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      George Bartenieff, Fixture of Downtown Theater, Dies at 89

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      A veteran actor, he was also a founder of Theater for the New City and Theater Three Collaborative, Manhattan groups known for experimental productions.George Bartenieff, an actor and producer who was a significant figure in the Off Off Broadway and experimental theater world as a founder of two theater groups, died on Saturday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 89.His wife, the playwright Karen Malpede, said the cause was the cumulative effects of several advanced illnesses.Mr. Bartenieff had credentials that might have led to a mainstream acting career. He was on Broadway before he was 15 and in the 1960s appeared there in plays by Edward Albee and John Guare. His smattering of film and television credits suggest that he could have made a character-actor’s career just out of playing a judge or a doctor on series like “Law & Order.”But he much preferred to be involved in the kinds of socially conscious, form-bending plays staged in downtown Manhattan and, sometimes, out on the street.When Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theater, the avant-garde repertory company they founded in the 1940s, presented Kenneth H. Brown’s scalding play about a Marine prison, “The Brig,” in 1963, Mr. Bartenieff was in the cast. He appeared in productions of the Judson Poets’ Theater, an experimental group in the same period. Later in the 1960s he worked with the director Andre Gregory at the Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. After he returned to New York, he and his wife at the time, Crystal Field, founded Theater for the New City in 1971.That group has been presenting adventurous theatrical works, many on social and political themes, ever since. After a divorce from Ms. Field, Mr. Bartenieff married Ms. Malpede in 1995, the year they and Lee Nagrin founded Theater Three Collective. It, too, has presented numerous plays since, many of them avant-garde, socially conscious works by Ms. Malpede, with Mr. Bartenieff in the casts.Mr. Bartenieff, left, and Ben Piazza in Edward Albee’s one-act play “The Zoo Story,” staged in 1965 at the Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan. It was part of a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” in which Mr. Bartenieff also performed.The plays he was in or produced dealt with issues he was concerned about, like environmental degradation or the effects of war — generally not the kinds of themes that made for widespread commercial success. He worked occasionally in the mainstream world, taking small parts in “Law & Order,” “Rescue Me” and other television shows and movies like “Julie and Julia” (2009), but that wasn’t his comfort zone.“More than fame or fortune, he wanted to make a difference with his art,” Ms. Malpede said by email. “He knew that the vision(s) of ‘Law & Order’ and so much else were same old, and he wanted the world to change.”“For George,” she added, “the vision, the worldview, the poetics were the most important. We raided every savings account, pension, etc., we ever had to do the work we loved. As simple or as strange as that.”George Michael Bartenieff was born on Jan. 23, 1933, in Berlin to Michael and Irmgard (Prim) Bartenieff, who were dancers. His father was Jewish, and as the situation darkened in Nazi Germany the parents went to the United States to try to establish a life, leaving George and a brother, Igor, in the care of an aunt.“I’m half-Jewish, so I was hidden in the German half of my family,” Mr. Bartenieff explained in an oral history recorded in 2015 for the Primary Stages Off Broadway Oral History Project.He attended a school in the Bavarian mountains that was somewhat removed from the turmoil elsewhere in Germany, and he remembered it fondly, especially the pageants the school would stage on various holidays.“It made you aware that storytelling was as important as living,” he said of those spectacles.His parents had settled in Pittsfield, Mass., using their dance expertise to start a physiotherapy business, and in 1939 they brought the boys over to join them. It was a time when German immigrants in the United States faced suspicion, something that The Berkshire Eagle, the local newspaper, sought to dispel with a 1940 article about the young newcomers.“Neither child spoke a word of English when their parents met them at the pier in New York,” the newspaper said. “But in six months they’ve learned not only to speak English, but good, honest ‘United States.’ George is in the fourth grade at Mercer School; Igor, in the sixth. Either one can say ‘You bet’ and ‘OK’ quicker than you could yourself.”A few years later, Mr. Bartenieff’s parents split up and the boys relocated to New York City with their mother, a devotee of the dance theorist Rudolf Laban, who would go on to found an institute in New York devoted to his ideas.When he was 11, Mr. Bartenieff saw a friend perform in a play and determined that that was what he wanted to do. His mother enrolled him in a dramatic arts workshop.“One day,” he recalled in the oral history, “a Broadway stage manager spoke to one of our teachers and said, ‘Do you have a boy who’s around 14? — because we need an understudy for a show that’s just started rehearsal.’”He went in to read for the director, Harold Clurman, a famed figure in New York theater. During out-of-town tryouts, as Mr. Bartenieff told the story, his work as an understudy so impressed everyone that the boy in the part was let go and he was promoted to the main cast. The show was a comedy called “The Whole World Over,” and Mr. Bartenieff made his Broadway debut in it in 1947.He was in a second Broadway show while still a teenager, the Lillian Hellman play “Montserrat,” in 1949. After graduating from high school he was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He spent four years in England before returning to New York in the mid-1950s, landing in the midst of the Beat era.Mr. Bartenieff with Lois Markle, left, and Judith Ivey in the Albee play “The American Dream” at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2008. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“One of the things about that moment in New York was that there were so many people who were half mad and half inspired by their own visions,” Mr. Bartenieff said in the oral history. It was, he added, “a moment when you were constantly being surprised by something you’d never seen before.”Soon he was among those creating surprises. One of the things that he and Ms. Field were known for once they started Theater for the New City was street theater, performed in unexpected places for unpredictable audiences. In 1985, Ms. Field recalled an early show performed at a playground in Brooklyn, in which Mr. Bartenieff played a purse snatcher and she portrayed a youngster who screams.“I had always shut my eyes when I screamed because it had to be loud and from a sitting position,” she said. “When I opened them, the entire au­dience was on its feet, chasing George.”In the mid-1970s, she and Mr. Bartenieff worked with the puppeteer Ralph Lee to turn his idea for a Greenwich Village Halloween parade into a major event that continues to this day.In addition to his wife, Mr. Bartenieff is survived by a son from his first marriage, Alexander; a stepdaughter, Carrie Sophia Ciminera; a granddaughter; and two step-grandchildren.Among his most ambitious projects with Ms. Malpede was “I Will Bear Witness,” a one-man play performed by Mr. Bartenieff that the two of them adapted from the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who documented Nazi cruelties from inside the Dresden ghetto. After the play had its premiere at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan in 2001, they took it on tour, including to Berlin, Mr. Bartenieff’s birthplace. The experience resonated deeply with him.“I don’t think Klemperer’s diary is your typical Holocaust literature, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have got past the first page,” he told The Irish Times in 2002, during the Berlin run. “So much love is in this diary, so much humanity, so much violence and poetry.” More

