor. Last year, he was the not-especially-ethical head of a major New York law firm in Michael Clayton, a film he also produced.

But Pollack’s legacy for film fans is the many films he directed, the kinds of intelligent films that held a provocative message but presented it entertainingly. He was one of the last filmmakers not to bend to the whims of an increasingly youthful movie-going audience, which may be why his last big box office success as director was The Firm 15 years ago. He directed only four more films, the most recent being the 2005 documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, about his famous architect friend, which found modest success on the art-house circuit.

Perhaps it was because Pollack made films for adult audiences and liked to explore both sides of his flawed characters, something that fell out of fashion in today’s black-or-white world, that in his later years he turned his energy more to producing.

But his legacy lives on in a collection of films he directed that still speak to audiences today, sometimes more than three decades since they were first shown.

Turner Classic Movies is celebrating Pollack’s career Monday with a string of his films, including his first, 1965’s The Slender Thread (8 p.m.), a thriller starring Sidney Poitier as a psychology student working at a crisis clinic and Anne Bancroft as a housewife who phones in after taking an overdose of barbiturates.

That will be followed at 10 p.m. by one of the six films Pollack made with Robert Redford, Three Days of the Condor, a man-on-the-run thriller with Redford as an innocent CIA researcher who finds himself marked for death by another branch of the agency.

At midnight it’s Tootsie, a best-picture nominee for 1982 and one of Pollack’s rare comedies. This trailblazing gender-switching film stars Dustin Hoffman as an unemployed actor who, in desperation, pretends to be a woman to get a starring role in a TV soap opera. Jessica Lange won the supporting actress Academy Award for her role in the movie, but it was Pollack, who also took the pivotal role of Hoffman’s disbelieving agent in the film, who won the lasting accolades for this classic comedy.

Finally, at 2 a.m. it’s Pollack’s new kind of frontier adventure, Jeremiah Johnson, starring Redford as a man who gives up city life to live a solitary existence in the wilderness, learning survival tactics as he goes along.

Most of these films are available on DVD. Others to watch for if you’d like to create your own Sydney Pollack Festival are The Way We Were, with Redford and Barbra Streisand as a mismatched-but-much-in-love couple in a film that follows the up-and-down trajectory of their romance from the 1930s to the 1950s; The Firm, a thriller based on John Grisham’s best seller in which Tom Cruise plays a bright young lawyer who finds himself entangled in a plot revolving around the mobsters controlling his law firm; Out of Africa, Pollack’s 1985 Oscar-winning romantic drama with Meryl Streep as a woman in an unfulfilling marriage on a Kenya coffee plantation who falls in love with a dashing hunter, played by Redford; Absence of Malice, a film about the dangers of the media, with Sally Field as a reporter who runs with false information and prints a story implicating a man, played by Paul Newman, in a murder; They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which looks at the desperation of the Great Depression through the metaphor of participants vying for the prize in a marathon dance contest.

mjanuson@projo.com