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Kevin Conway, who brought intensity to roles large and small on the screen and the stage, including memorable turns in the 1970s in the plays “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?” and “The Elephant Man,” died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 77.Geraldine Newman, his longtime partner, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Conway got a late start on his acting career, but by 1969 he was making his Broadway debut in Arthur Kopit’s “Indians.” His first significant film role was in “Slaughterhouse-Five,” George Roy Hill’s adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, in 1972.Early on, he often played explosive characters and tough guys. In 1978 he worked opposite Sylvester Stallone in both “F.I.S.T.,” a tale of organized labor and organized crime, and “Paradise Alley,” in which he played a hoodlum in the mean streets of 1940s New York. Mr. Stallone, he said, had suggested that he get a tattoo of an eagle on his forehead to make the character more memorable.“I told him I wasn’t crazy about the idea,” Mr. Conway told People magazine. “A thing like that could cut down your employment opportunities.”Mr. Conway was also seen on TV in numerous series and mini-series. In 2007 alone he appeared in the short-lived NBC series “The Black Donnellys,” about Irish brothers caught up in organized crime in New York, and the mini-series “The Bronx Is Burning,” about the 1970s Yankees, in which he portrayed the team executive Gabe Paul.He made good use of his compelling, slightly raspy voice as well, providing narration for television shows and commercials. He warned New Yorker subway riders to say something if they saw something. He was the voice of Mark Twain in a 2001 Ken Burns documentary. At about the same time, he was the creepy Control Voice for a remake of the science-fiction anthology series “The Outer Limits.”“There is nothing wrong with your television,” he advised viewers as eerie static materialized. “Do not attempt to adjust the picture.”Kevin John Conway was born on May 29, 1942, in Harlem to James and Margaret (Sanders) Conway. His father was a mechanic, and his mother worked for the telephone company.After graduating from Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn in 1959, he spent time in the Navy and then took a job at IBM, starting in the mailroom and working his way up to sales. On a whim he enrolled in nighttime acting classes. Eventually, he said, he asked IBM to fire him so that he could collect unemployment while pursuing an acting career.He began getting stage roles and delivering charged, attention-getting performances.In the early 1970s he was in a long-running Off Broadway revival of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel about an asylum, playing the wildly disruptive McMurphy, the role played by Kirk Douglas in 1963 on Broadway and by Jack Nicholson in the 1975 film.In 1973 he had another Off Broadway success in Mark Medoff’s “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?,” playing an amped-up man with a gun who disrupts a diner.“Mr. Conway lights up the stage with his half-amused, half-vicious personification,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Rarely can alienation have been exposed so mercilessly and, this is revealing, so understandingly.”An entirely different sort of role came his way in 1979, when he played Frederick Treves, the doctor who befriends the title character in “The Elephant Man,” Bernard Pomerance’s play about a Victorian-era Englishman with deformities. Treves was nothing like the brash extroverts Mr. Conway usually played, and nothing like Mr. Conway himself.“Treves is much more uptight than a modern character,” Mr. Conway told The Times. “He’s a guy who tends to sit on his emotions, whereas my instinct is to let them go.”He reprised the role in a 1982 television version of the play.Relatively early in his career, though, Mr. Conway realized that he wasn’t destined to be a marquee star. “I don’t envision posters of me hung on the walls of bedrooms of young girls,” he told The Boston Globe in 1978.“Yet,” he added, “someone like Laurence Olivier gets better as he gets older.”As Mr. Conway got older, the fiery young characters gave way to more mature ones, requiring a restrained bluster or even pathos.In a 1995 attempt to adapt the 1954 film “On the Waterfront” into a stage play, he was the racketeering boss Johnny Friendly, the role played by Lee J. Cobb in the movie. The Broadway production closed quickly, but Mr. Conway drew praise. “Easily the most riveting contribution is Mr. Conway’s as the murderous union boss,” Vincent Canby wrote in an otherwise unenthusiastic review in The Times.In the film “13 Days” (2000), about the Cuban missile crisis, Mr. Conway was the hawkish Gen. Curtis LeMay, who locks horns with the Kennedy brothers. In “Invincible,” a 2006 movie about Vince Papale, who made the roster of the Philadelphia Eagles as a 