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      Louise Fletcher, 88, Dies; Oscar Winner for ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

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      She was largely unknown to the public when she was cast as what the American Film Institute called one of cinema’s most memorable villains.Louise Fletcher, the imposing, steely-eyed actress who won an Academy Award for her role as the tyrannical Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died on Friday at her home in the town of Montdurausse, in Southern France. She was 88.The death was confirmed by her agent, David Shaul, who did not cite a cause. Ms. Fletcher also had a home in Los Angeles.Ms. Fletcher was 40 and largely unknown to the public when she was cast as the head administrative nurse at an Oregon mental institution in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The film, directed by Milos Forman and based on a popular novel by Ken Kesey, won a best-actress trophy for Ms. Fletcher and four other Oscars: best picture, best director, best actor (Jack Nicholson, who starred as the rebellious mental patient McMurphy) and best adapted screenplay (Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauber).Ms. Fletcher’s acceptance speech stood out that night — not only because she teasingly thanked voters for hating her, but also because she used American Sign Language in thanking her parents, who were both deaf, for “teaching me to have a dream.”The American Film Institute later named Nurse Ratched one of the most memorable villains in film history and the second most notable female villain, surpassed only by the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.”But at the time “Cuckoo’s Nest” was released, Ms. Fletcher was frustrated by the buttoned-up nature of her character. “I envied the other actors tremendously,” she said in a 1975 interview with The New York Times, referring to her fellow cast members, most of whom were playing mental patients. “They were so free, and I had to be so controlled.”Estelle Louise Fletcher was born on July 22, 1934, in Birmingham, Ala., one of four hearing children of Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopal minister, and Estelle (Caldwell) Fletcher; both her parents had been deaf since childhood. She studied drama at the University of North Carolina and moved to Los Angeles after graduation.She later told journalists that because she was so tall — 5 feet 10 inches — she had trouble finding work in anything but westerns, where her height was an advantage. Of her first 20 or so screen roles in the late 1950s and early ’60s, about half were in television westerns, including “Wagon Train,” “Maverick” and “Bat Masterson.”Ms. Fletcher married Jerry Bick, a film producer, in 1959. They had two sons, John and Andrew, and she retired from acting for more than a decade to raise them.Ms. Fletcher and Mr. Bick divorced in 1977. Her survivors include her sons; her sister, Roberta Ray; and a granddaughter.She returned to movies in 1974 in Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us,” as a woman who coldly turns in her brother to the police. It was her appearance in that film that led Mr. Forman to offer her the role in “Cuckoo’s Nest.”“I was caught by surprise when Louise came onscreen,” Mr. Forman recalled of watching “Thieves Like Us.” “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a certain mystery, which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Ms. Fletcher in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “She had a certain mystery,” said Milos Forman, the film’s director, “which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Herbert Dorfman/Corbis via Getty ImagesReviewing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael declared Ms. Fletcher’s “a masterly performance.”“We can see the virginal expectancy — the purity — that has turned into puffy-eyed self-righteousness,” Ms. Kael wrote. “She thinks she’s doing good for people, and she’s hurt — she feels abused — if her authority is questioned.”Ms. Fletcher is often cited as an example of the Oscar curse — the phenomenon that winning an Academy Award for acting does not always lead to sustained movie stardom — but she did maintain a busy career in films and on television into her late 70s.She had a lead role as the Linda Blair character’s soft-spoken psychiatrist in “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977) and was notable in the ensemble comedy “The Cheap Detective” (1978), riffing on Ingrid Bergman’s film persona. She also starred with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood as a workaholic scientist in “Brainstorm” (1983). But she was largely relegated to roles with limited screen time, especially when her character was very different from her Nurse Ratched persona.After a turn as an inscrutable U.F.O. bigwig in “Strange Invaders” (1983), she appeared in “Firestarter” (1984) as a fearful farm wife; the police drama “Blue Steel” (1990) as Jamie Lee Curtis’s drab mother; “2 Days in the Valley” (1996) as a compassionate Los Angeles landlady; and “Cruel Intentions” (1999) as Ryan Phillippe’s genteel aunt.Only when she played to villainous stereotype — as she did in “Flowers in the Attic” (1987), as an evil matriarch who sets out to poison her four inconvenient young grandchildren — did she find herself in starring roles again. And that film, she told a Dragoncon audience in 2009, was “the worst experience I’ve ever had making a movie.”Later in her career, she played recurring characters on several television series, including “Star Trek: Deep Space 9” (she was an alien cult leader from 1993 to 1999) and “Shameless” (as William H. Macy’s foulmouthed convict mother). She also made an appearance as Liev Schreiber’s affable mother in the romantic drama “A Perfect Man” (2013). She appeared most recently in two episodes of the Netflix comedy series “Girlboss.”Although Ms. Fletcher’s most famous character was a portrait of sternness, she often recalled smiling constantly and pretending that everything was perfect when she was growing up, in an effort to protect her non-hearing parents from bad news.“The price of it was very high for me,” she said in a 1977 interview with The Ladies’ Home Journal. “Because I not only pretended everything was all right. I came to feel it had to be.”Pretending wasn’t all bad, however, she acknowledged, at least in terms of her profession. That same year she told the journalist Rex Reed, “I feel like I know real joy from make-believe.”Mike Ives More

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      Will Anyone Give ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ a Chance?

