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    ‘Mean Girls’ Review: ‘Get in, Loser,’ Regina George Is Back

    Still puffily padded but no longer particularly tart, this shape-shifting classic about the girls you love to hate retains its ingratiating charms.Can a movie musical based on a Broadway musical based on a film comedy that in turn was based on a parenting book be any good? Sure — if only because the writer-producer Tina Fey and the producer Lorne Michaels have made sure that little has changed in their money-printing property since the first movie hit theaters in 2004. Few stories, it turns out, are as comically and horrifyingly reliable as those set in high school; few villains are as dependably hissable as a desirable young woman with an ostensibly cold heart.In keeping with this material’s cheerfully derivative history it seems right to start with the New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell, who called the original film — directed by Mark Waters and starring a preternaturally self-assured Lindsay Lohan — “tart and often charming.” Fast forward to 2018 when the paper’s former theater critic Ben Brantley described the Broadway musical as “likable but seriously over-padded.” For its part, the new “Mean Girls” lands somewhere between these two takes. It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact.Once again, the story — by Fey, who also wrote the first movie and the Broadway show — drops Cady (a sweet Angourie Rice), a bright home-schooled teen fresh from Kenya, into a high-school hellscape. There, she meets nerds and jocks, alphas and betas, and attracts the notice of the queen bee, the aptly named Regina (Reneé Rapp, who played the role on Broadway). Flanked by her vassals, Karen (Avantika) and Gretchen (Bebe Wood), Regina reigns supreme at school where, as the student body’s most attentively studied subject, she is feared, desired and loathed, at times simultaneously.As in the original film, the latest Cady is a quick study and soon learns her new habitat’s rules on her way to self-actualization and group acceptance. She befriends a pair of too-cool-for-school art kids, Janis and Damian — the tag-teaming scene-stealers Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey — who encourage her to insinuate herself into Regina’s clique, a.k.a. the Plastics, to learn its secrets. Cady does and the usual complications ensue, including a chaste romance with Regina’s ex, Aaron (Christopher Briney), a heartthrob with floppy hair. Betrayal, comeuppance, repentance and triumph follow.In making the transition from stage to screen, the filmmakers have cut many of the show’s songs by Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics). The remaining tunes blur together with the exception of “Meet the Plastics” and “World Burn,” Regina’s character-defining lung-busters. Nothing if not a show-boater, she enters in black fetish-wear for “Plastics,” belting it out with such old-school diva command that she smacks the movie awake. She doesn’t have the nuance of Rachel McAdams, who played the role in the 2004 film. But Rapp gives the character oomph and swagger (the dominatrix-lite get-up helps), and when Regina howls “I don’t care who you are,” you readily believe her.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    ‘Household Saints’ at IFC Center: An Italian American Tale

    Nancy Savoca’s 1993 film, a mystical, multigenerational Italian American family saga, opens for a revival run at IFC Center.Nancy Savoca’s 1993 film “Household Saints,” a warmhearted fable spiced with magic realism and zesty performances, may be the most endearing of multigenerational Italian American family sagas and is likely the most mystical. Heavy on folk belief, it flirts with Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” and the divine madness the Greeks called theia mania.Seemingly overlooked by the 1993 New York Film Festival, “Household Saints” was included as a restoration last October; it’s opening for a revival run on Jan. 12 at IFC Center.Savoca and the producer Richard Guay adapted “Household Saints” from Francine Prose’s well-received 1981 novel. If the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer were a product of Little Italy, he might have spun a similar yarn. Amid a 1949 heat wave so hellish the annual feast of San Gennaro has all but been shut down, a rakish young butcher named Joseph Santangelo (Vincent D’Onofrio) wins a wife, Catherine Falconetti (Tracey Ullman), in a game of pinochle. God’s grace or Joseph’s thumb on the scale?Catherine is the sullen daughter of Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo), a none-too-bright radio repairman. The Santangelos and Falconettis are unfriendly neighbors. Joseph’s