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      in Movies

      Joe Turkel, the Spectral Bartender in ‘The Shining,’ Dies at 94

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      Also memorably seen in “Blade Runner,” he was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.Joe Turkel, a gaunt-faced yeoman character actor who appeared in scores of movies but is best known for two of his final performances — as Lloyd the bartender in “The Shining” and Dr. Eldon Tyrell in “Blade Runner” — died on June 27 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 94.His son Craig Turkel said the death, at a hospital, was caused by liver failure.Mr. Turkel (pronounced ter-KELL) was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.In movies like “Hellcats of the Navy” (1957) and “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), he held his own alongside leading men like Ronald Reagan and Steve McQueen. It was often up to Mr. Turkel to provide a subtle but unmistakable plot pivot, using his steely onscreen demeanor and perfectly delivered lines to shift a film’s entire mood.Nowhere was that more true than in the three movies he made for Stanley Kubrick, with whom he formed something of a mutual admiration society. Both men, who were about the same age, had grown up as working-class secular Jews in New York. Both were huge baseball fanatics. And both were perfectionists about their work.Mr. Turkel had a small role in “The Killing,” Mr. Kubrick’s 1956 film about a racetrack robbery, and then returned a year later as a condemned soldier in “Paths of Glory.” In both films, he contrasted a stony stillness with sudden explosions of manic action to convey meaning far beyond his few brief lines.He went on to become a prolific television actor, with roles on popular shows like “Bonanza,” “Ironside” and “Fantasy Island.”He returned to Mr. Kubrick’s service in 1980 for “The Shining,” an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. The story revolves around an author, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who is hired as the winter caretaker of the secluded, otherwise empty Overlook Hotel and moves there with his family.Under the influence of malevolent supernatural forces, Jack slowly goes crazy. At one point he enters the hotel’s bar, where he finds Lloyd, played by Mr. Turkel. Jack asks for a bourbon, and Lloyd pours him a shot of Jack Daniel’s.Mr. Nicholson dominates their conversation, but it is Mr. Turkel’s ominously stoic presence that shifts the film into a darker register.“In dress and demeanor, he’s the prototypical old-school hotel barman,” Mr. Turkel told The Toronto Star in 2014. “He obviously takes pride in his work and the corruption he enables; most bartenders are stylish and a little bit evil. Poor Lloyd doesn’t know the difference between bourbon and Tennessee whiskey, though.”Joseph Turkel was born on July 15, 1927, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin Turkel, was a tailor, and his mother, Gazella (Goldfisher) Turkel, was a homemaker and part-time opera singer.Along with his son Craig, Mr. Turkel is survived by another son, Robert; his brother, David; and two grandchildren. His wife, Anita (Cacciatore) Turkel, died before him.He joined the U.S. merchant marine in 1944 and the Army in 1946. After receiving an honorable discharge, he briefly returned to New York for acting classes before heading to Hollywood in 1947.His first credited role was in “City Across the River” (1949), a film about a program for juvenile delinquents that also featured a young Tony Curtis.His work on “The Shining” brought him to the attention of Ridley Scott, who was casting “Blade Runner,” his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”He was cast as Dr. Tyrell, the brilliant but haughty founder of a company that produces robots so perfect that they blur the line between human and machine — an uncanniness that leads to Dr. Tyrell’s bloody demise at the hands of one of his creations.Although “Blade Runner” has become one of the most critically acclaimed science fiction films in history, it was originally a box-office dud. Mr. Turkel, having grown tired of grinding through auditions after decades in Hollywood, decided to retire; aside from a few more small TV and film roles, he never acted again.Instead he tried his hand at screenplays (although none of them were produced), became a regular on the fan-convention circuit and wrote a memoir, “The Miseries of Success,” which remains unpublished.“I’ve done some great films,” he told an interviewer for Blade Zone, a “Blade Runner” fan site, in 1999. “I know other actors that have done brilliant films. They still have to go out and audition and meet the producer, director, and please these people no matter what they’ve done. Of course the great big stars don’t do that. But there are great quality actors that do that and they find it demeaning.”Still, he added, “I’ve had a hell of a career.” More

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      in Theater

      A Chameleon Flies From ‘The Blacklist’ to ‘The Kite Runner’

