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Suzy Delair, a French film actress and music-hall singer best known for her 1940s thrillers directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, her starring role in Laurel and Hardy’s last movie and her cheeky screen persona, died on March 15 at a retirement home in Paris. She was 102.The death was reported by the French magazine Le Point.To French cineastes, Ms. Delair was most closely identified with “Quai des Orfèvres” (1947), Clouzot’s acclaimed police melodrama about an ambitious and recklessly flirtatious singer, her jealous husband and a murder investigation.When the film opened in New York in January 1948 as “Jenny Lamour” (the stage name of Ms. Delair’s character), Bosley Crowther praised it in The New York Times and described Ms. Delair’s character as “both vivid and credible, a creature of normal contradictions, pathetic aspirations and deceits.”It was her third film with Clouzot, after “Le Dernier de Six” (“The Last of Six,” 1941) and “L’Assassin Habite … sur 21” (“The Murderer Lives at No. 21,” 1942), both made in Paris during the German Occupation.Suzette Pierrette Delaire was born on Dec. 31, 1917, in Paris. Her father, Clovis-Mathieu Delaire, sold equestrian equipment, and her mother, Thérèse (Nicola) Delaire, was a seamstress.Suzette’s first job was as an apprentice in a millinery shop, but she also began singing in cafes when she was 14. Were it not for her vocal career, she and Clouzot might never have connected.“He met me when I was a little debutante working with Mistinguett,” the risqué and wildly popular actress and entertainer, Ms. Delair told The Times in 2002.Clouzot attended a performance, heard Ms. Delair sing the hit “Valencia,” marked her name on the program and planned his return.“The next time he came to the show,” Ms. Delair recalled in the same interview, “he waited for me at the exit, we went for a drink, and that lasted 12 years.” It was a romantic relationship as well as a professional one.Ms. Delair’s movie career, which began in 1931 with “Un Caprice de la Pompadour” (“A Whim of the Pompadour”) and ended in 1976 with “Oublie-Moi, Mandoline” (“Forget Me, Mandoline”), was almost exclusively French. She was in “Pattes Blanches” (“White Paws,” 1949), a drama directed by Jean Grémillon; “Gervaise” (1956), René Clément’s adaptation of an Émile Zola novel; and “Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob” (“The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob,” 1973), Gérard Oury’s crime comedy, in which she played an excitable, grotesquely overdressed dentist chasing down her runaway husband.Her final screen appearances were on French television series in the 1980s. She continued to work in operetta.Of her 35 feature films, one was Italian — Luchino Visconti’s 1960 “Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli” (“Rocco and His Brothers”) — and one was a French-Italian co-production, certainly one of the most unusual items in her filmography: Laurel and Hardy’s last film.Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had been among the most successful comedy teams of the 1920s and ’30s. But their career was on the wane when they starred in “Atoll K” (1950), about a man who inherits a boat and a tropical island and sets off to start a new life with his best pal. Ms. Delair played a Navy officer’s runaway fiancée, who joins them. The film, shot partly in Marseilles and on the Côte d’Azur, was plagued by script trouble, cast illness and assorted production nightmares.Finally released in the United States in 1954 as “Utopia,” it was often relegated to double-feature bookings. Ms. Delair had doubts about the project and accepted the role only with certain conditions, including a personal makeup artist, a personal hairdresser and costumes by the star designer Jacques Fath.Other encounters with famous men turned out more favorably. On Feb. 28, 1948, Ms. Delair was singing at the Hotel Negresco in Nice. One man in the audience, Louis Armstrong, particularly loved a new number she did: “C’est Si Bon.” Two years later he recorded an English version, and the song became an international classic, recorded by artists from Eartha Kitt to Iggy Pop.In France, Ms. Delair was best known for another song, “Avec Son Tra La La,” which she performed in “Quai des Orfèvres.” Several European publications mentioned it in the headline or the first paragraph of their obituaries.She wasn’t a particular fan of the song, however. As she told The Times in 2002, “I always preferred the other song in the film — ‘Danse Avec Moi.’”Ms. Delair was made an officer of the Legion of Honor in 2007. Information on survivors was not immediately available.Before moving to the retirement home, Ms. Delair had lived in the same house on the Left Bank of Paris since 1946. She stayed busy, dealing with what many older people face.“I don’t have a moment to myself,” she told the celebrity newsmagazine France Dimanche in 2010, when she was 92 and preparing to spend the summer in Brittany. “I answer my mail, and then I throw things out, I organize things, I give things away, and I tear things up.”Ms. Delair had a reputation as somewhat difficult, but she defended herself in a 2017 article in the same publication. She was not a person of “bad character,” she said.“When I act, I always worry about being perfect,” she explained, and as a result “people find me irritating.” More