superstitious mother, Carmela (played with alarming gusto by Judith Malina), hates her prospective daughter-in-law. Blessings battle tribulations. Savoca contrives a wedding night as filled with rococo confections as the interior of a Palermo church. A curse — disturbingly visualized as a bloody, stillborn infant — is lifted after Carmela dies and a healthy daughter, Teresa, is born.Among other things, “Household Saints” refracts 25 years of the Cold War through a Mulberry Street lens. Teresa and her playmates are obsessed with the prophecies of Our Lady of Fátima, received by three country children in visions that coincided with the triumph of Russian Bolshevism. As an adolescent, Teresa (Lili Taylor) writes a prizewinning essay on the dangers of Communism. She also becomes a fanatical devotee of her namesake, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, associating piety with a devotion to domestic chores.Madness runs in the family. In a parallel obsession, Teresa’s Uncle Nicky (Michael Rispoli) searches Chinatown for a dream Madame Butterfly. In the meantime, forbidden by her parents to take Carmelite vows, Teresa enters an earthy relationship with an awkward but ambitious law student (Michael Imperioli). Happily ironing his shirts in their disheveled, casually psychedelic East Village pad, she has an ecstatic vision of Jesus amid an abundance of checkered garments.“The story is filled with strange, homespun miracles,” Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review when the film was originally released, adding that “this single-minded little film could be counted as one of them.” So too its evocation of Mulberry Street. Largely shot on a North Carolina backlot built for the film “Year of the Dragon,” “Household Saints” seems the most authentically simulated New York movie since Sam Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street.” (The flavorsome line readings are supplied by a bevy of native New York actors, among them Argo, D’Onofrio, Malina, Rispoli and Imperioli.)“Household Saints” never tips its hand. Eventually institutionalized, the beatific Teresa informs her parents of celestial pinochle games, noting that God (like her dad) cheats at cards. While the once credulous Catherine thinks her daughter has suffered a psychotic break with reality, the anticlerical Joseph takes Teresa for a saint. Thanks to the spell the film casts, they’re both right.Household SaintsOpens on Jan. 12 at IFC Center, Manhattan; ifccenter.com. More

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    ‘Driving Madeleine’ Review: A Nonagenarian in Paris

    The beloved French singer Line Renaud plays a woman who forms an unlikely bond with a surly cabdriver in this heart-warmer.A prickly cabdriver gains perspective thanks to a chatty nonagenarian.Sound vaguely familiar? From “Driving Miss Daisy” to “Green Book,” there’s a whole subgenre of feel-good social drama in which unlikely connections are formed between passengers and drivers. “Driving Madeleine,” directed by Christian Carion, takes this dynamic and scrubs it of any real friction, like race or class.Instead, it’s a heart-warmer about respecting your elders. In the film, a glossy modern-day Paris is set against the personal history of a woman in her 90s named Madeleine (Line Renaud), whose life has echoes in major touchstones in history: World War II, the Vietnam War, the women’s rights movements of the 1970s.The bulk of the film unfolds over half a day. Charles (Dany Boon), a surly driver, takes a gig transporting Madeleine from her place in the suburbs to a retirement home, but in between the two take a drive through her old neighborhood — stopping for a bathroom break, then a meal — and contend with the horrors of Parisian traffic.Charles’s paycheck gets fatter as the meter runs, but as Madeleine regales him with stories of her affair with an American G.I. — and, more shockingly, an attempted murder case involving her abusive ex-husband — their relationship sweetens into a genuine friendship. Flashback scenes of these fiery melodramas (Alice Isaaz plays young Madeleine) run alongside lackluster bonding moments. Etta James’s “At Last” plays repeatedly, forcing a soulfulness the film doesn’t possess.Boon is best known as a star and director of middlebrow comedies in his native France (Americans may recognize him as the Parisian inspector in both “Murder Mystery” movies), but in “Driving Madeleine” he plays it straight, unconvincingly so as he looks back at his passenger with a rictus grin. With her sparkling baby blues and honey-dipped voice, Renaud comes off like an angel — a fitting role for the French icon and songstress, even if that means she’s less human as a result.Driving MadeleineNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Inshallah a Boy’ Review: Where the Male Line Is the Only Line