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      After nine seasons on the NBC series, Amir Arison is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel.An early scene in the new Broadway play “The Kite Runner” is mostly spoken in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, though the action depicts a distinctly American art form.“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us!,” the 12-year-old Amir exclaims to his best friend, Hassan. The two boys, pretending to be cowboys, love American westerns, especially “Rio Bravo” with John Wayne. After a standoff, Hassan charges at Amir, but Amir trips him and Hassan stumbles and falls. They wrestle, tumbling and giggling — blissfully unaware of the dark forces that will soon tear them apart.The place is Kabul, the year is 1973 and the two actors playing the boys are actually adults. One of them, Amir Arison, 44, the veteran stage actor who recently left NBC’s hit series “The Blacklist” after nine seasons, portrays Amir as a young boy and an adult.The show, which is scheduled to begin previews on July 6 at the Helen Hayes Theater, is based on Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel of the same name. It tells the story of Amir, a privileged Pashtun boy growing up alongside Hassan, the Hazara son of his father’s servant. After a childhood act of cowardice, Amir spends most of the play reflecting on and trying to atone for his failure to come to the aid of his best friend.Arison, center, during rehearsals. He plays the protagonist, Amir, as both a child and an adult. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn playing Amir as both a child and an adult, Arison jumps between acting out his childhood memories and narrating them from the present. He doesn’t leave the stage once.It may be a daunting part, but Arison, who cut his teeth on Off Broadway stages before appearing as an FBI counterterrorism expert in some 190 episodes of “The Blacklist,” is up for it.Over the years, he’s played a flashy Iraqi dermatologist in the documentary drama “Aftermath”; a mysterious newlywed in Christopher Durang’s dark comedy “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them”; and a government accountant in Stephen Belber’s “The Muscles in Our Toes,”Still, he said over lunch recently, this role is the biggest challenge of his professional and personal life. “In the theater, you cut a vein open,” he said. “You give your voice, your body, your mind and your soul.”Matthew Spangler, who adapted the story for the stage, said of the role: “It does raise the bar for that actor quite a bit, but then it becomes something truly virtuosic.”Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.While the casting director Laura Stanczyk and the cultural consultant Humaira Ghilzai ensured that Afghan actors auditioned (and that it was easy for them to do so), the role of Amir ultimately went to Arison, who is Israeli American. He grew up in Florida the son of Israeli immigrants; his mother was born in a refugee camp to Holocaust survivors.In March, when Arison landed the audition for Amir, his first call was to Ghilzai, whose family fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. He didn’t know of her affiliation with the show, but he had worked with her twice before — once for his role as a colonel in the Pakistani army in a West Coast production of J.T. Rogers’s “Blood and Gifts” — and asked for advice on his accent.Arison is a chameleon, Ghilzai said: He’s played Afghans, Arabs, Americans and “metamorphosizes into whatever you need him to be.”“The Kite Runner” was first staged in 2007 at San Jose State University, where Spangler teaches performance studies. Its first professional production took place in 2009, and it has since been staged in multiple countries. The Broadway production, directed by Giles Croft, is based on the version that ran at Nottingham Playhouse in 2013 and at Wyndham’s Theater in the West End three years later. (The play “mostly works on the level of childlike fable, satisfyingly schematic but frustratingly simplistic,” Stephen Dalton wrote in a Hollywood Reporter review.)The book — published two years after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to depose the Taliban — has captivated millions of readers around the world. Now the play arrives on Broadway almost a year after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban seized power again.Hosseini’s tale gave readers a rare inside perspective on Afghanistan and the intricacies of life there, but it also has, as Arison pointed out, universal themes of immigration, power, redemption, and father and son relationships.Azita Ghanizada, who plays Amir’s wife, Soraya, with Arison.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“The immigrant story never goes away,” Croft, the director, said in an interview. “Most of us have it in us somewhere. Even if we didn’t experience it ourselves, somewhere in our background, somebody will have traveled to get somewhere that they think will be better or safer. So we carry it with us.”As does Hosseini, whose family sought political asylum in the United States in 1980 after the Soviet army invaded the country, and told The Times last year that he still has “a perspective, and I do feel strongly about what’s going on in Afghanistan.” (In “The Kite Runner,” Amir and his father also escape Afghanistan — first to Pakistan, then to the United States.)Along with Arison, the cast has deep Middle Eastern and South Asian roots. Azita Ghanizada, who portrays Amir’s wife, Soraya, and Salar Nader, who plays the tabla onstage throughout the show, are both Afghan.“It’s been really heartening for me to see how devoted they are to representation,” Ghilzai, the cultural consultant, said of the cast members. “I think because their culture has been misrepresented so much that they really, really, really want to get it right.”Still, placing a non-Afghan in the central role was not a choice made lightly.“The thing that swung it for me,” Croft said of Arison’s casting, “was that he has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.”The director Giles Croft, left, said he cast Arison as Amir because he “has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.” Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn coaching the cast and creative team, Ghilzai guided actors through Dari pronunciations — including the names of characters and towns. The dialect is sprinkled throughout the script.One actor recently asked Ghilzai about Afghan body language: What should he do if he loses in a competition? She advised making a thumbs up motion, a Middle Eastern insult. (They later replaced it with a different gesture, so the meaning wouldn’t get lost in translation.)This production is Ghilzai’s first involvement as a consultant, and she worked closely with Spangler and Croft to re-evaluate the text. In a pivotal scene in the second act, Assef (Amir Malaklou), the neighborhood bully turned-Taliban member, taunts Amir, who has returned to Afghanistan from America.“But America’s not all bad,” Assef tells him. “You know who taught me how to use a Stinger missile? Your C.I.A.”The line emerged from conversations between Ghilzai, Spangler and Croft and was added for this production. It recognizes the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in the militarization of various groups in Afghanistan.Arison, third from left, played an F.B.I. special agent on the NBC series “The Blacklist.”David Giesbrecht/NBCIn his last episode of “The Blacklist,” Arison’s quirky character Aram Mojtabai told his colleagues that he’s leaving the FBI and plans to move to New York, where among other things, he’d likely see “a Broadway show.” (The episode left open room for him to return.)On Twitter, the actor explained to fans that he was a big fan of Hosseini’s novel, had done his first play in second grade, and couldn’t pass up the lifetime dream to be on Broadway himself.While his part there is “the most unheroic hero you’ll ever see,” he said in the interview, he has come to see it as personally meaningful in ways he didn’t expect.At the beginning of the second act, Amir and his father are hidden inside a fuel truck, fleeing Afghanistan to neighboring Pakistan. Soviet soldiers stop the truck, and father and son don’t know if they’ll live or die.“The other day I just lost it because I thought of my grandparents — that’s what happened to them,” Arison said. “That’s another way I connect, even though I’m not Afghan.“So I’m hoping — and I think every audience should take what they want,” he added, that “through an individual story, we do not forget that history is repeating itself.” More