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      Jennette McCurdy Is Ready to Move Forward, and to Look Back

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      In her memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” McCurdy, best known for her role in“iCarly,” reflects on her time as a child actor and on her troubled relationship with her mother.When Jennette McCurdy was 16, she was in her third year on “iCarly,” the hit teen sitcom on Nickelodeon. Millions of young viewers admired her for her comic portrayal of Sam Puckett, the wisecracking pal of its title character, and she was proud that her lucrative work was helping to support her family.McCurdy was also living under the stringent control of her mother, Debra, who oversaw her career, determined her meals — her dinners consisted of shredded pieces of low-cal bologna and lettuce sprayed with dressing — and even administered her showers.Her mother gave her breast and vaginal exams, which she said were inspections for cancer, and shaved her daughter’s legs while McCurdy remained largely uneducated about the changes her body was experiencing.She struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and anxiety triggered by the constant attention she received as a celebrity, but she felt trapped in her work. She also believed she owed her unfaltering loyalty to her mother, who had recovered from breast cancer when Jennette was very young, only for her cancer to return in 2010, at the height of her daughter’s fame.Debra McCurdy died in 2013, and Jennette, now 30, is still reckoning with the gravitational pull exerted by her mother, who steered her to the trade that gave her visibility and financial stability while she controlled virtually every aspect of her daughter’s existence.When Jennette McCurdy wrote a memoir, which Simon and Schuster will publish on Aug. 9, it was clear to her that her relationship with her mother would provide its narrative force. “It’s the heartbeat of my life,” she said recently.McCurdy as Sam and Miranda Cosgrove as Carly in “iCarly.”Lisa Rose/NickelodeonThe book is titled “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” and its cover bears the image of McCurdy, a narrow half-smile on her face, holding a pink funeral urn with confetti strands peeking over its rim. The presentation might be off-putting to some readers; the author is well aware. But she also feels it accurately encapsulates a coming-of-age story that is alternately harrowing and mordantly funny.When you have grown up as she has, feeling tenderness and anger toward a person you’ve seen wield immense power while fighting for her own life, she said, “You can’t believe how hard and how laughable it is at the same time. That’s completely my sense of humor.”“I feel like I’ve done the processing and put in the work to earn a title or a thought that feels provocative,” she added.Though McCurdy may have the résumé of a seasoned Hollywood veteran, she carried herself like a wide-eyed tourist on a visit to New York in late June. Over afternoon tea at the BG Restaurant in midtown Manhattan, she gazed at fellow patrons, asked for Broadway theater recommendations and chided herself about a transcendental meditation class she’d taken near her home in Los Angeles.“So far, I haven’t seen any results,” she said with a chuckle, “but we’ll see.”When it comes to new endeavors, McCurdy said, “I think things should feel natural. So much of my life was about forcing or pushing things. So when something feels like it’s working, I’ll let that be, and anything else can fall by the wayside.”As McCurdy recounts in her memoir, she was 6 when she started auditioning for acting roles, having been shepherded into the work by her mother, who was her herself discouraged from becoming an actress by her own parents.Growing up in Southern California, McCurdy was cast in TV commercials and shows like “Mad TV,” “Malcolm in the Middle” and “CSI” before landing “iCarly,” which had its debut in 2007. Yet she never had any illusions about who was really benefiting from these accomplishments. As she writes of the moment she learned she had booked “iCarly,” “Everything’s going to be better. Mom will finally be happy. Her dream has come true.”McCurdy endured various embarrassments and indignities at Nickelodeon, where she writes of being photographed in a bikini at a wardrobe fitting and being encouraged to drink alcohol by an intimidating figure she simply calls the Creator. In situations where her mother was present, Debra did not intervene or speak up, instructing Jennette that this was the price of showbiz success: “Everyone wants what you have,” she would tell her daughter.When McCurdy was promised an “iCarly” spinoff, she assumed she’d be given her own show — only to receive a co-starring slot on “Sam & Cat,” which paired her with the future pop-music sensation Ariana Grande.There, she says her superiors on these shows prevented her from pursuing career opportunities outside the show while Grande thrived in her extracurricular work. As McCurdy writes, “What finally undid me was when Ariana came whistle-toning in with excitement because she had spent the previous evening playing charades at Tom Hanks’s house. That was the moment I broke.”McCurdy, as Sam, and Ariana Grande as Cat in Sam & Cat, on Nickelodeon.Lisa Rose/NickelodeonAs McCurdy grew older and more independent, her relationship with her mother became further strained. The book reproduces an email in which her mother calls her “a SLUT,” “a FLOOZY” and “an UGLY MONSTER,” then concludes with a request for money for a refrigerator. When Debra had a recurrence of cancer and died, Jennette, then 21, was liberated — and left to navigate a complex world without her guidance, contending with destructive romantic relationships, bulimia, anorexia and alcohol abuse.