    In this film by Amjad Al Rasheed, a young widow in Jordan strains against the tradition, underpinned by law, that without a man she is nothing.Before things take an unjust turn in Amjad Al Rasheed’s tense and accomplished directorial debut, “Inshallah a Boy,” a wife and husband lie in bed discussing the timing to conceive a second child. There is something sweet in the exhaustion of the husband, Adnan (Mohammad Suleiman), and surprising in his admission to his wife, Nawal (Mouna Hawa), that he’s the cause of their fertility issues. This promising exchange will be their last.Adnan’s death throws Nawal into a tailspin she fears she cannot navigate, but she manages in ways that are at times resolute and at others desperate. To forestall her brother-in-law Rifqi (Haitham Omari) from pressing his legal right to seize the home where she and her daughter, Nora, live, Nawal tells a judge that she is pregnant. True or false, it’s the kind of declaration that has a fast-approaching expiration date.The first Jordanian film to compete at Cannes, “Inshallah,” from its very title, promises to delve into a patriarchal system that values men over women. (If only Nawal, god willing, had a son, ownership of the house would not be an issue.) But the filmmaker — and his fellow writers, Rula Nasser and Delphine Agut — also tussles with economic tensions that have implications beyond gender.Hawa, a Palestinian actress, is commanding as a woman whose future and faith are buffeted by her narrowing options. And the ensemble that buttresses the film — Nawal’s brother Ahmad (Mohammad Al Jizawi); Lauren (Yumna Marwan), the haughty and unhappily pregnant daughter of the Christian family that employs Nawal as a nurse; and Hassan (Eslam al-Awadi), a physical therapist who wants to be more than her colleague — makes Nawal’s alliances appear transactional, fraught and so very fragile.Inshallah a BoyNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Apolonia, Apolonia’ Review: A Whole Life in Art

    The painter Apolonia Sokol is the ostensible subject of a wide-ranging documentary about life itself.“For as long as I can remember, I’ve seen the world through my camera,” a woman’s voice says in the early moments of “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Onscreen, we’re watching — presumably through that same camera — a young woman, strong features, entrancing smile, dark circles under her eyes, bearing the expression of a person who’s not afraid of the lens one bit. “But no motif,” the voice continues, “has caught my eye as she did.”The face belongs to Apolonia Sokol, but the voice belongs to Lea Glob, the filmmaker who followed Sokol off and on for 13 years. The pair first met in 2009, and Glob, who is Danish (and speaks mostly in Danish throughout the film), decided to make Sokol the subject of a film school assignment: to create a documentary portrait of a person. She was, she tells us, entranced by Sokol’s life. Raised in a theater in Paris, then in Denmark after her parents split up, having weathered a life-threatening disease as a teen, Sokol returned to Paris when she turned 18 with aspirations to “walk in the footsteps of the great painters.” By that time, the theater (which her father had run) was barely holding on, but Sokol created a world in it nonetheless. That world grabbed Glob and wouldn’t let go.The age-old documentarian’s question — who is really the subject of a nonfiction film? — constitutes a major theme that runs through “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Glob speaks of entering the “magical theater” in which Sokol “played the starring role,” but even as the artist ages, the theater closes and life shifts drastically, Glob stays along for the ride. “Whether I captured Apolonia with my camera or she captured me with her theater, I don’t know,” she says. Glob’s method is observation, without a particular end or point in mind, very nearly to a fault. She even admits, late in the film, that she couldn’t really figure out when to turn off the camera — a question that plagues many an observational documentarian, and most artists and writers, too. Every time Glob thought the film might be finished, Sokol’s life morphed again: a move to New York, to Los Angeles, stints working with artists and for businesspeople. Each time, Glob went back to film some more.This is not the kind of documentary intended to help you learn about the life of the painter Apolonia Sokol. Unless you’re deep in the art world, you may not even know who that is. Instead, it’s a movie about life and how it’s lived, with Sokol’s portraiture forming a pleasing harmony rather