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      in Television

      In ‘Stranger Things,’ He Delivers Pizza and Stoned Comic Relief

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      Eduardo Franco, who joined the Netflix hit this season, has carved out a role as the show’s addled but reliably hilarious tension-release valve.The “Stranger Things” gang in Lenora Hills, Calif., is in danger — shots are being fired, and an agent is bleeding out. The camera switches abruptly to a view of an unknowing Argyle, played by Eduardo Franco, pulling up to the Byerses’ home as the catchy reggae hit “Pass the Dutchie” blares from his pizza delivery van.“Byers man, having a party and not inviting me, man?” he says. “That is so not cool.”As the group’s wheelman who “smokes smelly plants,” as Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) puts it, Argyle serves as comic relief in the show’s most horrifying season, his lighthearted energy offsetting the dark forces bedeviling the gang.“Argyle delivers pizzas and he dwells in the psychedelics sometimes,” Franco said in a recent video interview. “That’s the perfect combination: to always have hot and ready food, and a little tree.”As one of the most prominent cast additions in Season 4 — the final episodes arrive Friday on Netflix — Franco has carved out a role as the show’s addled but reliably hilarious tension-release valve. But Argyle transcends the stoner-pal stereotype and adds a little heart to the story as well, primarily in the form of his sweet friendship with Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) — though admittedly this often involves the duo being stoned out of their minds.Franco’s most prominent role before Argyle came in Olivia Wilde’s coming-of-age comedy “Booksmart,” as a 20-year-old high school senior named Theo who was recruited to code for Google. That performance led to his current gig — Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike Wheeler in “Stranger Things,” saw Franco in the movie and suggested him for the role.Franco spoke from Biarritz, France, where he was visiting as part of a “Stranger Things” branding partnership with the surf culture label Quiksilver, which supplied much of Argyle’s wardrobe. In conversation, he was clearly more astute than his character but similarly funny and informal, indulging in f-bombs as freely as Argyle does his smelly plants.In the interview, Franco discussed his inspirations for the character and “marinating in the awkwardness” that comes with life as the show’s designated burnout. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was it about Argyle’s character that appealed to you?I loved that I could hopefully bring a breath of fresh air to the chaos that ensues in the show. It tends to get crazy, and I was hoping I could serve as “let’s laugh it off now, because I’ve been tense for the last 45 minutes.”Argyle provides reliable comic relief, but he transcends the stoner-pal stereotype.NetflixDid you take inspiration from any past cinematic potheads?Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” is always in the back of my mind. My initial approach was to just completely be blown out of my mind all the time — as the character, not Eduardo the actor! I wanted Argyle to be completely clueless: When someone says “Oh my god, Argyle, we gotta get out of here!” I’ll be like, “Huh?” But I know that for the sake of the energy and the adrenaline in the scenes, that wouldn’t always work.How old is the van you drive in the show?It was touchy, an 80-something. I was taught how to drive that van by this professional stunt driver — I’d never driven a stick shift before and it was the worst thing to learn on, because it was just so old. But he was always in the van with me when I was driving, hiding in the car just in case.Was there a scene that was particularly fun to film?The dinner table scene was my personal favorite. Eleven is bummed out. Mike is also concerned. Joyce and Murray [played by Winona Ryder and Brett Gelman] are lying about going to Alaska. And me and Jonathan are blown out of our minds.It was so fun sitting there, marinating in the awkwardness. When it was time for me and Charlie to do our lines, sometimes we would stall while everyone was waiting for us, and we’d be sitting there just eating slowly. It was hilarious, and it was awesome to be able to get Brett and Winona to laugh. I love going to work and making people laugh — the camera man, the crew, the people hauling things up and down all day. And everything felt so organic, sharing the screen with Charlie, Finn and everyone.What did Argyle’s relationship with Jonathan bring to the show’s dynamic?Jonathan is in pain. I think they became instant friends because Jonathan needed a set of ears, and Argyle happened to be right there. Argyle’s character is what we all wish we could be: completely judgment-free. He’s there to have a good time with his bud, and to listen to Jonathan and help him out, no matter what he says.Do you think Argyle is capable of handling whatever danger is coming his way?I can’t tell you anything, but geez, he’s out of his mind for sure. Poor guy.“I loved that I could hopefully bring a breath of fresh air to the chaos that ensues in the show,” Franco said.Ryan Lowry for The New York TimesHow has joining an enormous global phenomenon like “Stranger Things” changed your life?At the Season 4 premiere in New York, when we sat down to screen the first episode, I got mad emotional and started crying in my seat. I was glad it was dark and nobody could see anything. To be a part of something this massive was overwhelming, and I hope people can accept my character as a new guy in the show. I hope he does serve his purpose as a breath of fresh air from all the crazy madness.Have you started getting recognized in public?Yes! For an example, when I got to France last week, I was riding a bike down the street to grab some stuff from a market. My bike had no brakes, and as I’m pulling up, I put my feet down to try to stop, and there was this guy pointing and laughing. Then he double-takes and he was like, “You’re the guy from ‘Stranger Things’? What are you doing here, man?” I was like, “I came to get some chocolate croissants and an adapter to plug my phone charger in the wall.” It was so funny, but that’s just how massive this show is.A series like this generally provides a significant career boost. What kinds of things do you hope to work on in the future?I got a couple movies under my belt, but to be in a movie where people are going to the theater and I’m rockin’ people’s socks off is my dream. I don’t know if that era is already out the window, but I just recently watched “Top Gun,” and it was amazing. So I have hope.And I’d love to be a part of creating the projects, but I don’t know necessarily how to do all that yet. I’m trying to figure all this stuff out. I don’t know a [expletive] thing, but we’re all learning. More

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      in Movies

      Mary Mara, Actress on ‘ER,’ ‘Dexter’ and ‘Nash Bridges,’ Dies at 61

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      She appeared in dozens of movies and television shows in a career of more than 30 years. The police said they believed she died in a drowning accident.Mary Mara, a character actress who appeared on television shows including “Nash Bridges,” “Dexter” and “ER” in a career that spanned more than 30 years, has died in upstate New York. She was 61.The death was announced by the New York State Police, who said that Ms. Mara’s body was found on Sunday morning in the St. Lawrence River near Cape Vincent, N.Y., near the Canadian border, and that a preliminary investigation suggested that she had drowned while swimming.She lived in Cape Vincent.Ms. Mara was born on Sept. 21, 1960, in Syracuse, N.Y., to Roger Mara, the former director of special events for the New York State Fair, and Lucille Mara, an accountant. Her brother, Roger, who was a puppeteer, told The San Francisco Examiner in 1996 that he and Mary were encouraged by their mother’s flair for the dramatic.After graduating from Corcoran High School in Syracuse, Ms. Mara studied at San Francisco State University and later earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the Yale School of Drama. Throughout her career she dabbled in theater, most notably in 1989 in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Twelfth Night,” alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.That same year, she had her first onscreen credit, in the television movie “The Preppie Murder,” based on the true story of a young woman’s murder in New York. In 1992 she appeared in “Love Potion No. 9” and “Mr. Saturday Night,” in which Billy Crystal starred as a veteran stand-up comedian. Ms. Mara played his estranged daughter.Her other films included the 2008 horror movie “Prom Night.”She was perhaps best known for her recurring roles on “ER,” in which she played a patient, Loretta Sweet, from 1995-96, and on “Nash Bridges,” in which she played Inspector Bryn Carson from 1996-97.She once said she thought her character had been overshadowed by the male detectives played by Don Johnson and Cheech Marin on the latter show.“It is a male-dominated show with Don and Cheech the principals,” she told The Post-Standard of Syracuse in 1999. Although the show’s writers “started to write for me really well about halfway through the season,” she added, the producers “were afraid I would stand out too much.”Ms. Mara later appeared on “Dexter,” “Ray Donovan,” “Bones,” “Star Trek: Enterprise” and other shows. Her last credit was in the 2020 movie “Break Even.”In a statement, Ms. Mara’s manager, Craig Dorfman, described her as “electric, funny and a true individual.”Her survivors include a stepdaughter, Katie Mersola, and two sisters, Martha Mara and Susan Dailey, according to Variety.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      in Movies

      Taika Waititi on “Thor” and “Our Flag Means Death”