“iCarly” ended its original run in 2012, and “Sam & Cat” ran just one season from 2013-14, after which, McCurdy writes, she turned down a $300,000 offer from Nickelodeon if she agreed never to speak publicly about her experiences at the network. (A press representative for Nickelodeon declined to comment.)She was free to reclaim her personal life and pursue other projects, like the Netflix science-fiction series “Between.” But she found it difficult to let go of the resentment from how she’d been treated when she was younger. As she said in an interview, “It felt like all these decisions were being made on my behalf and I was the last one to know about them. That’s really infuriating. It led to a lot of rage.”Even now, McCurdy found that revisiting the era of her child stardom resurfaced raw feelings about a parent, and an industry, that had failed to protect her.“My whole childhood and adolescence were very exploited,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “It still gives my nervous system a reaction to say it. There were cases where people had the best intentions and maybe didn’t know what they were doing. And also cases where they did — they knew exactly what they were doing.”Marcus McCurdy, the oldest of Jennette’s three brothers, said that their mother was consistently volatile when they were growing up.“You were always walking on eggshells — is it going to be nice mom or crazy mom today?” he said. “One day she’d be fine, the next day she’d be yelling at everybody. Every holiday was super overdramatic. She’d lose her mind on Christmas if something wasn’t perfect.”Friends and colleagues from Jennette McCurdy’s time as a child actor said they could sense the tension in her relationship with her mother, even if they did not yet know the exact details.“Jennette can be outgoing, very forward and bright and electric,” said David Archuleta, the pop singer and “American Idol” finalist. “I could also tell she was very guarded, very protective of her mom and they were very close.”Archuleta, whose career was closely controlled by his father when he was a minor, said such arrangements can be destructive for children.“Because you’re always with that parent, they don’t really let you around anyone else,” Archuleta said. “You don’t look at it as a control thing — you look at it as, ‘Oh, they’re looking out for me.’ And they make you feel like everyone is against you.”Over time, Archuleta added, the parent may turn toxic. “It gets to where it’s like, ‘You can’t make any decisions on your own. You can’t do anything on your own. You’re too dumb.’”Miranda Cosgrove, the star of “iCarly,” said that though she and McCurdy quickly became close on the show, she was initially unaware of many difficulties her friend was facing, which McCurdy only revealed as they became older.“When you’re young, you’re so in your own head,” Cosgrove said. “You can’t imagine that people around you are having much harder struggles.”In a softer voice, Cosgrove added, “You don’t expect things like that from the person in the room who’s making everyone laugh.”“So much of my life was about forcing or pushing things,” McCurdy said. Now, “I think things should feel natural.”Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesFor McCurdy, opening up about herself to the wider world has been a long-term process. In her late teens and early 20s, she wrote essays for The Wall Street Journal that shared some of her insights into child stardom. But today she feels she was not fully candid.“If I had been truthful at that time,” she explained, “I would have said, ‘Yeah, I wrote this and then I went and made myself throw up for four minutes afterward.’”A few years ago, McCurdy started writing a new series of personal essays, including several about her mother, and shared them with her manager at the time. “My manager sent me back a nice email that said, ‘This is great — I don’t really know what to do with this.’ I’ll never forget the ‘xoxo’ at the end.” (McCurdy no longer works with that manager.)Instead, she began performing a one-woman show, also called “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” in Los Angeles. Though the pandemic impeded plans to take the show on the road, McCurdy used some of her down time to craft the memoir. “I really wanted to build it out a lot more, get more into the childhood aspect of the story and work through the arc in a way that you only can with a book,” she explained.Marcus McCurdy said he supported his sister’s decision to write her memoir, even if her calling it “I’m Glad My Mom Died” has caused some consternation in the family.“Our grandmother is very upset about that title,” Marcus said, adding that he and his sister share a similar sense of humor. “It’s more of a coping mechanism,” he said. “You can either be like, ‘Woe is me, my life is horrible.’ Or you find the humor in these things that are really tragic.”Archuleta also said it was empowering for McCurdy to write her book. “It’s given her back some of her strength, her confidence,” he said.McCurdy is writing another set of essays about coming into her own in her 20s, as well as a novel. (Its protagonist, she said, is “either who I wish I could be in some aspects, or who I hope I never am in other aspects. But it’s probably me, right?”)Aside from a few watch parties that her family held for her earliest episodic TV work, McCurdy told me, “I’ve never seen any of the shows that I’ve been on.” For her, these were fraught documents of her suffering and unwelcome reminders of the helplessness she felt at the time.A few years ago, after the cancellation of her Netflix series, McCurdy decided to take a break from acting. As she writes in the memoir, “I want my life to be in my hands. Not an eating disorder’s or a casting director’s or an agent’s or my mom’s. Mine.” She did not take part in a recent revival of “iCarly” on Paramount+. But McCurdy said that her experience with her one-woman show has shown her there might be ways that performance could be constructive for her in the future.“It felt significant in repairing some of the really weighted, complicated relationships that I had with acting,” she said. “It felt like finally I’m saying my words and saying things I want to be saying. I’m myself.”Though McCurdy can still find it uncomfortable to reflect on her past, it also makes her hopeful to focus on the present and to see the friends and colleagues who are part of her life because she alone chose for them to be in it.“I have people around me now that are so supportive and so loving,” she said. “It makes me tearful with joy. I feel so safe. I feel so much trust and so much openness.” More