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      Olivia Wilde’s new film is trying to fight free of its pre-release reputation.Years ago, when I was a film critic, I was asked out for coffee by a guy who’d just been hired at the review-aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t remember the purpose of the meeting. I just recall the sense — as he ventilated about the site’s “Tomatometer” rating, which would soon crush all my elitist insights into hard data — that I’d been summoned to witness the digging of my own grave.This was actually fine with me. I was already demoralized by the whole enterprise. I’d always seen the role of the critic as a conduit, someone who has an aesthetic experience and then reports on what it was like; I never cared to tell others what to see or avoid, imposing a hegemony of tastes and interests that I didn’t believe in. At work, though, I was feeling the pressure to serve readers with ratings and recommendations — and, increasingly, sites like Rotten Tomatoes seemed to push a binary of “good” and “bad,” all based on consensus. It was depressing, all this holding up of fingers to the wind. Consensus is a snowball with a hard, mineral center, barreling down a slope, and few people want to be on the wrong side.Sometimes consensus accretes around the story of a movie, even before people see the film itself. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a screening of “Don’t Worry Darling,” which I’d been looking forward to since first getting a glimpse of its poster. I had been vaguely aware of some noise emanating from the film’s press rollout, I suppose, but it wasn’t until the now-infamous spit video that I realized just how much flak the movie was catching. The video showed Harry Styles, one of the film’s stars, approaching his audience seat at the Venice Film Festival, suavely buttoning his jacket, leaning down and then — according to nothing but gleeful online supposition — purportedly hocking a loogie on another of the film’s stars, Chris Pine, who stops clapping and, with his eyes, traces a trajectory from Styles’ lips to his own lap. No actual spit is discernible in the video, and no motive was ascribed. But none were needed. Those few frames of video were scrutinized, analyzed, slowed, zoomed, dissected and compared to the Zapruder film so often that the joke begged for mercy.People were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark.To me, though, the Cold War artifact it recalled was Kremlinology — the practice of scrying every available scrap of information to discern the hidden motivations and power struggles of distant, unknowable figures. The events that drew such close attention to “Don’t Worry Darling” were not huge ones, in the scheme of things: They included a supposed feud between the director, Olivia Wilde, and the lead actress, Florence Pugh, possibly involving a pay gap between leads; the actor Shia LaBeouf’s being replaced, under disputed circumstances, with Styles; LaBeouf’s leaking messages from Wilde about Pugh; Wilde’s being served with custody papers from her ex-fiancé, Jason Sudeikis, while onstage at CinemaCon; and, above all, Wilde’s becoming romantically involved with Styles, 10 years her junior. Where the theoretical animosity between Styles and Pine was supposed to fit in was unclear. But by then people were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark — as long as it kept building the story of a woman who fostered a work environment so fraught that one star would spit on another, in public and on camera, for no apparent reason.More on ‘Don’t Worry Darling’In this much gossiped-about feminist gothic, Florence Pugh plays a seemingly happy housewife whose world starts to crack apart.Review: “If Pugh’s performance never gets beneath the shiny, satirical surface, it’s because there’s no place for it or her to go,” our critic writes of the film.Publicity Crisis: It was one of the hottest projects in Hollywood. But a series of missteps on the promotional trail, hinting at supposed feuds and behind-the-scenes drama, have raised questions about the film’s viability and about Olivia Wilde, its director.Bad Reputation: Amid all the rumors and negative press, a vocal portion of the public seems to have grown oddly invested in witnessing Wilde’s comeuppance. Will that affect the movie’s ratings?“Don’t Worry Darling” is just the most recent example of a film maudit, or “cursed film.” That was the term coined for Jean Cocteau’s Festival du Film Maudit in 1949, describing works that had been wrongfully neglected, or deemed too outrageous to merit serious attention — “movies rendered marginal by disrepute,” as J. Hoberman would later write in The Village Voice. Films made by women are not the only ones stuck in this defensive position, but they seem disproportionately prone to it, often with criticism centering on the director herself. (Elaine May’s experience on “Ishtar” was such that Hoberman classed her as a cineaste maudit; she wouldn’t direct again for decades.) Hints of a production’s chaos or excess are less likely to be taken as signs of unruly genius, and more often framed as messiness or lack of authority. The more that talk swirled around “Don’t Worry Darling,” the more its quality — and then, specifically, Wilde’s competence — were called into question.Out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.Cinema has a century’s worth of lore about films troubled by budget overages, clashing personalities and on-set affairs: Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski’s wanting to kill each other while making “Fitzcarraldo,” mental breakdowns on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” Peter Bogdanovich’s leaving his actual genius of a wife after an affair with a young Cybill Shepherd on “The Last Picture Show.” These productions were