than a narrative backbone. The film moves roughly forward in time, but jumps backward and sideways sometimes, as if Glob — in making sense of the present — is remembering something she watched long ago. It’s easy to refashion any artist’s life as a narrative of inevitability, but Sokol paints with no guarantee that she’ll ever break into the mainstream art world. We watch her grueling uncertainty through the eyes of someone who also isn’t really sure what she’s making. The point here isn’t to document the rise of a star, but to observe the process of making.That fact alone sets “Apolonia, Apolonia” apart from the deluge of subject-approved documentaries that have flooded the market and film festivals in the past several years. Those movies are frequently hagiographic, though not inevitably so. The intended audience is the famous subject’s fans, or those who wish to be. Thus these films come with a built-in viewership, which brings along a healthy budget. They’re safe investments for funders and streamers, and the ecosystem is built for them. But they offer few surprises.In a movie like “Apolonia, Apolonia,” however, there’s no obvious path along which the story will unfold when filming begins, which makes it hard to pitch to the people who hold the purse strings. Instead, most of the director’s work comes in the editing stage, when the recurring threads in all that footage become more clear. The subject of this film is expulsion, and the way that Sokol’s story parallels that of women who have been cast from their homes because they refused to fit established molds, and must make new lives elsewhere. This theme is echoed in a more melancholy key in Sokol’s friend Oksana Shachko, a feminist activist whom Sokol took in when she became a refugee from her native Ukraine (and was “already an icon,” as Glob puts it). They live together for years, and describe themselves as a couple, as soul mates, though the nature of their intimacy is kept a bit coy in the film. What matters is their spiritual and creative connection, the support they give to each other in their pursuit of creativity and determination to avoid motherhood.Glob, on the other hand, gets pregnant and bears a child during the course of the filming — a fact that interests Sokol for how it represents a creative woman evolving her life. At the start of the film, the 20-something Sokol seems to be constantly performing for the camera, showing Glob the tapes her parents made of her own conception and birth. But as time wears on, the friendship between them, which slips on and off screen, grows into something more symbiotic. Mirrors appear: Sokol’s youthful illness is reflected in Glob’s life-threatening pregnancy complications. Sokol’s portraiture keeps shape-shifting as she matures as a painter, just as Glob’s portrait of Sokol keeps mutating.“Apolonia, Apolonia” is beguiling as a portrait of women with ambition, but also bittersweet. Glob repeatedly refers to her filming and Sokol’s painting, their work of creating portraits, as cheating death — something they both do in their real lives, too. “The truth is, I never had that control,” Glob says. It took her more than 13 years to understand what she was looking at: “life itself, larger, tougher, and more beautiful than I’d ever imagined.”“Apolonia, I’m going to turn off the camera now,” she says, as we see the smiling face of an older, wiser Sokol, less interested in performance now than in a full life. And then the screen goes black.Apolonia, ApoloniaNot rated. In Danish and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Book of Clarence’ Review: Messiahs Wherever You Look

    LaKeith Stanfield leads a predominantly Black cast in a retelling of the story of Jesus that’s both irreverent and devoted.The subject of a Jesus movie is technically Jesus. But every movie based on the biblical account of Jesus — and there are many such movies, stretching back to 1898 — says at least as much about the people who made it as it does about the man himself. Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” paints a heavily Catholic, heavily bloody image of a suffering hero. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” draws a romantic, Rennaisance-derived portrait of a lush, otherworldly Christ. “The Jesus Film,” produced for evangelistic purposes, takes its text entirely from the biblical account, attempting to render a literalist version of a savior. William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” functions almost like a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of the story, with the main character crossing paths with Jesus only occasionally while experiencing a more broadly appealing revelation about radical forgiveness and loving one’s enemies. (And, yes, racing chariots.)