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      Even when your job is to dream up the interplanetary adventures of a Norse god, you might still want to run off and play pirates.So during the weeks he was editing “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the Marvel movie that opens on July 8, Taika Waititi, its director and co-writer, would occasionally take weekends off for a different journey.He would get outfitted in a flowing gray wig, matching facial hair and temporary tattoos, and don deliciously fetishistic leather gear to portray Blackbeard, the swashbuckling, loin-kindling buccaneer of the HBO Max comedy series “Our Flag Means Death.”This is admittedly not a bad way to spend your spare time, though Waititi did occasionally fret over the trade-offs. As he explained recently, “Sometimes you’re pissed off at life and you’re like, ‘Why did I say yes to everything? I don’t have a social life — I’m just working.’ But then the thing comes out, you see where the hard work goes and it’s really worth it.”On TV, Waititi, 46, has had a hand in the FX comedies “Reservation Dogs” (as a co-creator) and “What We Do in the Shadows” (a series based on a movie he co-wrote and co-directed), as well as a “Shadows” spinoff, “Wellington Paranormal.” At the movies, you can hear him voice a good guy in “Lightyear” or see him play a bad guy in “Free Guy.”Waititi is also editing “Next Goal Wins,” a soccer comedy-drama that he co-wrote and directed for Searchlight. He’s writing a new “Star Wars” movie for Lucasfilm, a “Time Bandits” series for Apple TV+. He’s preparing two Roald Dahl projects for Netflix and adapting a graphic novel by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius for a feature film.“All my films are about underdogs,” Waititi said. “Not being able to choose your family and sometimes that’s not your blood family, it’s just who you end up gravitating towards.”Dana Scruggs for The New York TimesIf that isn’t enough, consider that it’s taken this many paragraphs to acknowledge that in 2020 Waititi won an Academy Award for the adapted screenplay of his World War II comedy-drama “Jojo Rabbit,” in which he played — in his own words — “a lovable, quirky, whimsical Hitler.”From this inventory alone (“not even mentioning the five other things that haven’t been reported on yet,” Waititi said), you can gauge how highly desired his services are. In just a few years, he has become one of the industry’s most ingenious and reliable purveyors of escapist fare while devising for himself some fulfilling escape routes from those escapes. And his filmmaking style is distinctive enough that it still shines through on monolithic and increasingly familiar Marvel movies.But his runaway résumé is also a sign of how difficult Waititi finds it to say no. And if you wonder how anyone can possibly balance so many demanding projects, rest assured Waititi is asking himself these same questions.“Sometimes I’ll wake up and be like, Am I having a midlife crisis?” he said. “Should I even be a filmmaker? Maybe I should have been a carpenter. Maybe I should just be a gardener.”Waititi’s estimable career isn’t necessarily the one he imagined for himself while growing up in New Zealand — half a world away from Hollywood and wondering how to gain its attention. “It was never my dream to do this,” he explained. “I would much rather have been a fighter pilot or a fireman, but then it appeared that you’ve got to be actually quite smart to be a pilot.”He added, more sincerely, that he didn’t start making films until his late 20s, at which point he’d already been a graphic artist, a musician and a comedian. “I don’t know if I’ve ever chased any of my dreams,” Waititi said. “My dreams have sort of developed through being part of the dream.”Though he fell in love with film, he calls it “an arranged marriage.” And the solution he has found for managing his workload is, essentially, not to think too much about it and never to stand in one place for too long.“Because if I was to step back and look at all of the things I’m doing, I’d probably have a panic attack,” he said. “I know there’s too many things. I know I’m doing a lot. I just have to keep pivoting every couple of hours.”Earlier this month, Waititi kept stationary long enough to savor a plate of smoked trout and avocado toast in the lobby of a Midtown Manhattan hotel. Wearing loosefitting clothes in pastel colors and a neatly trimmed mustache, he carried himself like all of the Marx Brothers rolled into one: He could be suave, sheepish or scheming, and was always ready with a self-deprecating quip.For example: “New Zealanders hate compliments,” Waititi said. “I think it’s because of our moms. Our moms are the ones who go, ‘Don’t worry — I still liked it.’ That’s the kind of support you’ll get.”Decked out in a gray wig and leather gear for “Our Flag Means Death.”HBO Max Chris Hemsworth in “Love and Thunder.” After the first sequel, he said, “we were waning, as far as support for the character.”Jasin Boland/Marvel StudiosWaititi was not the most obvious candidate to join the Marvel roster when the studio began to consider him in 2015. At the time, his directorial efforts included intimate short films (including the Oscar-nominated “Two Cars, One Night”) and features like “Boy,” an affectionate, coming-of-age tribute to his upbringing in a rural Maori community, about a child enthralled by his charmingly reprobate father (played by Waititi, of course).Before that, Waititi was a theater student at Victoria University of Wellington, where he befriended future collaborators like Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie (who would form the satirical rock duo Flight of the Conchords), obsessed over Monty Python and yearned for outlets for his wry comic voice.“In those days, you’re like, I wish I had something to work on,” Waititi said. “I would just make lists of things I would like to do.”Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘Ms. Marvel’: This Disney+ series introduces a new character: Kamala Khan, a Muslim high schooler in Jersey City who is mysteriously granted superpowers.‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’: With a touch of horror, the franchise’s newest film returns to the world of the mystic arts.‘Moon Knight’: In the Disney+ mini-series, Oscar Isaac plays a caped crusader who struggles with dissociative identity disorder.‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: In the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series, the web slinger continues to radiate sweet, earnest decency.But others from that era regarded Waititi as highly motivated and likely to fulfill his ambitions.“I still see within Taika the same cheeky alternative comic from the 1990s,” said Rhys Darby, a longtime friend and a co-star on “Our Flag Means Death.”“He found that creating behind the camera was more viable than being in front of it,” Darby explained. “But even when he directs, he’ll get in front of the camera and show the actors what he wants them to do. He gets them to mimic him. That’s why he always ends up in his own films. Because he’s trying to control everything.”At Marvel, the studio knew it needed a comprehensive reinvention of “Thor.” That film’s sluggish 2013 sequel, “The Dark World,” remains no one’s favorite entry in the franchise.