plagued by bad press and rumors, but they never faced the wrath of stan Twitter. These days, fans spread rumors and memes, which are picked up by media outlets, which disguise their prurience with speculation about box-office prospects or reviews. Then out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.But of course the idea that this consensus opinion emerges from some pure, objective place is disingenuous. Press always colors reviews — and now some vocal portion of the public seems oddly invested in Wilde’s comeuppance, a fact we may see reflected in ratings. (Given statements Wilde has made about some of the film’s real-world inspirations, it’s not hard to imagine the online response including the kind of organized backlash that has greeted other disfavored films.) And while critics’ responses won’t be actively malicious, they won’t be magically free of their own biases, either. “More or less the definition of the history of cinema,” Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker in 2012, “is: the stuff that most of the best-known critics didn’t like, or damned with faint praise — it isn’t that they didn’t care for it, but that they didn’t care about it.” Male film critics outnumber female ones 2 to 1, and tend to award “slightly higher average quantitative ratings to films with male protagonists,” according to studies conducted by Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.It’s odd that this could be the fate of “Don’t Worry Darling,” a film about men trapping women in a regressive, suffocating place where dissent means repudiation and exile — a film whose big plot developments must be hard for Wilde to resist talking about, given how much the narrative surrounding the film echoes their point. But it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the story, so I’ll just share an anecdote. My 14-year-old daughter came with me to the screening, unencumbered by external baggage. When the credits began to roll, she announced, “That was the best movie I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” Seeing Wilde’s name among the cast, she asked which character the director had played. When I told her, she was impressed. She said: “I want to be her. I want to do what she does.” It made me happy to hear this. And then I started to worry.Source photographs: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images; Screen grab from Warner Bros.Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl” and a contributing writer for the magazine. She frequently writes for the magazine’s Screenland column. More

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      Ryan Grantham of ‘Riverdale’ Sentenced to Life for Mother’s Murder

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      Grantham, who also appeared in the film “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” had pleaded guilty earlier this year. He will be eligible for parole after 14 years.Ryan Grantham, a young Canadian actor who appeared in the television show “Riverdale,” has been sentenced to life in prison after admitting to killing his mother as part of a broad scheme in which he said he had planned to also kill Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and carry out a mass shooting in British Columbia.Grantham, 23, was declared eligible for parole after 14 years during sentencing proceedings at the Supreme Court of British Columbia on Wednesday, according to prosectors and a lawyer for Grantham.Grantham had pleaded guilty earlier this year to second-degree murder, which carries an automatic sentence of life in prison. The main issue at the sentencing was when he would be eligible for parole. Prosecutors had called for a 17- to 18-year waiting period before Grantham could apply for parole, Grantham’s lawyer had asked for a period of 12 years, and a judge on Wednesday chose a number in between.The court also imposed a lifetime firearm ban on Grantham, prosecutors said.Grantham has more than 30 acting credits, starting when he was a child. He appeared in the 2010 movie “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” in which he played Rodney James, and in several other films, including “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.” Most recently he played the character Jeffery in a 2019 episode of “Riverdale,” a dark reimagining of the Archie Comics franchise on CW.His lawyer, Chris Johnson, said that Grantham had suffered from a number of documented mental health challenges including clinical depression and that, since entering prison, he had “committed himself to trying to rehabilitate himself.”The crime occurred on March 31, 2020, when Grantham, then 21, shot his mother, Barbara Waite, in the back of her head as she played piano in their home in Squamish, a town in British Columbia about 37 miles south of Whistler, Johnson said. Grantham recorded a video shortly after that in which he confessed to the murder and then left by car, Johnson said. Grantham told the authorities that he initially had planned to kill the prime minister, but changed his mind and at some point decided he would carry out a mass shooting, possibly at Simon Fraser University, where he had been a student.He did not carry out either plan, and instead turned himself in to the police on April 1, 2020, Johnson said.Grantham had rationalized that it was necessary to kill his mother so that she would not have to deal with the fallout of the crimes he had planned to commit, Johnson said.Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      ‘Sidney’ Review: A Lovingly Assembled Career Portrait