“The Book of Clarence” is something entirely different than these and dozens of other renderings. But it bears some passing resemblance to another contemporary Jesus hit: “The Chosen,” a wildly popular television show that was crowdfunded and produced by Angel Studios (of last year’s megahit “Sound of Freedom”), and was so popular on streamers that the CW bought the rights to broadcast the first three seasons in 2023. (The fourth season will premiere exclusively in theaters this February.) Its popularity owes as much to a broad appetite for faith-inflected content as to its central concept: This is Jesus and those around him as you’ve never seen them before. They’re humans, with lives and dramas — not flat figures on a stained-glass window, or storybook characters, or ethereal saints. (It helps that the Jesus of “The Chosen,” unlike many other representations, actually looks like he’s from the Middle East.)As with that series, “The Book of Clarence” is a highly ambitious attempt at relatability, with an added reverence for the old-school “Ben-Hur”-era Hollywood biblical epics. Jeymes Samuel, who wrote and directed the film, clearly knows and loves the Bible story. He also doesn’t feel particularly beholden to a literalist rendering of the text. Here, Jesus and the apostles and their neighbors and friends are played by Black actors from around the diaspora, mostly in their own accents. The white actors play the Romans, a colonizing force of oppression.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Adan Canto, ‘The Cleaning Lady’ and ‘X-Men’ Actor, Dies at 42

    In a career spanning more than a decade, Mr. Canto played a range of roles, including a control-obsessed criminal, a poised politician and a fiery comic book hero.Adan Canto, the Mexican actor known for his roles in TV series such as “The Cleaning Lady” and “Designated Survivor” as well as for playing Sunspot in the film “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” died on Monday. He was 42.His death was confirmed by his publicist, Jennifer Allen, who said the cause was appendiceal cancer. She did not say where he died.In an acting career that spanned more than a decade, Mr. Canto played a range of roles including a furious criminal hellbent on having control, a poised politician and a fiery comic book hero.Mr. Canto said in a 2013 interview with Collider that he had “always been fascinated by people, their psychology, what drives them and trying to understand them.”Italia Ricci, left, and Adan Canto were both series regulars in the show “Designated Survivor.”Ben Mark Holzberg/ABCIn “The Cleaning Lady,” which premiered on Fox in 2022, Mr. Canto played the gangster Arman Morales, who recruits a woman, played by Elodie Yung, into his criminal organization after she witnesses a murder. The show is entering its third season this year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Marisa Pavan, Oscar Nominee for ‘The Rose Tattoo,’ Dies at 91

    The twin sister of the Italian ingénue Pier Angeli, she attempted to avoid the pitfalls of fame that befell her sister’s career.The Italian actress Marisa Pavan never achieved the fame of her twin sister, Pier Angeli, a film ingénue of the 1950s who graced national magazine covers, and whose romance with James Dean and subsequent marriage to the singer Vic Damone became the stuff of Hollywood lore.Ms. Pavan — analytical, at times defiant and, in her view, less conventionally beautiful than her sister — nevertheless carved out a successful career herself. She appeared in a number of high-profile films throughout the 1950s, including “The Rose Tattoo” (1955), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress.And she did it her way, bristling at the star-making machine that she believed had turned her sister into a sexualized confection of the silver screen.“The studios made her be like what they wanted her to be like, but from this moment on, it was not my sister I had in front of me anymore,” Ms. Pavan said in an interview with Margaux Soumoy, the author of a biography of Ms. Pavan, “Drop the Baby; Put a Veil on the Broad!” (2021). “She had become a studios’ product.”Ms. Pavan, right, with her twin sister, the actress Pier Angeli, in 1952. “The studios made her be like what they wanted her to be like,” Ms. Pavan said of her star-crossed sister.Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesMs. Pavan died on Dec. 6 at her home in Gassin, a village on the French Riviera, Ms. Soumoy said. She was 91.Maria Luisa Pierangeli, known as Marisa, and her fraternal twin, Anna Maria Pierangeli, were born on June 19, 1932, in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, to Luigi Pierangeli, an architect, and Enrichetta (Romiti) Pierangeli, who later helped guide the careers of her daughters. (Their younger sister, Patrizia, born 15 years after they were, also became an actress.)The family moved to Rome when the twins were 3 and, during World War II, harbored a Jewish general in the Italian Army who was hiding from the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. His last name was Pavan, which Marisa, who had grown close to him, would eventually adopt as her screen name.Her sister’s career started in her teens, when she was discovered on a street in Rome. When Mr. Pierangeli died in 1950, the family relocated to the United States to further her career.Marisa had no interest in the limelight until a friend of the family, Albert R. Broccoli, an agent who would go on to produce the James Bond film franchise, invited her to visit the set of “What Price Glory” (1952), a film set during World War I starring James Cagney and directed by John Ford.Once she was there, the producer Sol Siegel asked her if she could sing in French. She could, and she did. “I sang a song of Jacqueline François,” Ms. Pavan said in a 2015 interview with Film Talk, an online film journal. She recalled Mr. Siegel responding, “You’re going to test tomorrow!”“I took all of this as a joke,” Ms. Pavan said. But she took the script home, learned the scene and returned the next day.She got the part — a French girl who falls in love with a U.S. Marine, played by Robert Wagner — and discovered a passion for acting.Her career reached its pinnacle three years later with “The Rose Tattoo,” based on a Tennessee Williams play. Ms. Pavan played Rosa, the rebellious daughter of a grief-stricken Sicilian widow (Anna Magnani) whose life in a town on the Gulf of Mexico takes a turn when she meets an ebullient trucker (Burt Lancaster).Ms. Pavan with Robert Wagner in “What Price Glory” (1952), her first film.Paramount Pictures, via AlamyHer sister, who by then went by the name Pier Angeli, had a long-term contract with MGM that limited her freedom to choose her roles and control her image, Ms. Soumoy wrote. But Ms. Pavan wished instead to preserve her independence and worked with various studios.“From the moment I realized that I wanted to build a career as an actress, I kept telling my agents to only find me quality parts that would fit my own personality and tastes,” Ms. Pavan was quoted as saying in Ms. Soumoy’s book. “The last thing I wanted was to be kept prisoner under contract to one studio like Anna was.”Her other notable roles included the noblewoman Catherine de Medici in “Diane” (1956), a romance set in the 16th century that starred Lana Turner; the wartime fling of Gregory Peck’s conflicted suburban husband and father in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1956); and the love interest of Tony Curtis in the murder mystery “The Midnight Story” (1957).Ms. Pavan and the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont in 1989. They married in 1956 and remained married until his death in 2001.James Andanson/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMs. Pavan married the French film and stage star Jean-Pierre Aumont in 1956. He died in 2001.Her sister’s life ultimately took a tragic turn as she encountered a faltering career, a series of unhappy relationships and struggles with mental and physical health. In 1971, Ms. Angeli was found dead at 39.Although speculation of suicide has swirled for years, Ms. Pavan remained adamant that her sister’s death was accidental, a reaction to a medication a doctor had given her during a bout of anxiety. It was a loss from which Ms. Pavan never fully recovered.“She felt like she had lost half of herself,” Ms. Soumoy said.Ms. Pavan is survived by her sons, Jean-Claude and Patrick Aumont; her sister Patrizia; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Her eventual parting with the movie business appeared to stem from one clash in particular. While filming the splashy historical romance “Solomon and Sheba” (1959), the headstrong Ms. Pavan squared off against a producer after many of her scenes were cut, and threatened to leave the project. The move resulted in her effective blacklisting by studios, according to her biography.Ms. Pavan pivoted to television, making appearances on shows like the police procedural “Naked City,” the snappy private investigator drama “The Rockford Files” and the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.” She acted into the early 1990s. Late in life, she expressed no regret over her fate in Hollywood.“It was not in my nature to compromise,” she told Film Talk. “They did change my sister; they made her up like a pinup girl. I could wear a wig to play a certain part, but they could not change me in life.” More