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      Pat Carroll, TV Mainstay Turned Stage Star, Dies at 95

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      Tired of sitcoms and game shows, she reinvented herself in a one-woman show about Gertrude Stein — and, later, in a gender-bending Shakespeare role.Pat Carroll, who after many years on television as the self-described “dowager queen of game shows” went on to earn critical acclaim for her work on the stage, died on Saturday at her home on Cape Cod, Mass. She was 95. Her daughter Kerry Karsian, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. She did not specify the cause.Ms. Carroll broke into television as a sketch comedian in the 1950s and later became a fixture on “Password,” “I’ve Got a Secret” and other game shows. She was also seen frequently on sitcoms like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and dramas like “Police Woman.” But a part she took in 1977, when she was 50, inspired her to change direction.In a 1979 interview with The New York Times, she recalled being cast as Pearl Markowitz, an overly protective mother, on the short-lived comedy “Busting Loose,” and asking herself, “Is this all there is left — playing mothers on TV?”Rather than sinking comfortably into that stereotype, Ms. Carroll provided a bold answer to her own question by commissioning Marty Martin, a young Texas playwright, to write a one-woman play for her about the poet Gertrude Stein.“Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein” opened Off Broadway in 1979 and received glowing reviews. Ms. Carroll won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards in 1980 for the performance, and in 1981 her recording of the play won a Grammy Award in the “best spoken word” category.“It was the jewel in my crown,” Ms. Carroll said in an interview for this obituary in 2011, recalling how the play came about. “I was recently divorced, I had gained a lot of weight, and the phone was not ringing. It was not the agents’ or directors’ or producers’ fault that the phone was not ringing. I thought, ‘I am responsible for creating some kind of work.’ And I began thinking of people to do.”Ms. Carroll in 1979 in the title role in the Marty Martin play “Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein” at the Circle Repertory Theater. “It was the jewel in my crown,” she said of the play.Gerry GoodsteinA decade later, Ms. Carroll, still looking for challenging work, sought out the role of the conniving, overweight — and, obviously, male — Falstaff in a production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” in Washington.“When Ms. Carroll makes her first entrance,” Frank Rich wrote in The Times, “a nervous silence falls over the audience at the Shakespeare Theater at the Folger here, as hundreds of eyes search for some trace of the woman they’ve seen in a thousand television reruns. What they find instead is a Falstaff who could have stepped out of a formal painted portrait: a balding, aged knight with scattered tufts of silver hair and whiskers, an enormous belly, pink cheeks and squinting, froggy eyes that peer out through boozy mists. The sight is so eerie you grab onto your seat.”“One realizes,” Mr. Rich continued, “that it is Shakespeare’s character, and not a camp parody, that is being served.”Patricia Ann Carroll was born on May 5, 1927, in Shreveport, La., and grew up in Los Angeles. Her father, Maurice, worked for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power; her mother, Kathryn (Meagher) Carroll, worked in real estate and office management.Ms. Carroll attended Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles on an English scholarship but left before graduating. “I realized that what I was learning was not going to advance what I wished to do,” she said in 2011. “I always thought experience was the best preparation.”In 1947, Ms. Carroll left Los Angeles for Plymouth, Mass., where she worked at the Priscilla Beach Theater and, she said, ate, drank and breathed the theater. She made her professional stage debut there that year in “A Goose for the Gander,” starring Gloria Swanson. Soon after, she made it to New York, where, among other odd jobs, she shined shoes.She initially made her mark in the early 1950s as a comedian — first at Le Ruban Bleu, the Village Vanguard and other nightclubs, then on television, on “The Red Buttons Show” and other variety series.She was a regular on the Sid Caesar sketch show “Caesar’s Hour,” for which she won an Emmy in 1957, and, in the early 1960s, on “The Danny Thomas Show,” on which she played the wife of the Thomas character’s manager.Ms. Carroll made the first of her four Broadway appearances in 1955 in “Catch a Star!,” a revue written by Neil and Danny Simon. Her performance did not win the kind of notices that foreshadow stage success: Brooks Atkinson of The Times, for example, wrote that she did not have “a bold enough technique to come alive in the theater.”The response was different in 1959 when she played Hildy, the flirtatious cabdriver who tries to persuade a shy sailor on 24-hour shore leave to come to her apartment with the song “I Can Cook, Too,” in a revival of the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical “On the Town” at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse. “If the evening has a star,” Arthur Gelb of The Times wrote, “it is Pat Carroll, a blue-eyed blonde with a genius for the deadpan and double take.”Ms. Carroll’s work at the Folger Theater garnered her three Helen Hayes Awards: outstanding lead actress for her roles in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” and outstanding supporting actress for her role as the nurse in “Romeo and Juliet.”Ms. Carroll married Lee Karsian, a William Morris agent, in 1955. The couple, who divorced in 1975, had three children: a son, Sean, who died in 2009, and two daughters, Kerry Karsian and Tara Karsian, who survive her. Ms. Carroll played an Appalachian grandmother in the film “Songcatcher.” The role earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination and a jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.James Bridges/Lions Gate FilmsAlthough she spent most of her career on television (where her later work included appearances on “ER” and “Designing Women”) and the stage, Ms. Carroll also had some memorable roles on the big screen. In 1968 she played Doris Day’s sister in “With Six You Get Eggroll.” In 2000 she played an Appalachian grandmother in “Songcatcher,” a role that earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination and a jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.For many of her film and TV performances, Ms. Carroll went unseen: She provided voices for numerous cartoon characters, most notably Ursula, the menacing sea witch, in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” in 1989. That role, she once said, was “the one thing in my life that I’m probably most proud of.”“I don’t even care if, after I’m gone, the only thing that I’m associated with is Ursula,” she added. “That’s OK with me, because that’s a pretty wonderful character and a pretty marvelous film to be remembered by.” More

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      Pat Carroll, Stage Star Who Voiced Disney’s “Ursula,” Dies at 95