“We were waning, as far as support for the character,” said Chris Hemsworth, who has played Thor since 2011. “I felt fatigued and there was an audience fatigue, too. If we didn’t do something different and change it up, I wasn’t convinced we were going to bring back an audience.”The comic-book literate Waititi was no fan of the annoyingly flawless Thor, whom he described as “a rich kid from outer space who’s trapped in the ghetto.” But as he reflected further, Waititi wanted to understand his own resistance to the hero and see if he could make a movie that acknowledged and embraced those traits.Moreover, Waititi wanted to know if he could handle making movies at a mammoth scale. Addressing himself, he said, “You’ve always been scared of working with studios, worried about working in America and what it might do to you. But why not go straight into the deep end and see how that goes?”The result was the wildly successful “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017), in which the Viking deity is stripped of his magical hammer and shorn of his flowing locks but overcomes his villainous sister, Hela (Cate Blanchett), and the flamboyant Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum).Why do so many in Hollywood try to hire Waititi? “He gives you his cachet, and he puts himself 100 percent behind your ideas,” said David Jenkins, creator of “Our Flag Means Death.”Dana Scruggs for The New York TimesDirected by Waititi (from a screenplay credited to Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher L. Yost), “Ragnarok” featured plenty of his personal flair — like two different battle sequences set to Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” — while allowing him to play the soft-spoken stone warrior Korg. (It was well-reviewed and sold more than $853 million in tickets worldwide, outstripping its predecessors.)Almost immediately, Waititi and Marvel began devising a follow-up, but getting him back in the director’s chair was not so simple. Within weeks of his Oscar victory, the pandemic hit.“Painting, learning a language, exercising — you think I did any of them?” he said. “No, I didn’t. What I wanted to do was sleep for a month and then I got to sleep for six months.”Then he launched into projects he had been neglecting. By this point, Marvel had become accustomed to sharing Waititi.As Kevin Feige, the studio’s president, explained, “On ‘Ragnarok,’ it was, ‘I’m just finishing this little thing.’” That turned out to be Waititi’s 2016 comedy-drama “Hunt for the Wilderpeople.” “While we were writing and developing this movie, it was, ‘I’m just going to do this other thing in Manhattan Beach.’” That was Waititi’s work on the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian,” for which he directed an episode and voiced the robot bounty hunter IG-11. “‘I’m just going to Hawaii for a few weeks.’ Oh, I guess family vacation?” Feige recalled. Actually, he was filming “Next Goal Wins.”Even after the “Thor: Love and Thunder” shoot ended in Australia last summer and postproduction began in Los Angeles, Feige said, “we were always on alert for Taika being spread too thin. We were very ready to be like, We’re in the cutting room, it’s 8 p.m., where is he? But he was always sitting right next to us.”Hemsworth said that Waititi’s numerous extracurricular activities are not diversions, but intellectual necessities. “If he isn’t continually creating, he would become stagnant,” Hemsworth said. “Most of us would fall flat on our asses from exhaustion. That’s what fuels him, in a strange way.”Waititi’s to-do list included “Our Flag Means Death,” whose creator, David Jenkins, spent three years wooing Waititi — first to serve as an executive producer and director of the pilot, and then to play Blackbeard.“It’s like writing a song for Prince,” said Jenkins, who got Disney and Marvel’s permission to borrow Waititi on weekends. “He gives you his cachet, and he puts himself 100 percent behind your ideas.”“I would much rather have been a fighter pilot or a fireman, but then it appeared that you’ve got to be actually quite smart to be a pilot,” Waititi said.Dana Scruggs for The New York TimesWaititi said he did not need much persuading to play Blackbeard once Jenkins suggested he was right for the part. “This is what I needed to hear,” Waititi said. “My ego loves that.”But “Our Flag Means Death” offered Waititi more than just a morale boost. (Here there be spoilers, me hearties.) While the series told the comic tale of Stede Bonnet (Darby), a befuddled but well-meaning aristocrat trying to make it as a pirate, it did not simply dangle Blackbeard as an unlikely mentor to Bonnet and a source of will-they-or-won’t-they, bro-ho-ho innuendo.In the first season’s penultimate episode, Bonnet and Blackbeard realized they loved each other and shared a tender kiss. Their romance has become integral to the series going forward, and the inspiration for countless works of fan art that Waititi keeps saved on his phone.As much as he understands the cultural fascination with Stede and Blackbeard’s kiss, Waititi said he wished it wasn’t remarkable for its rarity: “It needs to be normalized.”It is a wish that Waititi understands he cannot necessarily fulfill in a Marvel movie, despite some of the wink-wink repartee shared by Thor and his hunky ally Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) in a “Love and Thunder” teaser trailer.“No one talks about Tom Cruise hooking up with Jennifer Connelly in ‘Top Gun,’” he said. But in “Our Flag Means Death, “it’s a massive talking point that two dudes kiss on the beach. I’m cool with talking about it because I’m really proud of the moment. But my dream is to be like the world of the pirates, where no one bats an eye.”The new “Thor” is partly concerned with expanding the Marvel empire to include Russell Crowe as the vainglorious Greek god Zeus and Christian Bale as the nefarious Gorr the God Butcher. But as the title implies, the movie is also a romance, one that continues Thor’s journey from “Avengers: Endgame” (2019).Looking at the character there, Waititi said he asked himself, “What is he missing most in his life?” And the answer: “It was love. It was a partner. For people who are larger than life, what completes them? I think a lot of superheroes, when you look at them, they’re just lonely.”The story line provided the opportunity to bring back Natalie Portman, who played Thor’s love interest Jane Foster in the first two films but did not appear in “Ragnarok.”Portman, who gets to wield Thor’s mighty hammer in the new film, said that she had seen “Ragnarok” and was excited that Waititi’s style was “so free and creative.”“His other work, too, has impressed me so much over the years and how he’s able to blend the silly and the profound, all with a distinctive visual style,” Portman said. “Everything in his films always feels spontaneous and hilarious and full of heart.”The idea of yearning for companionship is particularly prevalent in this “Thor,” and one could speculate about why it appeals so strongly to Waititi. His parents separated when he was young, and he is divorced from the film producer Chelsea Winstanley, with whom he has two daughters.But as we talked about the strands that tie his work together, Waititi preferred to point to broader themes.“All my films are about underdogs,” he said. “Not being able to choose your family and sometimes that’s not your blood family, it’s just who you end up gravitating towards. You’re like, How did I end up with these weirdos? What is it about these guys?”Waititi didn’t start making films until his late 20s. “Before that,” he said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever chased any of my dreams.”Dana Scruggs for The New York TimesWithout quite naming himself, Waititi spun an extemporaneous monologue about why certain people — whoever they might be — can never see themselves as being successful or having made it.“What drives people is this idea of, I’ll show you,” he said. “Sometimes it’s an ill-perceived, false idea that people don’t believe in you. You still carry that around and people will be like, ‘You can stop now — you’ve proven your point.’”His voice rose to a comic volume as he continued: “No, there’s still some dead people I need to show! My dead dad, he needs to see!” Then in a softer, more sincere tone he added, “It’s a weird infatuation.”Once this “Thor” has been safely launched into the world, more work awaits Waititi. “I’m trying to write the ‘Star Wars’ idea at the moment,” he said. “I’ve got to see how that goes, because once I submit it, that might determine when it gets made or if it gets made, even.”But then again, “I am cool as well to take six months off and just go hang out with my kids.”I asked him if he was starting to feel like Leonardo DiCaprio in “Inception,” just desperate to walk through the front door and have his children embrace him, and Waititi did not dismiss the comparison. “They’re in New Zealand,” he said. “I mean, they couldn’t be further away.”For now, Waititi takes solace in the fact that he tried to have his daughters on the set of “Thor” as much as possible and provided them with experiences that would someday be meaningful to them.“I know in the future, they’ll look back and go, ‘Wow, we were on set with Christian Bale,’” he said. “‘And we were rude to him and ignored him.’” More