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      Sidney Poitier is memorialized in this thorough, and thoroughly conventional, documentary.“Sidney,” a documentary about the actor and filmmaker Sidney Poitier, who died in January, is a compendium of hero worship. The director is Reginald Hudlin, but, in tone and temperament, this lovingly assembled encomium is peak Oprah Winfrey. As one of the film’s producers and a close friend of Poitier (whom she calls her “great Black hope”), Winfrey glows with emotional authenticity. Her breakdown at the end is unexpectedly moving, if not entirely unexpected.Oblivious to the film’s fire hose of adulation and thicket of talking heads, Poitier (speaking mainly in a 2012 interview with Winfrey) softly addresses the camera, unfailingly modest and supremely chill. Around him, Hudlin unrolls a life that, Poitier believed, fulfilled the predictions of the soothsayer his mother consulted when he was not expected to survive infancy. Having exchanged Bahamian poverty for Jim Crow-era America, barely literate, he claimed, and baffled by segregation, Poitier discovered that acting was therapy, a way to express the many personalities roiling inside him. (Much later, he would require many years of actual therapy in part to process his love affair with the gorgeous Diahann Carroll.)Painstakingly thorough, “Sidney” scans a career freighted with political and social significance, its litany of firsts — including the first Black leading man to win an Oscar for best actor; the first Black director to make a $100 million movie — no deterrence to those who would later accuse Poitier of subservience to the desires of white audiences. Spotlighting the courage of Poitier’s civil rights activism and the daring of his acting choices, Hudlin labors to convey their significance to Black Americans: The man who had grown up without ever seeing a mirror was now tasked with reflecting Black lives back to an audience avid for recognition.The inescapable impression is of a picture buckling beneath the weight of its subject’s achievements. Yet there are moments when the focus shifts and the movie shrugs off its hagiographic shackles: Lulu, the Scottish pop star, belting out the theme of “To Sir, With Love” (1967), her pipes barely corroded; the tart, mischievous interjections of interviewees like Denzel Washington and Spike Lee; and Poitier’s first wife, the admirable Juanita Brady, explaining how she gave her inexperienced spouse critical financial advice, even selling her mink coat to invest in “A Raisin in the Sun,” the 1959 stage play in which he starred.These interludes act like lemon juice squirted on heavy cream, brief reagents in a movie that, despite the meticulousness of its making, seems a peculiarly orthodox tribute to a revolutionary life.SidneyRated PG-13 for racial slurs. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on AppleTV+. More

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      Review: ‘Marie It’s Time’ Pieces Together a Woman in Fragments

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      This three-actor play initiates a dialogue with Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck,” examining men’s violence against women.Girlish, perilous, sexy and bleak, Minor Theater’s “Marie It’s Time,” at HERE, resurrects a marginal character from an influential work of modern drama. Then it kills her again. In this three-actor play, the playwright Julia Jarcho and the director Ásta Bennie Hostetter initiate a dialogue with Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck,” an expressionist take on true crime left unfinished at the time of Büchner’s early death.“Woyzeck,” inspired by an early 19th-century scandal, centers on a sometime soldier who murders Marie, his common-law wife and the mother of his child, after she sleeps with a drum major. Woyzeck’s Marie isn’t granted much interiority in Büchner’s text, which makes “Marie It’s Time” a kind of reclamation, homage and clapback, even if Marie doesn’t survive for long here either.Jarcho splits Marie’s identity between two actors. Jarcho is one of them. Jennifer Seastone, a Minor Theater regular, is the other. Seastone plays a character named Marie — a breathy, lipsticked femme who knows the fatality is coming. Jarcho is Mag, a harassed mom in jeans and a sloppy sweater, introduced while cradling a screaming baby. (Each also takes turns playing Frank, the baby’s volatile father.) The women’s eyes are caught by Major (Kedian Keohan), a traveling musician in skinny jeans with a louche repertory of songs that describe and promise violence. Violence may be what Marie and Mag want. Certainly, it is what they expect. (Jarcho is also an academic, and her new book project explores theater and masochism. These ideas clearly absorb her.)As a playwright, Jarcho (“Pathetic,” “Grimly Handsome”) specializes in the weirdness and danger throbbing just below the surface of ordinary life, like a forehead vein that won’t stop pulsing. This creates an odd tangle of heightened emotions and ultranormal textures. Here, the style is broadly presentational, with some dialogue spoken into stand microphones and other lines rendered without amplification. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s a mind game. Or maybe it’s all mind games?Mag and Marie’s home, represented by an alphabet rug and a pile of laundry baskets, doubles, without adjustments, as a nightspot, a barbershop, a field. (The set is by Meredith Ries.) Hostetter doesn’t make the most of the confined downstairs space at Here. Despite the collection of doors and apertures in the set, the actors’ bodies inhabit it in limited ways. Still Ebony Burton’s lighting, which suggests a club in the weary, early morning moments before the work lights come on, and Ben Williams and Elliot Yokum’s ominous sound design provide greater ambience.Running just over an hour, “Marie It’s Time” is an intentionally narrow work and a recursive one, an echo chamber in which love and harm reverberate. It explores men’s violence against women, but as there aren’t any cisgender men onstage (Keohan is a trans actor), it does so in a way that feels both dangerous and appropriately safe, provocative without being exploitative. It returns agency to Marie, particularly when Seastone, an actress of great and strange charisma, steps up to the microphone. Then again, agency only goes so far. Marie still dies. She always dies.Jarcho and Hostetter create a world in which violence against women exerts a constant pressure — a grim attitude, but not one that invites a lot of argument. In a bitter coincidence, one of Major’s songs, “Keys in My Hand,” somehow reframed a joke I made to a friend a couple of weeks ago: that I never feel more feminine than when I’m walking home at night, keys laced through my fingers. Which is to say that “Marie It’s Time” — small and finely wrought — is a jewel box of a play. And that you may not want to reach your hand inside.Marie It’s TimeThrough Oct. 1 at HERE, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Henry Silva, Actor Who Specialized in Menace, Dies at 95

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      He was forever cast as a thug, a hit man or some other nefarious character. But he took pride in his ability to play each bad guy differently.Henry Silva, who for decades was high on the call list of any Hollywood casting director in search of a particularly menacing villain, died on Wednesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 95. His son Scott Silva confirmed the death, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital.Mr. Silva appeared in more than 130 movies and television shows, scowling through many of them as a thug, a hit man or some other nefarious character. He was an assassin sent by a mob boss to wreak vengeance in “Johnny Cool” in 1963. He was a drug addict with a tendency to shoot people in the 1981 Burt Reynolds movie “Sharky’s Machine.” He was a corrupt C.I.A. operative in “Above the Law,” a 1998 Steven Segal film. He was even reprehensible as a cartoon: He voiced the supervillain Bane in animated TV shows involving both Batman and Superman.Yet Mr. Silva was a serious actor, with training at the Actors Studio in New York and appearances on Broadway and in well-regarded movies like “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962). He prided himself on not letting the typecasting make him lazy.“I see a lot of actors who play heavies, but they always play the same heavies,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2000. “I have a seven-minute reel of clips from my movies, and none of the guys are the same. I don’t always go to the same place, because that would be boring.”Henry Silva was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Brooklyn (not, as most sources have it, in 1928). He grew up in Spanish Harlem, raised by his mother, Angelina Martinez, after his father, Jesus Silva, left when Henry was young.“It was the kind of place,” he told Knight Ridder in 1985, “where if you lived on one block and you wanted to go a few blocks away, you had to take a couple of guys with you, or else you would get your ass kicked. I mean, that’s the only way to put it; I can’t say that you would get ‘beat up.’”“So you were always tense, and you were always on guard,” he continued. “You were never relaxed.” He said he often tapped into those memories when playing characters who were full of jittery, bottled-up anger.By the time he was 8 he had determined that he wanted to be an actor; he said that the Andy Hardy movies of Mickey Rooney, with their idyllic small-town life so different from his own, were an inspiration of sorts. He left school at 13 and worked odd jobs. Years later, he would sometimes be complimented by real gangsters.“They say, ‘My God, where did you learn how to play us?’” Mr. Silva told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2000. “I say, ‘I lived with “us.” I grew up with “us” in New York.’ I used to know the guys who used to run the whole areas, the prostitution rings. I used to shine their shoes.”His mother hoped he would become a postal carrier, but instead he tried the acting life. He occasionally landed a bit part, including one on Broadway in the Tennessee Williams flop “Camino Real,” which ran for two months in 1953.In 1955 Mr. Silva was one of hundreds who auditioned for the Actors Studio, then being run by Lee Strasberg. He was one of five selected for membership. He was soon part of the cast when the group staged “A Hatful of Rain,” Michael V. Gazzo’s play about a morphine addict named Johnny Pope (played by Ben Gazzara). The play was picked up for a Broadway run and opened in November of that year with a cast that also included Shelley Winters and Anthony Franciosa.Mr. Silva earned good notices for his portrayal in the production of, yes, a bad guy: a drug pusher known as Mother. He reprised the role in the 1957 film version.“A Hatful of Rain” would be Mr. Silva’s last Broadway appearance, but television and film offers were beginning to pile up. In the late 1950s he appeared in TV series like “Suspicion” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and in movies, including “The Tall T” (1957), with Randolph Scott, and “The Law and Jake Wade” (1958), with Robert Taylor.The roles were big enough to catch the attention of one particularly influential person.