30-year-old rookie, he played Papale’s father, a man who is not used to showing emotion but who chokes up with pride at his son’s accomplishment. (Mark Wahlberg played Vince.)Mr. Conway also directed plays, including several productions of Jerry Sterner’s “Other People’s Money,” in which he starred when it played Off Broadway in 1989.Mr. Conway’s marriage to Mila Burnette ended in divorce. Ms. Newman said that in addition to her, Mr. Conway, an animal advocate, would have listed his survivors as his three beloved pets: a cat, Chico, and two dogs, Cotton and Dorothy.Decades earlier, when appearing in “The Elephant Man,” he would sometimes think of another pet dog, Jingles, when conjuring up the tenderness his character was feeling toward Merrick, the Elephant Man.“It’s not that the relationship is that of dog and master,” he explained to The Times, “but that a pet will sometimes do something that really pleases you. Well, Merrick occasionally does things that surprise and delight Treves.” More

The 92nd Academy Awards take place Sunday. If you’ve been too busy to pay attention to the race (and who hasn’t?), here’s a primer to get you up to speed for Hollywood’s big night.When are the Oscars? Sunday, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific.Where can I watch? ABC is broadcasting the ceremony in the United States. It will be livestreamed on abc.com or via the ABC app, providing you signed up with a participating TV provider (like a cable company). Depending on where you live and your equipment, there’s also Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV, AT&T TV Now or YouTube TV, which all require subscriptions.Will there be a host? Nope. The lack of an M.C. seemed to work out well enough last year: ratings were up 12 percent over the previous ceremony (though the numbers still weren’t great).Who’s nominated? You can check out our complete ballot, but there are a couple of headlines to know: “Joker” topped all other films with 11 nominations, while “1917,” “The Irishman” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” each drew 10. Women were completely omitted from the best director race. And the acting slate was almost completely white, with the exception of the best-actress nominee Cynthia Erivo (“Harriet”).Who will win? We’d love to know, too. Our awards-season expert, Kyle Buchanan, has made his Oscar predictions, and the short answer is that the World War I drama “1917” is well-positioned. Then again the South Korean thriller “Parasite” could pose strong competition. Buchanan also expects the quartet of Joaquin Phoenix (“Joker”), Renée Zellweger (“Judy”), Brad Pitt (“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”) and Laura Dern (“Marriage Story”) to take home acting trophies, as they have all season long.Who will be presenting? The academy has announced a long list of household names, including Will Ferrell, Gal Gadot, Salma Hayek, Mindy Kaling, Spike Lee, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Keanu Reeves, Maya Rudolph and Timothée Chalamet.What else should I expect? There will probably be remembrances of Kirk Douglas, who died on Wednesday, and Kobe Bryant, the basketball star who won an Oscar for a short film made after he retired. And there will reportedly be a “special performance” by Janelle Monáe with Elton John and Randy Newman. What about the red carpet? You have some options. E! will begin its red carpet coverage with a countdown show at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, seguing to live coverage at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific. And there’s an official academy preshow from the red carpet that starts at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, 3:30 p.m. Pacific. It will be broadcast on ABC.Now you’re all caught up! More

BERLIN — On a recent morning, the Berlin Film Festival’s two new co-directors were arguing about accents — specifically, what kind of voice should introduce the filmmakers in live announcements at this year’s event.“On this issue, I like an accent,” said Carlo Chatrian, its artistic director, adding that a non-native English speaker would best reflect Berlin’s cosmopolitan identity.“But we already have so many accents,” protested Mariette Rissenbeek, its executive director.When another team member floated the idea of a German person introducing the films in broken English, Rissenbeek winced. “No, no, no,” she said. “It cannot, under any circumstances, be embarrassing.” After erupting into laughter, the group agreed.This year’s Berlinale, as the festival is often called, will be the first time the event has been overseen by not one, but two leaders — an arrangement that proponents say allows specialists to focus on areas of expertise rather than having a single all-powerful figure responsible for both creative and business decisions.In an era when organizations are being scrutinized for gender disparities in leadership positions, it also allows a man and a woman to share the top role. In this case, Chatrian, 48, is responsible for programming decisions and Rissenbeek, 63, is handling logistics, staffing and finances for the event, which begins on Feb. 20 and runs through March 1.