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      in Theater

      The ‘Most Real Richard III There’s Ever Been’

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      The Royal Shakespeare Company has cast a disabled actor to play the “deformed, unfinish’d” king for the first time. The choice has been hailed as a landmark moment.STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England — A raucous party was underway in one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s rehearsal rooms this month as the cast of “Richard III” ran through the play’s opening, dancing in a conga line while music blared and balloons bounced off the floor.Off to one side, the future Richard III sneered at the scene. Shakespeare depicted the king as a scheming hunchback who murdered his way to the British throne, and in this imagining of the play, he is personified by the 30-year-old actor Arthur Hughes. In role, Hughes stepped into the middle of the party, veering through the revelers to deliver the play’s famed opening speech: “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he began.As the speech continues, Richard lists the insults he has faced. He is “curtail’d of this fair proportion”; he is “cheated of feature”; he is “deformed, unfinish’d.” As Hughes declaimed each barb, he angrily squeezed a white balloon. Eventually the pressure became too much. The balloon popped.The moment of tension was made even more powerful by Hughes’s own appearance. He has radial dysplasia, meaning he was born with a shorter right arm, his wrist bending into the body and his hand missing a thumb.The first casting by the Royal Shakespeare Company of a disabled actor to play Richard III has been hailed as an advance in British theater. The play opened in Stratford-upon-Avon on Thursday and runs through Oct. 8.“You can see a despot and tyrant,” Hughes said of Richard III, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned.”Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanyShakespeare used and amplified Richard III’s real-life condition — the king is thought to have had scoliosis or curvature of the spine — to highlight the character’s unsavory nature. (He is described at one point as a “pois’nous bunch-back’d toad.”) According to Gregory Doran, the director of the current adaptation, the casting of Hughes in the role “sends out a big message, just as not casting a disabled actor would have sent out a different message.”Hughes’s casting comes as the frequency of disabled actors earning major roles appears to be growing in British theater. In July, the National Theater will present “All of Us” by Francesca Martinez, an actor and playwright who has cerebral palsy (Martinez said in a telephone interview that the play would feature three disabled actors, including herself). And Liz Carr, who uses a wheelchair, this year won an Olivier Award, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for her performance in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” at the National.In her Olivier acceptance speech, Carr highlighted some persistent problems. “There’s so many fears of risk of employing disabled actors,” she said, but added the award “proves we can do it, we can project, we can fill a stage.”Jack Thorne, the playwright behind “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and an activist for disabled people, said in a telephone interview that there was “definitely a willingness” to expand disabled casting in Britain. The National Theater was a leader, he said, as were six regional theaters behind an initiative called Ramps on the Moon that stages productions led by deaf and disabled actors.Yet there was still a dearth of lead roles in London’s commercial heartland, he said. “There aren’t West End shows with disabled leads,” he added. In discussions about diversity, the issue was routinely forgotten, he said. Theaters should bring in targets to increase participation, he said.The National Theater, for instance, has experimented with aspirational quotas for women and people of color, but not for disabled people. Alastair Coomer, the theater’s head of casting, said in a telephone interview that new targets were being discussed and that he “would not be surprised” if that discrepancy was addressed.Hughes in a Royal Shakespeare Company costume storeroom. “Richard III” plays in the company’s repertoire through Oct. 8.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesHughes, eating potato chips in a break from rehearsal, said he hoped his casting as Richard III “sets the mold for how the industry can change.”Growing up in Aylesbury, a town about 40 miles northwest of London, Hughes said that he had experienced few barriers to pursuing acting. As a child, he said, he was so enthusiastic in drama classes that he was given prime roles, such as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Hughes said that he had read “Richard III” for the first time while looking for speeches to use when auditioning for drama schools. He instantly identified with the role, he added, since the play’s characters view the future king as “not cut out for big parts” because of his looks. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me,’” Hughes said.After drama school, Hughes did not immediately secure an agent — unlike many of his colleagues. “Voices in my head were going, ‘Are you a risk?’” he said, but those doubts lifted after he secured a role in a production by Graeae, a British theater company that casts deaf and disabled actors. Before then, Hughes said, he felt his appearance “was going to hold me back,” but after being surrounded by other disabled actors, he felt empowered. He even started wearing short sleeves to highlight his limb difference, he added.The Royal Shakespeare Company show is Hughes’s most high-profile casting to date. In May, Doran gave an interview to The Times of London that was headlined: “Able-Bodied Actors Cannot Be Richard III.” In a letter of complaint to that newspaper, Doran said that the headline was misleading. His point, he wrote, was that, although anybody could play the role, a disabled actor could “enhance the performance and impact of the production.”Richard III is often portrayed as an almost comedic bad guy, Hughes said, often with a fake “hump and limp.” While not trying to hide the character’s villainy, he hoped to draw attention to his motivations: “You can see a despot and tyrant,” he said, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned and outcast and is underestimated.”Mat Fraser, another disabled actor, who played Richard III in a production in Hull in northern England in 2017, said that the king was often played by older performers who could make the king seem a “withered little twig.” But Hughes is young and muscular — better suited to portraying a monarch who died at age 32 on a battlefield, Fraser said. “We’re going to see the most real Richard III there’s ever been,” he added.Hughes said he was already looking beyond his turn as Richard to other Shakespeare roles, and would love to play Hamlet, and Iago from “Othello.”“I’d like to play a role that’s not specified as disabled,” he said. “Obviously, whichever role I play will be disabled by the very nature of me playing it,” he added. “But that’s not the point.”Richard IIIThrough Oct. 8 at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England; rsc.org.uk. More