What do we do now?It’s a big question — as a matter of policy, national purpose and social cohesion it’s the big question — made up of a knot of local, individual, practical decisions. What actions can each of us take to stay healthy, connected and sane, to fight the dangerous secondary infections of boredom, selfishness and panic? How are we going to stay busy? How are we going to keep ourselves entertained?That last one may seem like a trivial problem with an easy solution. Lives and livelihoods are at stake, and there’s still plenty to watch on television. Maybe the lamentations about the closing of restaurants, bars, nightclubs, theaters and museums represent the displacement of deeper fears about the wholesale collapse of civilization. But it’s also true that the suspension of those amusements — of every form of cultural activity that involves the presence of other people — is a grievous loss, and a cause for real grief.We console ourselves with stopgaps and substitutes. There’s so much music and television to stream. There are stacks of books we never got around to reading, and games of meme-tag to play on social media. There are jokes to make about writing the next “King Lear.”All those energetic ways of making do may themselves be manifestations of grief — signs that we’re in the bargaining stage, much as those last nights out in early and mid-March were expressions of denial. (Those are the first and third phases in the Kübler-Ross sequence. Did we skip the second one, anger, or are we just so used to being angry all the time that we didn’t notice?)The loss we are confronting is real and profound, even if it turns out to be temporary. We are undergoing a trauma that we can’t fully comprehend. Denied our favorite sources of fun, we have also been robbed of the resources of meaning and community they represent.Much discussion of the coronavirus’s impact on the arts has focused on economics, on the dire effects on box-office revenues and business models, and on our roles as workers and consumers. A vibrant marketplace has shut down; industries face devastation.At the same time, our habits of cultural consumption connect us to an atavistic world of ritual, a way of being that money can never account for. The music fans who would have streamed into Coachella and the cinephiles alighting in Cannes retrace ancient routs and rites of pilgrimage. Bands on tour carry the memory of itinerant troubadours and acrobats caravanning from town to town, performing on makeshift stages in the village square. A movie house is like a house of worship: some congregations insist on silent contemplation, while others favor ecstatic call-and-response prayer.Theater, the most protean of art forms, and one of the oldest, has an especially complex genome. Susan Sontag once described theater as “this seasoned art, occupied since antiquity with all sorts of local offices — enacting sacred rites, reinforcing communal loyalty, guiding morals, provoking the therapeutic discharge of violent emotions, conferring social status, giving practical instruction, affording entertainment, dignifying celebrations, subverting established authority.” That’s only a partial list, and these “offices” persist, at least as latent possibilities and memory traces, at every performance of “Hamilton” or “Our Town.”What unites those disparate functions is the way theater, like other public art forms, makes us aware of a boundary that it simultaneously allows us, at least for a moment, to cross. Art is a way of knowing, of seeing and feeling, the borders that separate work from leisure, the sacred from the secular, the ordinary from the exalted, passivity from action, life from death. It makes us witnesses and participants in the crossing of those frontiers, and in doing so makes visible and permeable the boundaries between our individual and communal selves. We are alone in the dark of the theater or the light of the museum, and also together.For the last few years, motivated by affection rather than expertise, I’ve taught a college course on postwar Italian cinema. One of the things I love about the movies we study — and one of the things that makes them wonderfully resistant to classroom analysis — is how they defy the usual categories. My students and I puzzle over what seem like basic questions of style and genre: comedy or tragedy? Satire or sincerity? Happy ending or sad? Everything is mixed together — humor and pathos, horror and absurdity, Christian piety and pagan revelry, modern manners and primal urges.Even the most austere filmmakers — Vittorio De Sica in his late-1940s neorealist phase; Michelangelo Antonioni in his early-’60s explorations of alienation — can’t avoid the warmth and noise of communal life. Virtually every classic Italian film includes a chaotic meal, a religious procession or festival, a gaggle of squealing children tumbling through the frame. Solemnity will always be punctured. Solitude exists to be interrupted. Life is intrusive, unruly and beautiful.My hunch — supported only by the haphazard, dreamy research of looking at pictures, moving and otherwise — has always been that Italian filmmakers like De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and especially Federico Fellini were not only responding to the realities of Italian life in the hectic middle decades of the 20th century. They were also, consciously or not, refracting the influence of centuries of Italian art.Renaissance and baroque paintings of sacred subjects — last suppers, crucifixions, the torments of saints — bustle with profane life. The holy business at the center of the tableau is nearly upstaged by the flirting, drinking, gambling and fighting happening around the edges. Children and dogs cavort under the furniture. Elders grow distracted and sleepy. Adolescents roll their eyes in boredom. And for the viewer, wandering into the gallery hundreds of years too late for the party, the distinction between art and life dissolves. I know these people. We are these people.The film scholar Joseph Luzzi, writing about Italian neorealism, describes the role of the social group in these films as “chorality.” The