I originally wrote that Sidney Lumet had been beaten out for a Best Director Oscar the year of Dog Day Afternoon by Stanley Kubrick. Then, only moments after posting and seconds before a torrent of e-mails came tumbling in, I realized my error and fixed it. He was beaten out by Milos Forman that year.
I said he was nominated five times as Best Director. I got that number from several online obits like the one in Hollywood Reporter. The truth is he was nominated four times for his directorial work: Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The Verdict. The confusion is because he was a five-time Oscar nominee but only four of those were for directing. He was also nominated for a shared screenplay credit on the 1981 Prince of the City…and he also won an Honorary Academy Award in 2005 that most obits aren't mentioning and which some say was last year, which it wasn't.
And this isn't something I need to correct here but the Hollywood Reporter obit also says he was married three times. His Wikipedia listing and his IMDB bio list four.
Lastly, here's one fun fact that I noticed when I researched the above. He directed seventeen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Katharine Hepburn, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Chris Sarandon, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Beatrice Straight, William Holden, Ned Beatty, Peter Firth, Richard Burton, Paul Newman, James Mason, Jane Fonda and River Phoenix. Four of them won for those Lumet-supervised performances. A pretty impressive record.