“With #MeToo, this idea of having autocratic, solitary rulers running cultural institutions began to change,” Andrea Hausmann, a professor at the Institute of Arts Management in Ludwigsburg, said in a telephone interview.The dual-director concept — known here as a “doppelspitze” — has existed in Europe and elsewhere for decades, and has become especially popular in Germany’s cultural sector in the last few years.The arrangement requires a level of coordination that can prove challenging, even to seasoned chiefs.Many hope it will help reinvigorate the Berlinale, which is considered one of Europe’s most important film festivals but has recently drawn accusations of lackluster curation. Chatrian, who was born in Italy, previously worked as the artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, and Rissenbeek, who is from the Netherlands, led a promotional agency focused on German film.In a joint interview, Chatrian said the doppelspitze structure had allowed him to take a more hands-on curatorial approach than his predecessor, Dieter Kosslick, who oversaw the festival alone for 18 years. Under Kosslick’s leadership, the festival expanded significantly in size and scope.“Everyone was aware that Dieter had a lot of things on his plate,” Rissenbeek said. “If the activities grow time after time, you need to change the structure so people can cope with the amount of work.”In recent years, the Komische Oper opera company in Berlin, the Deutsches Museum in Munich and numerous state-funded theaters around the country have embraced the model. Tanztheater Wuppertal, the dance company founded by Pina Bausch, appointed joint leaders in 2018, with Bettina Wagner-Bergelt taking over the group’s artistic direction and Roger Christmann handling its business concerns.Ms. Wagner-Bergelt said the arrangement was a savvy way of ensuring a more by-the-books approach to money in the theater world.“For a long time there were gray zones where you could make agreements without contracts, for example,” she said in a telephone interview — whereas these days financial decisions need to be made with more attention to detail, ideally by people with a keen financial sense. “It’s like any other business now,” she said.Elsewhere the structure has proved ill-fated.In 2016, the Berlin State Ballet company announced the joint appointment of the contemporary choreographer Sasha Waltz and the more classically inclined Johannes Ohman as directors. The arrangement unraveled last month, after Ohman announced that he was leaving the company to take a job in Stockholm.At a tense news conference last week, Waltz suggested that she might continue in the role with a new partner, adding that the collapse of the partnership with Ohman “does not mean the model of a doppelspitze has failed.”Rissenbeek and Chatrian said their collaboration had, thus far, gone off without a hitch.“But we still have some time,” she joked, noting that the festival doesn’t start for a few weeks. “If he had said he wanted the opening film to be, I don’t know, a small, Russian black-and-white film that’s five hours long, I would have said it’s a no-go,” she added. “But he didn’t suggest it.”The Berlinale will instead kick off with “My Salinger Year,” a film by the Canadian director Philippe Falardeau. The film, starring Sigourney Weaver, focuses on a woman working for the writer J.D. Salinger’s literary agent.Chatrian estimated that he had watched around 800 films as part of the selection process, and said he had closely overseen the curation of all festival programs. “That would not have been possible if I had 10 meetings a day like Mariette,” he said.This year’s competition lineup will include a new film by the Berlinale favorite Christian Petzold, as well as works by noted art-house directors like Sally Potter, Kelly Reichardt and Philippe Garrel. “DAU. Natasha,” part of a notoriously long-gestating art project by the Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, will also be shown in competition. The British actor Jeremy Irons will head the jury.Rissenbeek and Chatrian have made some structural changes to this year’s festival.Two programs — Culinary Cinema, focusing on food-related movies, and NATIVe, a section dedicated to films made by members of indigenous communities — were cut because, Chatrian explained, he had struggled to find enough features that met his standards. They also created a new section, called Encounters, dedicated to “aesthetically and structurally daring works from independent, innovative filmmakers.”The festival announced last week that it would suspend the Alfred Bauer Prize, an annual award named after the festival’s first director, which is typically given to a film that “opens new perspectives on cinematic art.” The prize’s suspension followed a report in the German newspaper Die Zeit revealing that Bauer had worked as a high-ranking functionary in the Nazi film bureaucracy.Critics have reacted to this year’s lineup with cautious optimism. Katja Nicodemus, a longtime Berlinale observer who is a reporter and critic with Die Zeit, said in an email that this year’s program seemed “intriguing and persuasively curated,” but noted that, like Dieter Kosslick, the new doppelspitze had not been able to attract the top ranks of auteur filmmakers to Berlin.