word evokes ancient Greek tragedy, in which the chorus played a central role in the drama. More than simply commenting on the main action, the chorus, at least in the highly speculative theory proposed by Nietzsche, was the true protagonist, linking the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to even older Dionysian rituals. If the destruction of the hero provides a reminder of the inevitability of death, the voice of the chorus offers the compensatory, comforting lesson that “life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.”Recently, as communal life in Italy came to an agonized halt, the world caught a glimpse of this chorality in action. Videos of empty streets and locked-down high-rises brought to life by the singing of sequestered neighbors traveled around the internet. Like Italian movies, they mixed sentimentality with occasional silliness, but they also had a haunting, consoling aesthetic power.Those songs, so potent in their impotence, so inessential and yet so necessary, were reminders of what we stand to lose, and why we can’t stand to lose it. None of us is a hero: We are the chorus in this tragedy. We mourn for art because at the moment we are unable to mourn through art. What we do now is grieve, so that we can survive. More

When it was released in theaters less than a month ago, “The Invisible Man” looked like a breakout hit with a topical twist: This modern-day adaptation of the H.G. Wells science-fiction novel tells the story of a Bay Area woman, played by Elisabeth Moss, whose abusive ex-boyfriend (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) has apparently committed suicide and left her a large sum of money. But when she tries to move forward, she is unable to convince others that her unseen ex might still be stalking her.Moss, the Emmy Award-winning star of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” was widely praised for her performance in “The Invisible Man” (written and directed by Leigh Whannell of “Saw” and “Insidious” fame), and the film had sold more than $122 million in tickets worldwide before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered most movie theaters. Now, “The Invisible Man” is one of a few new movies that Universal Pictures will release Friday through on-demand video services, in a break from longstanding entertainment industry traditions. (Also due Friday, at a cost of $20 for a 48-hour rental, are “The Hunt” and “Emma.”)In a phone interview on Wednesday, Moss said she supported this experiment and was hopeful it would help “The Invisible Man” reach more viewers. “This is all new territory for everyone,” she said. “It’s an inevitable move. I also think that it’s a brave move.” She added, “If we can provide a couple hours of escape for people who are at home, and they can get a chance to forget about things for a second, that’s great.”Moss spoke about the contemporary themes of “The Invisible Man,” its insights into the nature of abuse and how horror movies can still offer relief in anxious times. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Were horror movies part of your cultural diet when you were growing up?I’ve always been a fan of horror films. Ever since I was 11 or 12, I would get together with my girlfriends from ballet school and we’d have sleepovers and we’d watch scary movies. That was our subversive act.Since you were studying ballet, I have to ask, did you ever watch “Suspiria”?No, I don’t think we were quite that highbrow. It was more like “Nightmare on Elm Street.” But we freaked ourselves out, for sure.How were you approached about “The Invisible Man”?I was doing Season 3 of [“The Handmaid’s Tale”], and I had done “Us,” and as soon as I read this script, I completely understood why this was definitely up my alley. It was this convergence of a genre-film reboot and an emotional character piece. This is the Jordan Peele way of approaching the genre — you’re taking something that’s, on the surface, entertaining and a popcorn movie, but at the same time, there’s a deeper message to it. I was like, OK, I see exactly why they think this is for me.When people think of you for a character who’s going to suffer, emotionally and physically, do you take it as a compliment?Absolutely. When I read scripts like this, I’m really flattered that they think that I can jump through these emotional hoops.Do you think that the feminist perspective has been absent from horror films?There are films that have had women at the center, especially recently with “Bird Box” and “A Quiet Place.” It also harkens back to the ’70s and ’80s, when you had “The Shining” and “The Exorcist.” These movies were about more than what was on the surface.It was Leigh Whannell’s idea to approach “The Invisible Man” this way, to tell it from the perspective of the victim and make it an analogy for women not being believed, women not being heard — women being told that they’re crazy or emotional when they believed something was happening to them. The parallel is so incredibly obvious and incredibly relevant.How do you approach the scenes where you’re essentially acting opposite no one, but you have to believe that another person is there?So much of my job is about imagination — creating something that is not there or erasing things that are there. So it’s not as big of a leap as you would think.Behind the scenes of that big fight sequence that I did and quite a few of the moments where I had to make physical contact with the Invisible Man, I was doing it with either Ollie [Jackson-Cohen] or a stunt double. It would have been impossible to do that fight without an actual, physical person there. That said, the fight when Aldis [Hodge, her co-star] gets beat up by the Invisible Man in the hallway, he did that by himself. It’s one