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      Tired of sitcoms and game shows, she reinvented herself in a one-woman show about Gertrude Stein — and, later, in a gender-bending Shakespeare role.Pat Carroll, who after many years on television as the self-described “dowager queen of game shows” went on to earn critical acclaim for her work on the stage, died on Saturday at her home on Cape Cod, Mass. She was 95. Her daughter Kerry Karsian, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. She did not specify the cause.Ms. Carroll broke into television as a sketch comedian in the 1950s and later became a fixture on “Password,” “I’ve Got a Secret” and other game shows. She was also seen frequently on sitcoms like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and dramas like “Police Woman.” But a part she took in 1977, when she was 50, inspired her to change direction.In a 1979 interview with The New York Times, she recalled being cast as Pearl Markowitz, an overly protective mother, on the short-lived comedy “Busting Loose,” and asking herself, “Is this all there is left — playing mothers on TV?”Rather than sinking comfortably into that stereotype, Ms. Carroll provided a bold answer to her own question by commissioning Marty Martin, a young Texas playwright, to write a one-woman play for her about the poet Gertrude Stein.“Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein” opened Off Broadway in 1979 and received glowing reviews. Ms. Carroll won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards in 1980 for the performance, and in 1981 her recording of the play won a Grammy Award in the “best spoken word” category.“It was the jewel in my crown,” Ms. Carroll said in an interview for this obituary in 2011, recalling how the play came about. “I was recently divorced, I had gained a lot of weight, and the phone was not ringing. It was not the agents’ or directors’ or producers’ fault that the phone was not ringing. I thought, ‘I am responsible for creating some kind of work.’ And I began thinking of people to do.”Ms. Carroll in 1979 in the title role in the Marty Martin play “Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein” at the Circle Repertory Theater. “It was the jewel in my crown,” she said of the play.Gerry GoodsteinA decade later, Ms. Carroll, still looking for challenging work, sought out the role of the conniving, overweight — and, obviously, male — Falstaff in a production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” in Washington.“When Ms. Carroll makes her first entrance,” Frank Rich wrote in The Times, “a nervous silence falls over the audience at the Shakespeare Theater at the Folger here, as hundreds of eyes search for some trace of the woman they’ve seen in a thousand television reruns. What they find instead is a Falstaff who could have stepped out of a formal painted portrait: a balding, aged knight with scattered tufts of silver hair and whiskers, an enormous belly, pink cheeks and squinting, froggy eyes that peer out through boozy mists. The sight is so eerie you grab onto your seat.”“One realizes,” Mr. Rich continued, “that it is Shakespeare’s character, and not a camp parody, that is being served.”Patricia Ann Carroll was born on May 5, 1927, in Shreveport, La., and grew up in Los Angeles. Her father, Maurice, worked for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power; her mother, Kathryn (Meagher) Carroll, worked in real estate and office management.Ms. Carroll attended Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles on an English scholarship but left before graduating. “I realized that what I was learning was not going to advance what I wished to do,” she said in 2011. “I always thought experience was the best preparation.”In 1947, Ms. Carroll left Los Angeles for Plymouth, Mass., where she worked at the Priscilla Beach Theater and, she said, ate, drank and breathed the theater. She made her professional stage debut there that year in “A Goose for the Gander,” starring Gloria Swanson. Soon after, she made it to New York, where, among other odd jobs, she shined shoes.She initially made her mark in the early 1950s as a comedian — first at Le Ruban Bleu, the Village Vanguard and other nightclubs, then on television, on “The Red Buttons Show” and other variety series.She was a regular on the Sid Caesar sketch show “Caesar’s Hour,” for which she won an Emmy in 1957, and, in the early 1960s, on “The Danny Thomas Show,” on which she played the wife of the Thomas character’s manager.Ms. Carroll made the first of her four Broadway appearances in 1955 in “Catch a Star!,” a revue written by Neil and Danny Simon. Her performance did not win the kind of notices that foreshadow stage success: Brooks Atkinson of The Times, for example, wrote that she did not have “a bold enough technique to come alive in the theater.”The response was different in 1959 when she played Hildy, the flirtatious cabdriver who tries to persuade a shy sailor on 24-hour shore leave to come to her apartment with the song “I Can Cook, Too,” in a revival of the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical “On the Town” at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse. “If the evening has a star,” Arthur Gelb of The Times wrote, “it is Pat Carroll, a blue-eyed blonde with a genius for the deadpan and double take.”Ms. Carroll’s work at the Folger Theater garnered her three Helen Hayes Awards: outstanding lead actress for her roles in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” and outstanding supporting actress for her role as the nurse in “Romeo and Juliet.”Ms. Carroll married Lee Karsian, a William Morris agent, in 1955. The couple, who divorced in 1975, had three children: a son, Sean, who died in 2009, and two daughters, Kerry Karsian and Tara Karsian, who survive her. Ms. Carroll played an Appalachian grandmother in the film “Songcatcher.” The role earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination and a jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.James Bridges/Lions Gate FilmsAlthough she spent most of her career on television (where her later work included appearances on “ER” and “Designing Women”) and the stage, Ms. Carroll also had some memorable roles on the big screen. In 1968 she played Doris Day’s sister in “With Six You Get Eggroll.” In 2000 she played an Appalachian grandmother in “Songcatcher,” a role that earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination and a jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.For many of her film and TV performances, Ms. Carroll went unseen: She provided voices for numerous cartoon characters, most notably Ursula, the menacing sea witch, in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” in 1989. That role, she once said, was “the one thing in my life that I’m probably most proud of.”“I don’t even care if, after I’m gone, the only thing that I’m associated with is Ursula,” she added. “That’s OK with me, because that’s a pretty wonderful character and a pretty marvelous film to be remembered by.” More

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      Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura on ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 89