“One day, many years ago,” he recalled in 2000, “I was driving down Sunset Boulevard in the first car I ever owned, a Chevy convertible. I pulled up at a stoplight and heard someone say, ‘Henry, I like you in movies.’”It was Frank Sinatra, who invited Mr. Silva to visit him on the set of “Some Came Running.” When Mr. Silva showed up, Sinatra recruited him to be in a film with him — the original “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960). Mr. Silva played one of the gang that Danny Ocean (Sinatra) brought together for a spectacular multi-casino robbery scheme. Forty-one years later, Mr. Silva would record his last movie credit by appearing in a small part in Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven” remake.Mr. Silva was cast in the 1960 movie “Ocean’s Eleven” after a chance meeting with Frank Sinatra while at a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard. Clockwise from left: Akim Tamiroff, Richard Conte, Buddy Lester, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Mr. Silva, Richard Benedict, Norman Fell and Clem Harvey.United Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Silva became a secondary member of the Rat Pack, a circle of Sinatra pals that also included Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop, and he would appear in two more movies with Sinatra in 1962, “Sergeants 3” and “The Manchurian Candidate.” Both demonstrated a quality that served Mr. Silva well for years: At least by the standards of the day, he could pass as a variety of races and nationalities.He described himself as being of Italian and Hispanic descent, but in “The Manchurian Candidate” he played a Korean heavy who engages in a memorable karate fight with Sinatra’s character. In “Sergeants 3” he was an American Indian, and not for the last time; he played a number of Indians, including one in a 1965 episode of the TV series “Daniel Boone.” In the 1982 comedy “Wrong Is Right” he was a Middle Eastern fanatic.Some roles, though, reflected his actual heritage. He played a number of Hispanic characters of various nationalities. In “Johnny Cool,” one of his few leading roles (he played the title character), he was Sicilian.He also went to Italy for a time in the 1970s to make crime films when that genre was the rage among Italian directors, a stretch of his career he apparently enjoyed.“If they didn’t pay me, I wouldn’t care, because it was so joyous,” he said in Mike Malloy’s 2012 documentary “Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s.”Mr. Silva’s marriage to Ruth Earl in 1966 ended in divorce in 1987. His previous marriages, to Cindy Conroy and Mary Ramus, also ended in divorce. Besides his son Scott, he is survived by another son, Michael. Mr. Silva had an explanation for his ability to play sinister characters decade after decade.“I think the reason that I haven’t disappeared,” he said in 1985, “is that the heavies I play are all leaders. I never play a wishy-washy anything. They’re interesting roles, because when you leave the theater, you remember these kinds of guys.”Vimal Patel More

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      Marvel Attracts Criticism With Israeli “Captain America” Superhero

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      The studio has angered many Palestinians and their supporters by casting the actress Shira Haas to play Sabra, a mutant Mossad agent, in a “Captain America” movie.JERUSALEM — It was the latest addition to a fantasy world populated by an ever-growing cast of superheroes and villains: Marvel Studios announced this past week that it had cast the Israeli actress Shira Haas to play Sabra, a mutant Israeli police officer-turned-Mossad agent, in the next installment of the “Captain America” franchise.While Jewish Israelis rejoiced at the casting of an actress from Israel as a superhero in a major Hollywood production (“Israeli Pride,” declared the Hebrew news site Maariv), the backlash among Palestinians and their supporters was swift, and #CaptainApartheid soon appeared on social media.Many critics expressed outrage about Sabra’s character and her identity as an Israeli intelligence agent, accusing Marvel of buying into Zionist propaganda; of ignoring, or supporting, Israel’s occupation of territory captured in 1967; and of dehumanizing Palestinians.“By glorifying the Israeli army & police, Marvel is promoting Israel’s violence against Palestinians & enabling the continued oppression of millions of Palestinians living under Israel’s authoritarian military rule,” wrote the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a U.S.-based pro-Palestinian organization, on Twitter.Compounding the anger was the name of the superhero, Sabra, which has different connotations for Israelis and Palestinians. To Israeli Jews, a Sabra can simply be a person born in Israel. But Sabra is also the name of a refugee camp in Lebanon where a Christian militia massacred hundreds of Palestinians while Israeli troops stood by 40 years ago.“The bottom line is that to Palestinians, Marvel having an Israeli superhero whitewashes the occupation,” said Sani Meo, publisher of This Week in Palestine, a magazine about Palestinian issues.Palestinians and their supporters around the world have been posting profusely about “Captain Apartheid,” he said. “Some of it is humorous,” he added, “though the topic is not humorous.”A 1940 sketch by Joe Simon of Captain America with a copy of a Marvel comic from the 1960s at the Library of Congress in Washington.Zach Gibson for The New York TimesMarvel Studios declined to answer detailed questions about the issue or about the company’s intentions in bringing Sabra to the big screen.“While our characters and stories are inspired by the comics,” the studio said in a statement, “they are always freshly imagined for the screen and today’s audience, and the filmmakers are taking a new approach with the character Sabra who was first introduced in the comics over 40 years ago.”Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’: Tatiana Maslany described the giant, green character making her television debut on Disney+ as “weirdly, the closest thing to my own experience I’ve done ever.”‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’: The trailer for the long-awaited sequel was unveiled at Comic-Con International in San Diego. The film will be released on Nov. 11.