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      in Music

      James Rado, Co-Creator of the Musical ‘Hair,’ Is Dead at 90

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      Working with his fellow writer and actor Gerome Ragni and the composer Galt MacDermot, he jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius.James Rado, who jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius as a co-creator of “Hair,” the show, billed as an “American tribal love-rock musical,” that transfigured musical theater tradition with radical ’60s iconoclasm and rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90.The publicist Merle Frimark, a longtime friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardio-respiratory arrest.So much of the power of “Hair” resided in its seeming raw spontaneity, yet Mr. Rado (pronounced RAY-doe) labored over it for years with his collaborator Gerome Ragni to perfect that affect. Contrary to theatrical lore, he and Mr. Ragni were not out-of-work actors who wrote “Hair” to generate roles they could themselves play, but rather New York stage regulars with growing résumés.They met as cast members in an Off Broadway revue called “Hang Down Your Head and Die,” a London transfer that closed after one performance in October 1964. Mr. Rado bonded with Mr. Ragni and was soon talking to him about collaborating on a musical that would capture the exuberant, increasingly anti-establishment youth culture rising all around them in the streets of Lower Manhattan — a musical about hippies before hippies had a name.A musician before he’d become an actor, Mr. Rado began writing songs with Mr. Ragni, which they sometimes sang in what were then beatnik coffee houses in Greenwich Village.Moving to an apartment in Hoboken, N.J., where rents were even cheaper than in downtown Manhattan, they borrowed a typewriter from their landlord and went to work writing their musical in earnest, transcribing into song the sexual liberation, racial integration, pharmacological experimentation and opposition to the escalating Vietnam War that was galvanizing their young street archetypes. In solidarity, Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni let their short hair grow long.A museum stroll in mid-1965 brought them face to face with a painting of a tuft of hair by the Pop artist Jim Dine. Its title was “Hair.”“I called it to Jerry’s attention, and we were both knocked out,” Mr. Rado later recalled. Their nascent musical now had a name.A moment from the original production of “Hair,” at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1967.DagmarWhat happened next would become the stuff of Broadway legend, albeit in fits and starts. In October 1966, on a train platform in New Haven, Conn., Mr. Ragni recognized Joseph Papp, impresario of the then-itinerant New York Shakespeare Festival, and handed him a bound script of “Hair.” Mr. Papp took it, read it and resolved to consider making “Hair” the opening production at his Public Theater, just nearing completion in what had been the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village.Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni, meanwhile, had decided that their lyrics needed better melodies than the ones they had written, and embarked on a search for a legitimate composer to improve the songs. The search yielded the Canadian-born Galt MacDermot, a most unlikely choice: He was slightly older than his colleagues and a straight arrow with an eclectic musical background but scant Broadway experience. Mr. MacDermot wrote the melody for versions of “Aquarius” and several other songs, on spec, in less than 36 hours. It instantly became clear that he was the ideal choice for setting Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni’s lyric ruminations to rocking show music.A demonstration soon ensued in Mr. Papp’s office, with Mr. MacDermot singing and playing the trio’s new songs. Impressed, Mr. Papp announced that he would open the Public with “Hair.”Yet, second-guessing himself, he soon rescinded his offer, only to reconsider after a return office audition, this time with Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni doing the singing. “Hair” did, in fact, open the Public Theater on Oct. 17, 1967, with the 32-year-old Mr. Ragni leading the cast as George Berger — a hippie tribe’s nominal leader — but without the 35-year-old Mr. Rado, who was deemed too old by the show’s director, Gerald Freedman, to play the doomed protagonist, Claude Hooper Bukowski, even though the character was based almost entirely on Mr. Rado himself.“Hair” — an impressionistic near-fairy tale of a flock of flower children on the streets of New York taking LSD, burning draft cards, shocking tourists and making love before losing their conflicted comrade, Claude, to the Vietnam War — ran for eight weeks at the Public’s brand-new Anspacher Theater, generating ecstatic word of mouth and reviews that ranged from perplexed to appreciative.A wealthy young Midwesterner with political ambitions and strong antiwar politics named Michael Butler stepped in to move the show, first to Cheetah, a nightclub on West 53rd Street, and then — much rewritten by Mr. Rado and his collaborators, and with a visionary new director, Tom O’Horgan, now in charge — on to Broadway, where Mr. Rado was restored to the cast as Claude.Mr. Rado, second from left, with, from left, the actor Paul Nicholas, Mr. Ragni, the actor Oliver Tobias and the director Tom O’Horgan in London shortly after “Hair” opened there in 1968.Getty“Hair” was a Broadway sensation, hailed for its irresistible rock- and soul-driven score, its young cast of utter unknowns, its often-searing topicality and its must-see 20-second nude scene. It ran for 1,750 performances after opening at the Biltmore Theatre, on West 47th Street, on April 29, 1968. (It is now the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.)“Hair” quickly conquered the culture at large — though there were naysayers, who found its nudity, flagrant four-letter words and flouting of the American flag objectionable. It played all across America and ultimately the world, engendering a 1979 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman — which was disavowed by Mr. Rado — and a Tony Award-winning Broadway revival in 2009 that Mr. Rado helped guide. The original cast album won a Grammy Award and was the No. 1 album in the country for 13 straight weeks in 1969. (It was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019.)The score generated ubiquitous cover versions. In 1969 alone, the Fifth Dimension’s medley of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (it went on to win the Grammy Award for record of the year), while the Cowsills’ version of the title song reached No. 2, Oliver’s “Good Morning Starshine” hit No. 3 and Three Dog Night’s “Easy to Be Hard” got as high as No. 4. Among the many others who recorded songs from the “Hair” score was Nina Simone.“From the start, I envisioned that the score of ‘Hair’ would be something new for Broadway,” Mr. Rado later reflected, “a kind of pop-rock/show tune hybrid.”“We did have the desire to make something wonderful and spectacular for the moment,” he added. “We thought we’d stumbled on a great idea, and something that potentially could be a hit on Broadway, never thinking of the distant future.”James Alexander Radomski was born on Jan. 23, 1932, in Los Angeles to Alexander and Blanche (Bukowski) Radomski. His father was a sociologist who taught at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. Mr. Rado grew up in a Rochester suburb, Irondequoit, and then in Washington. He graduated from the University of Maryland, where he majored in speech and drama. A lover of Broadway musicals since childhood, he began writing songs in college and co-wrote two musicals that were produced on campus, “Interlude” and “Interlude II.”After serving two years in the Navy, he returned to pursue graduate theater studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, writing both music and lyrics for a revue there called “Cross Your Fingers.” After moving to New York, he wrote pop songs; recorded with his band, James Alexander and the Argyles; performed in summer stock; and did office work while studying method acting with Lee Strasberg.He landed his first Broadway job in 1963 in the ensemble of “Marathon ’33,” written by the actress June Havoc and produced by the Actors Studio. Following their initial encounter in 1964, he and Mr. Ragni were cast by Mike Nichols in his 1965 Chicago production of Ann Jellicoe’s comedy “The Knack.”In 1966, Mr. Rado appeared on Broadway in James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter,” originating the role of Richard Lionheart, the oldest son of Henry II of England. His mainstream theatrical focus, however, was being redirected to the downtown avant-garde by Mr. Ragni, who, through his involvement with the Open Theater and Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa E.T.C., introduced Mr. Rado to the experimental aesthetic that became central to the experience of “Hair” onstage.“The truth is, we unlocked each other,” Mr. Rado wrote in a foreword to the book “Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation” (2010), by Eric Grode. “He was my creative catalyst, I probably his. We were great friends. It was a passionate kind of relationship that we directed into creativity, into writing, into creating this piece. We put the drama between us onstage.”Mr. Rado in 2017 at a Jazz at Lincoln Center celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Off Broadway opening of “Hair.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesIn the immediate aftermath of “Hair,” Mr. Rado’s fellowship with Mr. Ragni fractured. “We couldn’t be in a room together, we would burst into an argument,” he recalled. Mr. Rado wrote the music, lyrics and book (with his brother, Ted) for a “Hair” sequel he called “The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow,” which ran Off Broadway in 1972, just as Mr. Ragni and Mr. MacDermot were suffering an ignominious Broadway flop with their post-“Hair” musical, “Dude.” Mr. Rado then reunited with Mr. Ragni to write “Sun (Audio Movie),” an environmental musical, with the composer Steve Margoshes, and “Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom,” also with Mr. Margoshes.Mr. Ragni died in 1991. Mr. MacDermot died in 2018.In 2008, Mr. Rado confirmed in an interview with The Advocate what had long been an open secret among his “Hair” castmates and collaborators: that he and Mr. Ragni had been lovers.“It was a deep, lifelong friendship and a love of my life,” Mr. Rado stated simply. “Looking back,” he later elaborated about “Hair,” “what was really underlying the whole thing was the new way men were relating to each other. They were very openly embracing each other as brothers. It wasn’t gay; it wasn’t repressed… We suddenly realized this was a musical about love in the larger sense.”Mr. Rado, whose brother is his only immediate survivor, never married and did not identify as gay, but rather as “omnisexual.” Asked before the 2009 “Hair” revival opened if the show was based on his relationship with Mr. Ragni, Mr. Rado answered yes.“We were in a love mode,” he said, “and this whole love movement started happening around us, so the show got it. ‘Hair’ was our baby in a way, which is pretty cool.”Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      in Movies