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      She was among the first Black women to have a leading role in a TV series. She later worked with NASA to recruit minorities for the space program.Nichelle Nichols, the actress revered by “Star Trek” fans everywhere for her role as Lieutenant Uhura, the communications officer on the starship U.S.S. Enterprise, died on Saturday in Silver City, N.M. She was 89.The cause was heart failure, said Sky Conway, a writer and a film producer who was asked by Kyle Johnson, Ms. Nichols’s son, to speak for the family.Ms. Nichols had a long career as an entertainer, beginning as a teenage supper-club singer and dancer in Chicago, her hometown, and later appearing on television.But she will forever be best remembered for her work on “Star Trek,” the cult-inspiring space adventure series that aired from 1966 to 1969 and starred William Shatner as Captain Kirk, the heroic leader of the starship crew; Leonard Nimoy (who died in 2015) as his science officer and adviser, Mr. Spock, an ultralogical humanoid from the planet Vulcan; and DeForest Kelley (who died in 1999) as Dr. McCoy, a.k.a. Bones, the ship’s physician.A striking beauty, Ms. Nichols provided a frisson of sexiness on the bridge of the Enterprise. She was generally clad in a snug red doublet and black tights; Ebony magazine called her the “most heavenly body in ‘Star Trek’” on its 1967 cover. Her role, however, was both substantial and historically significant.Uhura was an officer and a highly educated and well-trained technician who maintained a businesslike demeanor while performing her high-minded duties. Ms. Nichols was among the first Black women to have a leading role on a network television series, making her an anomaly on the small screen, which until that time had rarely depicted Black women in anything other than subservient roles.In a November 1968 episode, during the show’s third and final season, Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura are forced to embrace by the inhabitants of a strange planet, resulting in what is widely thought to be the first interracial kiss in television history.Ms. Nichols’s first appearances on “Star Trek” predated the 1968 sitcom “Julia,” in which Diahann Carroll, playing a widowed mother who works as a nurse, became the first Black woman to star in a non-stereotypical role in a network series.Ms. Nichols and William Shatner on “Star Trek,” sharing what is believed to be the first interracial kiss on television.CBS via Getty Images(A series called “Beulah,” also called “The Beulah Show,” starring Ethel Waters — and later Louise Beavers and Hattie McDaniel — as the maid for a white family, was broadcast on ABC in the early 1950s and subsequently cited by civil rights activists for its demeaning portraits of Black people.)But Uhura’s influence reached far beyond television. In 1977, Ms. Nichols began an association with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, contracting as a representative and speaker to help recruit female and minority candidates for spaceflight training; the following year’s class of astronaut candidates was the first to include women and members of minority groups.In subsequent years, Ms. Nichols made public appearances and recorded public service announcements on behalf of the agency. In 2012, after she was the keynote speaker at the Goddard Space Center during a celebration of African American History Month, a NASA news release about the event lauded her help for the cause of diversity in space exploration.“Nichols’s role as one of television’s first Black characters to be more than just a stereotype and one of the first women in a position of authority (she was fourth in command of the Enterprise) inspired thousands of applications from women and minorities,” the release said. “Among them: Ronald McNair, Frederick Gregory, Judith Resnick, first American woman in space Sally Ride and current NASA administrator Charlie Bolden.”Grace Dell Nichols was born in Robbins, Ill., on Dec. 28, 1932 (some sources give a later year), and grew up in Chicago. Her father was, for a time, the mayor of Robbins, and a chemist. At 13 or 14, tired of being called Gracie by her friends, she requested a different name from her mother, who liked Michelle but suggested Nichelle for the alliteration.She was a ballet dancer as a child and had a singing voice with a naturally wide range — more than four octaves, she later said. While attending Englewood High School, she landed her first professional gig in a revue at the College Inn, a well-known Chicago nightspot.There she was seen by Duke Ellington, who employed her a year or two later with his touring orchestra as a dancer in one of his jazz suites.Ms. Nichols appeared in several musical theater productions around the country during the 1950s. In an interview with the Archive of American Television, she recalled performing at the Playboy Club in New York City while serving as an understudy for Ms. Carroll in the Broadway musical “No Strings” (though she never went on).In 1959, she was a dancer in Otto Preminger’s film version of “Porgy and Bess.” She made her television debut in 1963 in an episode of “The Lieutenant,” a short-lived dramatic series about Marines at Camp Pendleton created by Gene Roddenberry, who went on to create “Star Trek.”Ms. Nichols appeared on other television shows over the years — among them “Peyton Place” (1966), “Head of the Class” (1988) and “Heroes” (2007). She also appeared onstage occasionally in Los Angeles, including in a one-woman show in which she did impressions of, and paid homage to, Black female entertainers who preceded her, including Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey and Eartha Kitt.At the 15th annual “Star Trek” convention in Las Vegas in 2016, Ms. Nichols was the subject of a panel titled “Tribute to Nichelle Nichols.” Gabe Ginsberg/Getty ImagesBut Uhura was to be her legacy: A decade after “Star Trek” went off the air, Ms. Nichols reprised the role in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” and she appeared as Uhura, by then a commander, in five subsequent movie sequels through 1991.Besides a son, her survivors include two sisters, Marian Smothers and Diane Robinson.Ms. Nichols was married and divorced twice. In her 1995 autobiography, “Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories,” she disclosed that she and Roddenberry, who died in 1991, had been romantically involved for a time. In an interview in 2010 for the Archive of American Television, she said that he had little to do with her casting in “Star Trek” but that he defended her when studio executives wanted to replace her.When she took the role of Uhura, Ms. Nichols said, she thought of it as a mere job at the time, valuable as a résumé enhancer; she fully intended to return to the stage, as she wanted a career on Broadway. Indeed, she threatened to leave the show after its first season and submitted her resignation to Roddenberry. He told her to think it over for a few days.In a story she often told, that Saturday night she was a guest at an event in Beverly Hills, Calif. — “I believe it was an N.A.A.C.P. fund-raiser,” she recalled in the Archive interview — where the organizer introduced her to someone he described as “your biggest fan.”“He’s desperate to meet you,” she recalled the organizer saying.The fan, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., introduced himself.“He said, ‘We admire you greatly, you know,’ ” Ms. Nichols said, and she thanked him and told him that she was about to leave the show. “He said, ‘You cannot. You cannot.’”Dr. King told her that her role as a dignified, authoritative figure in a popular show was too important to the cause of civil rights for her to forgo. As Ms. Nichols recalled it, he said, “For the first time, we will be seen on television the way we should be seen every day.”On Monday morning, she returned to Roddenberry’s office and told him what had happened.“And I said, ‘If you still want me to stay, I’ll stay. I have to.’”Eduardo Medina contributed reporting. More

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      Mary Alice, Tony Winner for Her Role in ‘Fences,’ Dies at 85