‘Thor: Love and Thunder’: The fourth “Thor” movie in 11 years, directed by Taika Waititi, embraces wholesale self-parody and is sillier than any of its predecessors.‘Ms. Marvel’: This Disney+ series introduces a new character: Kamala Khan, a Muslim high schooler in Jersey City who is mysteriously granted superpowers.Whatever its motivations, Marvel has found itself mired in the intractable, century-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Israel has been vilified by international human rights groups and by boycott and divestment activists for its policies toward the Palestinians. Some of those organizations equate Israeli policy with apartheid. But the country is also gaining broader acceptance by some Arab governments, such as the United Arab Emirates, that have grown tired of waiting for any resolution of the long conflict.Simmering in the background, fierce disputes still frequently erupt in Israel and in the occupied territories over history, territory and national identity.Last year, those tensions embroiled another Israeli actress, Gal Gadot, who appears as Wonder Woman in a different superhero franchise, when she decried the continuing cycle of violence between Israel and the Palestinians. Critics assailed her for comments in which she defended Israel’s right to exist, even as she expressed support for “our neighbors.”Much of the furor over Marvel’s decision to include Sabra in the new movie, called “Captain America: A New World Order,” centers on the name of the character itself.To Israeli Jews, sabra is the Hebrew name of a cactus bush and its fruit, prickly on the outside and soft and sweet on the inside, which the nation’s founders adopted as the nickname for native-born Israelis.But to Palestinians, the sabra bush, traditionally used to mark the boundaries of village lands, is a symbol of loss and steadfastness (“sabr” is also the Arabic word for “patience”). During the war that accompanied Israel’s creation in 1948, Zionist and Israeli forces destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees after fleeing or being expelled from their homes. But the hardy sabra bushes remained an indelible part of the landscape even after most traces of the villages were erased.Residents of the Sabra camp in Lebanon mourning those who were slain in the 1982 massacre.Jamal/Associated PressCritics have also accused Marvel of being insensitive to the link between the Israeli superhero’s name and that of the refugee camp in Lebanon. Sabra and Shatila are the names of two Palestinian camps in Lebanon where, from Sept. 16 to Sept. 18 in 1982, a Lebanese Christian militia massacred hundreds of residents. Israeli troops had allowed the militia to enter the camps, and Israeli commanders issued no orders to stop the carnage.“Social media activists are slamming Marvel over their new Israeli Mossad superhero ‘Sabra,’ whose name is sensitive considering the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” the official Palestinian news agency WAFA wrote on Twitter.The character of Sabra first surfaced in an issue of “The Incredible Hulk” comic book in 1980, wearing a blue cape and white bodysuit featuring a Star of David. That debut was some two years before the massacre in Lebanon.Yossi Klein Halevi, an American Israeli author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research and educational center, said he believed that the filmmakers had not intended to reference the refugee camp when they decided to use the character.Over the course of a long conflict, like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he said, “a kind of cultural paranoia sets in.”“Sometimes, a Marvel movie is just a Marvel movie,” he added.Still, critics point at how, in a 1981 Hulk issue titled “Power and Peril in the Promised Land,” the character of Sabra initially showed little emotion over the death of a Palestinian boy in an explosion, until the Hulk enlightened her about basic human values.Nothing is yet known about the story line of the next “Captain America” movie, which is scheduled for release in 2024, or the scope of Sabra’s debut role.Ms. Haas, left, on the set of the Netflix series “Unorthodox” in Berlin. One Israeli director praised her as “a brilliant actress who is relatable for her beautiful human flaws and not inhuman perfections.”Anika Molnar/Netflix/EPA, via Shutterstock’But Joseph Cedar, a New York-born Israeli director of movies including “Norman” and “Footnote,” praised Marvel’s casting of Ms. Haas, 27.A diminutive actress who has gained international recognition for her roles in the Netflix series “Unorthodox” and “Shtisel,” Ms. Haas survived cancer as a child.“I like the idea that the embodiment of an Israeli superhero is not a tall supermodel, but rather a brilliant actress who is relatable for her beautiful human flaws and not inhuman perfections,” Mr. Cedar said.Einat Wilf, a former Israeli lawmaker and author of “We Should All Be Zionists,” said that Israel was “enjoying a certain cultural moment,” with many of its local television productions finding success on international streaming platforms. “Marvel wants to make money,” she noted, adding that it appeared the studio saw the box office appeal of an Israeli superhero.Ms. Wilf said that she was withholding judgment about Sabra until the release of the movie, noting that superheroes had become more complex characters in recent years, with “a good side, an evil side, a trauma history.”“I am not so sure that an Israeli superhero will necessarily mean a positive portrayal of Israel,” she added.Hiba Yazbek More

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      Irene Papas, Actress in ‘Zorba the Greek’ and Greek Tragedies, Dies at 96