of the greatest physical acting accomplishments I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s also super-fit. I can’t do that.When you’ve spent the time immersing yourself in the themes of this film, do you emerge from the project a different person in any way?Because of the roles that I’ve played, I’ve always had an extreme awareness of the patriarchy and of women put in abusive situations or who experience sexual servitude. Mental and emotional abuse is a much harder thing to quantify. It’s much more difficult to be believed and much harder to receive empathy. We tend to go, she’s not happy, she’s being abused, why doesn’t she just get out? Leigh and I had many conversations about wanting to show that a woman who experiences abuse isn’t weak, isn’t stupid. There are strong and intelligent women out there who wind up in positions that they find very difficult to get out of, and it’s not their fault.How do you feel about the movie getting such a rapid on-demand release?I was quite honestly hoping that they would make it available to people at home sooner than was originally planned. It’s an unusual move. But at the same time, we live in an unusual moment. Are movies going to be this way forever? I have no idea. That’s up to much smarter heads than mine. But this week, I think it’s a good idea.There’s one particular scene in this movie — I don’t want to spoil it here — that absolutely shocked viewers who saw it in theaters. Will it work the same when you’re watching at home and can’t hear the reactions of other moviegoers?I think it’s just a different experience. I’ve watched so many horror films at home, and I was still terrified. Of course, seeing something in a theater with an audience is so singular. But at the same time, I think there is an experience that you can have at home that’s just as scary and just as meaningful, even if it’s different. In fact, you’ll be alone at home, which is probably the scariest way to watch this movie. I would just recommend turning out all the lights and turning up the volume as much as you can.Do you see any connections among the film and TV characters you have portrayed recently, including Becky Something, the unruly rock star you played in “Her Smell”?I really take great pleasure in pushing characters to the extreme. It gets more and more challenging to find new ways to do that. You have to keep asking yourself, what can I do now that is different? For me, it’s not about necessarily always playing the good guy. What I loved about Becky was that I got to play somebody who was not an admirable human being, and who was really quite honestly terrible, most of the time. [Laughs]Many viewers first took notice of you on “Mad Men,” where you played Peggy Olson, who was a much more constrained character. Was that at all inhibiting? Did you feel like the role let you show your full range as an actor?“Mad Men” was a much slower burn than “The Invisible Man” or “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but Peggy changed so much from Season 1 to Season 7. Every single season, I felt like she was a different person when we came back. Playing within the constraints of a character is very challenging, too — playing a person who can’t express themselves, or is under a patriarchy or in a work environment that’s extremely sexist and having to navigate that, that is a very human and relatable experience as well.Part of it, too, is that I developed a lot as an actor over the years. I don’t know if I could have done “Handmaid’s Tale” at 23, which is when I started “Mad Men.” Working with Jane Campion on [the mystery-drama series] “Top of the Lake,” which I did between seasons of “Mad Men,” was such an incredible learning experience, too. Because I wasn’t sure what other tools I had in the toolbox when I went to New Zealand to do that first season. I thought, well, I can at least do these three scenes that I auditioned with. Taking that into “Handmaid’s Tale,” when I didn’t think I was going to be doing another TV show quite that quickly, it showed me: Ooh, there’s this other thing I can do! More

This article contains spoilers for “The Hunt.”It’s a showdown of pop-culture gladiators: Million Dollar Baby vs. Liberty Belle.Hilary Swank, who won an Oscar for playing a boxer in “Million Dollar Baby,” and Betty Gilpin, an Emmy nominee for her turn as the wrestler Liberty Belle, or Debbie Eagan, in “GLOW,” square off in an over-the-top fight sequence at the climax of the new satirical action picture “The Hunt.”The actors’ backgrounds in on-screen combat were a boon to Hank Amos, who along with Heidi Moneymaker served as the film’s stunt coordinator. “Both of them were already so far ahead of the game,” Amos said in a recent phone interview. “Trust me, those ladies can throw down.”The clash takes place in the high-end kitchen of a mansion owned by Athena (Swank), a wealthy liberal who organizes a hunting party of elitists to track down and kill a dozen so-called “deplorables,” including Crystal (Gilpin).The finale opens with six minutes of verbal sparring, followed by a seven-minute battle that utilizes such improvised weapons as hanging light fixtures and the chopping blade of a food processor. “I’ve filmed so many scenes in kitchens, but never one quite like this,” Gilpin said in a recent phone interview. “To have some meat-and-potatoes scene work with two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank and then beat the crap out of each other was incredible.”VideoHilary Swank and Betty Gilpin in “The Hunt.”Gilpin trained for seven months in preparation for the fight. “I did all the tire lifting and sled pushing that my weird little Irish body could do,” Gilpin said. “I was eating bison meat, drinking protein shakes and taking insanely good care of myself.” More