“It seems largely reminiscent of Kosslick’s competition lineups,” Nicodemus said.Chatrian said that he expected criticism but added that, like his predecessor, he was aware of the need to balance more auteur-driven work with audience-pleasing films.“I think there is room for both,” he said. “In that respect, the identity of the Berlinale is not at stake.” More

“Watching the Academy Awards is always a difficult experience,” said Melissa Silverstein, the founder and publisher of Women and Hollywood, an online initiative that pushes for gender diversity and inclusion in the movie industry.“There are so few female filmmakers nominated,” Ms. Silverstein said. “We still live in a world where we can count the amount of women nominated for best director on one hand.”Gender parity in storytelling is Ms. Silverstein’s call to arms. She is also the artistic director and co-founder of the Athena Film Festival, which is dedicated to movies about female leaders. The 10th annual festival, at Barnard College, runs from Feb. 27 to March 1.Ms. Silverstein, 52, lives in a two-bedroom house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a roommate and her 70-pound shepherd mix, Duke. When the awards season hoopla dies down, she will get back to her latest project: the invitation-only Girls Club, a networking group for creative women.EVERYTHING’S FINE On Sundays I try to be a little more mindful, so I’ve started meditating with an app called Calm. It’s what I do first thing. You have to exit from the bed to do it. You have to sit up straight. It’s really good 10-minute meditations, not too much of a big commitment. The woman’s voice is really soothing. She tells you, “Everything’s fine, everything’s good.”PLAY DATE Then it’s Duke time. He dominates my existence. Depending on the weather, we try to head up to Prospect Park. It’s a big walk, almost a mile. Sometimes I go with my friend Richard Berne who lives on my block. His dog, Max, is a golden. Our dogs love each other. On the way back I stop off at Blue Sky Bakery. It’s a great muffin place in my neighborhood, and a locally owned business, which I like. Plus they make some nice dog treats.CATCH UP I do a little puttering on Sundays. I’m very good at puttering. I have some breakfast, or sometimes I’ll read. I use this app called Send to Kindle, so if there are articles I just can’t get to during the week, like from The New Yorker, I send them to my Kindle. Most of the stories are political.TALK TO ME I’ve also become super obsessed with audiobooks. If I don’t go to the park with Richard, I’ll probably sit and listen to an audiobook. I just finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s “City of Girls,” which I loved. I still think about it. The best book I’ve done on audiobook is Michelle Obama’s “Becoming.”MAINTENANCE I clean up a little. My house is very old, so a lot of things need to be WD-40’d. I’ll inevitably get on the computer. In this awards season I spend a lot of time responding to things going on with women and film.LOCAL OR LONG ISLAND Duke is going to need another walk. Sometimes we’ll walk to Greenlight Bookstore. I get a discount because of my membership with BAM. It’s also very dog-friendly.But we don’t go on the same walk all the time. You’ve got to challenge yourself. I might grab some lunch at Bergen Bagels, and then sometimes I’ll go over to BAM and watch a movie because it’s really close and they have great movies. Or sometimes I’ll take the train to Long Island to see my sisters and my parents. I grew up in Massapequa.POWER DOWN I like my Sunday nights to be not crazy. If I have to go somewhere formal on a Sunday night I’m like, “Whyyyyyy?” I try to power down. I’ve been a little obsessed with making turkey chili lately. I’ve got a crockpot and a good recipe. But I’m not a cook. I don’t pretend to be a cook.ABLUTIONS My bedtime ritual is not elaborate. It’s walk the dog and make sure I put some moisturizer on. Also this is very weird but I’m a big Waterpik user. I use my Waterpik every night because I have bad teeth.TV IN BED I’ve got one of those new platform beds so I can watch TV in my bed. It’s the best investment ever. I try to be asleep by 10:30 or 11 at the latest, but if it’s an awards night I’m not going to be chilling. There are so few opportunities where people pay attention to things like this, where you see how much work we have to do to create an inclusive industry, that I’m 100 percent working.Ms. Silverstein will be live-tweeting the Oscars this weekend @melsil. More