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      She was best known for commanding movie roles in the 1960s but received the greatest plaudits for playing heroines of the ancient stage.Irene Papas, a Greek actress who starred in films like “Z,” “Zorba the Greek” and “The Guns of Navarone” but won the greatest acclaim of her career playing the heroines of Greek tragedy, died on Wednesday. She was 96.The death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry in an email. He did not know the cause of death, but in 2018, it was announced that Ms. Papas had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.Ms. Papas was best known by American moviegoers for her intensely serious and sultry-strong roles in the 1960s. In “The Guns of Navarone” (1961), filmed partly on the island of Rhodes, she played a World War II resistance fighter who dared to do what a team of Allied saboteurs (among them Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn) would not: shoot an unarmed woman because she was a traitor.In “Zorba the Greek” (1964), with Mr. Quinn, she was a Greek widow who is stoned by her fellow villagers because of her choice of lover. In Costa-Gavras’s Oscar-winning political thriller “Z” (1969), set in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, she played Yves Montand’s widow, who evoked the film’s meaning with one final grief-ridden look out to sea.But in the same decade, she was making her name in Greek film versions of classical plays, often directed by her countryman Michael Cacoyannis, who also directed “Zorba.” She played the title characters in “Antigone” (1961), Sophocles’s tale of a woman who pays dearly after fighting for her brother’s right to an honorable burial; and in “Electra” (1962), in which she and her brother plot matricide. She was also Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, in “Iphigenia” (1977), the drama of a daughter offered as human sacrifice.In 1971, she received the National Board of Review’s best actress award for her role as Helen of Troy in “The Trojan Women.” Her co-stars were Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave.Ms. Papas was born Eirini Lelekou on Sept. 3, 1926, in Chiliomodi, Greece, a small village near Corinth, and grew up in Athens. She was one of four daughters of two schoolteachers and entered drama school at age 12. By the time she was 18, she had already played both Electra and Lady Macbeth. But her first professional stage role, in 1948, was as a party-hopping society girl in a musical.She made her film debut the same year, in Nikos Tsiforos’s drama “Hamenoi Angeloi” (“Fallen Angels”), and appeared in 14 films during the 1950s — some American, some European — before her breakout role in “The Guns of Navarone.”Ms. Papas with James Darren, center, and Anthony Quinn in “The Guns of Navarone” (1961). Everett CollectionThe director Elia Kazan is often credited with discovering Ms. Papas. On a 1954 trip to the United States, she read a scene from “The Country Girl” for him. The following year, she was given a seven-year contract by MGM, although she made only one film under it: “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956), a western starring James Cagney.Ms. Papas’s other films included “Bouboulina” (1959), in which she played an 18th-century Greek revolutionary heroine; “The Brotherhood” (1968), as a Mafia wife (to Kirk Douglas); “Anne of the Thousand Days” (1969), as the discarded Catherine of Aragon opposite Richard Burton’s Henry VIII; and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1987), based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez.The Greek tragedies were the focus of her New York stage career as well. She made her Broadway debut in 1967 in “That Summer — That Fall,” based on “Phèdre,” playing a passionate second wife in love with her stepson (Jon Voight), but the production closed after only 12 performances. The following year, she was Clytemnestra in a Circle in the Square production of “Iphigenia in Aulis.” She returned to Circle in the Square as the title character, a woman who kills her own children, in “Medea” (1973) and as Agave, who mistakenly kills her own son during an orgy of drugs, drink and violence, in “The Bacchae” (1980).She was also a singer. She made two albums of Greek folk songs and hymns, “Odes” (1979) and “Rapsodies” (1986), and created something of a scandal with vocals that were condemned by some as lewd on “666,” the 1971 album by the rock group Aphrodite’s Child.Ms. Papas had strong political feelings about her country and made them public. In 1967, she risked her citizenship by calling for a “cultural boycott” of Greece after a military junta took control, saying “Nazism is back in Greece” and describing the country’s new leaders as “no more than a band of blackmailers.” Although Ms. Papas spoke in interviews about a desire to give up acting and a regrettable tendency to be too obedient to directors, she continued film acting well into her 70s. Her final screen appearances included “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), in which she played Drosoula, the formidable mother of Mandras (Christian Bale), and “Um Filme Falado” (“A Talking Picture”), Manoel de Oliveira’s 2003 meditation on civilization, in which she portrayed a privileged actress sailing the Mediterranean.She married Alkis Papas, a director and actor, in 1947, and they divorced four years later. A brief 1957 marriage to José Kohn, a producer, was annulled. She never married again.She is survived by her nephews, the spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry said.Having played all those characters from ancient Greece, Ms. Papas had a worldview that took thousands of years of history and philosophy into account. “Plato made the first mistake,” she told Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times in 1969, lamenting an unnecessary delay in the scientific revolution. “He began to talk about the soul and morality, and he prevented the Epicureans from searching the nature of man.” More