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      A former Chicago schoolteacher, she appeared on TV in ‘A Different World’ and ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ winning an Emmy in 1993.Mary Alice, an Emmy- and Tony-award winning actress who brought a delicate grace and a quiet dignity to her roles in Hollywood blockbusters (“The Matrix Revolutions”), television sitcoms (“A Different World”) and Broadway plays (“Fences”), died on Wednesday in her home in Manhattan. She was 85, according to the New York City Police Department.The death was confirmed by Detective Anthony Passaro, a police spokesman, who said officers responded to a 911 call and found Ms. Alice unresponsive.A former Chicago schoolteacher, Ms. Alice appeared in nearly 60 television shows and films. In 2000, she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.She first gained widespread attention in the Broadway production of August Wilson’s “Fences” in 1987. She earned a Tony Award for best featured actress for playing Rose Maxson, a housewife in 1950s Pittsburgh forced to balance duty with anger toward a philandering husband (played by James Earl Jones, who also won a Tony), who is filled with rage after a promising career as a baseball player devolved into a grueling life as a garbage hauler.“Ms. Alice’s performance emphasizes strength over self-pity, open anger over festering bitterness,” Frank Rich wrote in a review for The New York Times. “The actress finds the spiritual quotient in the acceptance that accompanies Rose’s love for a scarred, profoundly complicated man.”The role had deep resonance for Ms. Alice, who based her performance on memories of her mother, her aunts and her grandmother, women “who were not educated, living in a time before women’s liberation, and their identities were tied up in their husbands,” she said in an interview with The Times that same year.“I decided very early that I did not want — well, not so much that I did not want to get married, but that I did want to find out about the world,” she added. “I did that through college, through learning, through books and travel.”Ms. Alice, left, with Ray Aranha, center, and James Earl Jones in “Fences.” Ron ScherlMary Alice Smith was born on Dec. 3, 1936, in Indianola, Miss., one of three children of Sam Smith and Ozelar (Jurnakin) Smith. When she was a small child, the family moved to Chicago, where they lived in a house on the Near North Side that was later demolished to make way for the Cabrini-Green housing project.No immediate family members survive.Viewing teaching as a path to a stable, middle-class life, she graduated from Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University) in 1965 and took a job teaching at a public elementary school.Even so, she aspired to be an actress. “It was escapism,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1986, adding: “We never lacked for anything. But my parents got up before the sun rose and worked all day. My father was tired. My mother had to cook. When I went to the movies, those people on the screen didn’t have to work.”Dropping the surname “Smith” and moving to New York City in 1967, Ms. Alice trained at the Negro Ensemble Company, landing in an advanced acting class taught by Lloyd Richards, the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater who went on to direct “Fences.” Ms. Alice, left, and Beatrice Winde in “Sparkle,” a 1976 film loosely based on the singing group the Supremes.Everett CollectionThroughout the 1970s and the early ’80s, she made numerous appearances in sitcoms like “Good Times” and “Sanford and Son,” while carving out a film presence in “Sparkle,” a 1976 musical loosely based on The Supremes, and “Beat Street,” the 1984 break-dancing film that helped nudge hip-hop culture into the mainstream.She earned praise onstage in a 1980 Off Broadway production of “Zooman and the Sign,” featuring Frances Foster and Giancarlo Esposito, as well as a 1983 Yale Rep production of “Raisin in the Sun,” featuring Delroy Lindo.After her success with “Fences,” she played Lettie Bostic, a resident director at a historically Black college who has an intriguing past, in “A Different World,” a spinoff of “The Cosby Show.” A year after that, she drew praise as the mother of Oprah Winfrey’s matriarch character in “The Women of Brewster Place,” a television mini-series based on the Gloria Naylor novel about a group of women living in a run-down housing project.By the 1990s, she had become a familiar face in film. She had roles in Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger” featuring Danny Glover, and in Penny Marshall’s “Awakenings” featuring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, in 1990; and in Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” with Denzel Washington in the title role, two years later.She also appeared in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” as the mother of a teenager struck by a car in a hit-and-run accident.Ms. Alice, right, and Jasmine Guy in a 1988 episode of the NBC sitcom “A Different World.” NBCU Photo Bank/GettyIn 1992, she was nominated for an Emmy award for outstanding supporting actress in a drama series for her role in “I’ll Fly Away,” a series starring Sam Waterston and Regina Taylor and set in a fictional Southern town in the 1950s; she won the award for the same role the following year.Ms. Alice nearly took home another Tony in 1995. She was nominated for best actress for her performance as the fiery Bessie, one of two centenarian sisters looking back on a century of life, in “Having Our Say,” Emily Mann’s Broadway adaptation of the best-selling 1994 memoir by Sarah (Sadie) L. Delany and her sister Annie Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany, written with Amy Hill Hearth.Ms. Alice replaced Gloria Foster as the Oracle in the third installment of the Matrix film series in 2003, and continued acting until 2005, when she appeared in a television reboot of the 1970s detective show “Kojak.”“Acting has been a big sacrifice,” she told The Tribune in 1986. “I sometimes think that if I had continued to be a teacher, I would be retired already. The income would have been constant. But I didn’t feel about teaching the way I do about acting. It’s my service in life. I’m supposed to use it.” More

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      in Movies

      Bernard Cribbins, British Actor Known for ‘Doctor Who,’ Is Dead at 93

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      Mr. Cribbins’s long career included roles on stage, film and television.Bernard Cribbins, a British actor who had roles on “Doctor Who” and “Fawlty Towers,” and whose contributions to children’s programs delighted young audiences over a career that spanned seven decades, has died, his agent said on Thursday. He was 93.In a statement, the management and talent agency, Gavin Barker Associates, did not say when or where Mr. Cribbins died.Mr. Cribbins worked well into his 90s, the agency said, in a career that influenced some of the best-known comedy, drama and children’s programs in Britain. He started acting at the age of 14 in the Oldham repertory company. This period of onstage work broadened into other media, including television and film, for which he became widely known, according to IMDB.He was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2011 for his contributions to the arts. In addition to dozens of roles in film and television, he recorded the 1960s novelty song “Right Said Fred.”For three decades, Mr. Cribbins was regularly featured on “Jackanory,” a BBC children’s program in which an actor read books to young audiences. The program, which ran between 1965 and 1996, was meant to arouse an interest in reading.In one of his more than 100 readings, of “The Wizard of Oz” in 1970, Mr. Cribbins infused the voices of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard and other characters with a full dramatic repertoire of whispers, tremors and shrieks.When he was awarded a BAFTA Special Award in 2009, he grew serious in an interview when asked about the hugely popular “Jackanory” and how it had influenced young audiences.“All you have to do,” he said, “is look down the lens, find one child, and just talk to that child. And you pull them in.”“It really works, and you think all over the country there will be little kids saying, ‘Just a minute, Mum,’ and they will be looking. And the stories, as I said before, were wonderful,” he said.Mr. Cribbins was born in Oldham, England, just outside Manchester, on Dec. 29, 1928, according to IMDB. After his early stage career, he narrated “The Wombles,” a 1970s animated television program created from a series of books about underground creatures, and joined the cast of the science-fiction TV series “Doctor Who” from 2007 to 2010. He had also appeared in a Doctor Who movie, “Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.,” in 1966.Mr. Cribbins, left, and his co-star David Tennant collected an award for “Doctor Who,” which was named most popular drama at Britain’s National Television Awards in 2010.Photo by Ian West/PA Images via Getty ImagesIn the TV series, which the producer Russell T Davies revived in 2005, Mr. Cribbins played a recurring role as the grandfather of one of the Doctor’s companions, Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate. In an Instagram post on Thursday, Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins “loved being in Doctor Who. He said, ‘Children are calling me grandad in the street!’”Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins had once “turned up with a suitcase full of props, just in case, including a rubber chicken.” He added, “He’d phone up and say, ‘I’ve got an idea! What if I attack a Dalek with a paintball gun?!’ Okay, Bernard, in it went!”Mr. Cribbins also starred in the 1970 film “The Railway Children,” based on the children’s book by Edith Nesbit. A review in The New York Times called it “a perfectly lovely little British movie” and said Mr. Cribbins was “excellent” as the stationmaster Albert Perks in a “simple tale about three children who putter around a Yorkshire village, sharing a loving kindness learned at home.”In 1975, Mr. Cribbins appeared in an episode of the comedy series “Fawlty Towers,” starring John Cleese as the hapless manager of a seaside hotel. Mr. Cribbins played a guest mistaken by Mr. Cleese’s character for a hotel inspector, who is trying to order a cheese salad for lunch and instead is served an omelet.A list of survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Cribbins’s wife, the actor Gillian McBarnet, died in October last year.In the interview after receiving the BAFTA award in 2009, Mr. Cribbins and his “Doctor Who” co-star Ms. Tate spoke about how quickly time had gone by during his long career.“I can remember a lot of things with total clarity, total recall,” he said, before adding jokingly, “I’ve got stories I haven’t even thought of yet.” More

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      in Theater

      Who Can Play the King? Representation Questions Fuel Casting Debates.

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      Should Shakespeare’s Richard III be reserved for disabled actors? Does the character have to be played by a white man? By a man at all? Three recent productions took different tacks.When three of the most prestigious Shakespeare companies in the world staged “Richard III” this summer, each took a different approach to casting its scheming title character in ways that illuminate the fraught debate over which actors should play which roles.At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, which means he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself in the opening scene as “deformed.” The production’s director, Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days.The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different tack: It cast Colm Feore, who is not disabled, to play a Richard who has a deformed spine but who is not a hunchback. And in New York City, the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman who does not have a disability, as the duke who schemes and kills his way to the throne of England.Their varying approaches came at a moment when an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting.It has been decades since major theaters have had white actors play Othello in blackface, and, after years of criticism, performances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are growing rarer in theater and film, and are being rethought in opera and ballet.Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl”) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic.)Tom Hanks recently said that today he would, correctly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in the film “Philadelphia,” which he starred in with Denzel Washington.TriStar PicturesWhile many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotyped portrayals and the new opportunities belatedly being given to actors from a diverse array of backgrounds, others worry that the current insistence on literalism and authenticity can be too constraining. Acting, after all, is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”And while the recent insistence on more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some respects, it threatens less in others — coming as many women and actors of color are getting more opportunities to play some of the greatest, meatiest roles in the repertory, regardless of whatever race or gender or background the playwrights may have initially envisioned.More About on Deaf CultureUpending Perceptions: The poetic art of Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, challenges viewers to reconsider how they hear and perceive the world.‘Coda’: The Oscar-winning film showcases deaf actors and lives. But some deaf viewers found its hearing perspective frustrating. Seeking Representation: Though deafness is gaining visibility onscreen, deaf people who rely on hearing devices say their experiences remain mostly untold. Name Signs: Name signs are the equivalent of a first name in some sign languages. We asked a few people to share the story behind theirs.Sometimes such casting is considered “colorblind,” in which case audiences are asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other features. But in recent years the trend has been toward “color-conscious” casting, in which an actor’s race, ethnicity or identity becomes part of the production, and a feature of the character being portrayed.The casting of Mr. Hughes in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain was hailed as the first time the company had cast a disabled actor in the title role.Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanySome of the varied approaches were underscored by this summer’s productions of “Richard III,” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he is:Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my timeInto this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionableThat dogs bark at me as I halt by themThe remark by Mr. Doran, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, that it would “probably not be acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.Not only is Mr. Doran a renowned Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was one of the most memorable Richards of recent decades, using crutches in an acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his portrayal.Mr. Doran, whose production in Stratford-upon-Avon was critically lauded, later clarified his thinking about its casting, explaining that while any actor might be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “have the opportunities across the board now more widely afforded to other actors.”The new staging in Stratford, Ontario, featuring Mr. Feore, listed a “disability consultant” in its credits. His depiction was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago — the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis — and rested on the idea that his physique “was less of a medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given crucial conversations currently happening around deaf and disability performance.”And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who has appeared in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to explore the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He’s looking at the rules in front of him, and he feels he’s most capable, but the rules disallow him from manifesting his full capability.”The production’s director, Robert O’Hara, said that they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.”Ms. Gurira, left, said her approach to Richard aimed to get at the “psychological reason for what he becomes.” She appeared with Daniel J. Watts, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe rest of the cast for the production, which ended its run earlier this month, was notably diverse, and included several actors with disabilities in roles that are not usually cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is Deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two typically communicating onstage via American Sign Language.“I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’” Mr. O’Hara said.Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on its “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understandings of how different attributes inflect both actors’ identities and audiences’ perceptions.“All of our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether or not we want to acknowledge that. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet’s, whom other characters often confuse for each other. “If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by Black actors and the Hamlet family is all-white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish carries a whole set of different meanings.”Many productions upend traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every role in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at Donmar Warehouse in London, seen in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesar” directed by Mr. Doran reset the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reimagined some blockbusters, as with the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters.”Harriet Walter, with hands outstretched, in a 2013 production of “Julius Caesar,” in which all of the roles were played by women. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as there is a push for greater casting freedoms in some areas, there is an argument for more literalism in others, especially from actors with certain backgrounds who lack opportunities.Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everybody can play everybody,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and has played Richard, “but my entire career I’ve not been allowed to play hardly anybody.”In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”The conversation on casting has been evolving in recent years.“It used to be that part of the measurement of greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” said Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” a new history of Method acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you approach it if there are certain identity lines you cannot cross? And which are those identity lines?”Gregg Mozgala, left, an actor with cerebral palsy, says he has to bring his “full humanity to every character I play.” He appeared with Jolly Abraham in 2017 in a production of the play “Cost of Living.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles that are not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did playing two monarchs in “Richard III” in New York, and sometimes plays characters written as having cerebral palsy, as he will this fall in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living.”“I spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and onstage, which is ridiculous, because it does,” Mr. Mozgala said.“Every character I ever play is going to have cerebral palsy — there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity to every character I play.”Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will recede in the conversation.“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.” More