      Jean-Louis Trintignant, Star of Celebrated European Films, Dies at 91

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      For 50 years, in movies like “A Man and a Woman” and “My Night at Maud’s,” his specialty was playing the flawed Everyman.Jean-Louis Trintignant, a leading French actor of subtle power who appeared in some of the most celebrated European films of the last 50 years, among them Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist,” Eric Rohmer’s “My Night at Maud’s” and Claude Lelouch’s “A Man and a Woman,” died on Friday at his home in southern France. He was 91.His wife, Marianne Hoepfner Trintignant, confirmed the death to Agence France-Presse. Mr. Trintignant had announced in 2018 that he had prostate cancer and was retiring.Mr. Trintignant seemed to specialize in playing the flawed Everyman and revealing his characters’ depths slowly.“Jean-Louis Trintignant has been, for better than half a century, one of the great stealth actors of the movies,” the critic Terrence Rafferty wrote in The New York Times in 2012. “He knows how to catch an audience unaware.”The occasion was the release that year of Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” which went on to win the 2013 Academy Award for best foreign-language film. In a starring role for the first time in the millennium, Mr. Trintignant, by then nearly blind, portrayed a frail old man caring for his dying wife, played by Emmanuelle Riva — “two titans of French cinema,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times — in a film that is both a love story and a stark examination of illness and mortality.It was the capstone to a rich career playing a gallery of characters who were rarely glamorous. Mr. Trintignant was an emotionally fragile Fascist in “The Conformist” (1970); a timid, meticulous graduate student who accidentally falls in with a ribald bon vivant in Dino Risi’s 1962 “Il Sorpasso” (“The Easy Life”); and a repressed Roman Catholic from the provinces who resists the seductive advances of a beautiful divorced woman in “My Night at Maud’s” (1969).“If some people laugh because I did not have sex with Maud, well, I would prefer being thought ridiculous to being thought a hero,” Mr. Trintignant said in a 1970 interview with The Times. “Even kissing scenes bore me.”In 1969 he won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance as a magistrate investigating the assassination of a Greek politician in Costa-Gavras’s political thriller “Z,” which also won the foreign-language Oscar that year.For American audiences, Mr. Trintignant did not fit the conventional images of French film stars, like the wisecracking Jean-Paul Belmondo, the working-class hero Jean Gabin or the suave sophisticate Maurice Chevalier. He was more understated.“The best actors in the world,” he once said, “are those who feel the most and show the least.”Jean-Louis Xavier Trintignant was born on Dec. 11, 1930, in Piolenc, a small town in southeastern France, where his father, Raoul, was a wealthy industrialist and local politician. Jean-Louis seriously considered becoming a racecar driver like his uncle Maurice Trintignant, a top competitor in the 1950s and ’60s who was only 13 years older than Jean-Louis. (Another uncle, Louis Trintignant, also raced and was killed in 1933 when his car crashed.)Jean-Louis took up law studies instead, thinking he would follow his father into politics. But while a law student in Aix-en-Provence he attended a performance of “The Miser” by Molière and was so smitten that he decided on a stage career.Mr. Trintignant moved to Paris to study acting and began appearing in theater productions at 20. After touring France in the early 1950s, he was hailed as one of the country’s most gifted young stage actors and was soon offered film contracts.Mr. Trintignant with Brigitte Bardot in “And God Created Woman” (1956), directed by Roger Vadim, Ms. Bardot’s husband at the time.Kingsley InternationalIn Roger Vadim’s 1956 movie “And God Created Woman,” Mr. Trintignant starred as a young, naïve husband who is in love with his diabolically flirtatious wife, played by Brigitte Bardot (Mr. Vadim’s wife at the time) in what was considered her breakout sex-kitten role. Whether true or not, rumors circulated that she and Mr. Trintignant had a real-life affair during the filming. Ms. Bardot’s marriage to Mr. Vadim ended in 1957.Mr. Vadim nonetheless cast Mr. Trintignant in the 1959 film “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” adapted from a sexually scandalous 18th-century novel about a scheming noblewoman. Mr. Trintignant had the lesser but romantic role of the charming Chevalier Danceny, a music teacher for French nobility.The Académie Française, the official arbiter of French culture, denounced the film as “desecrating a classic,” and it was condemned as salacious from Roman Catholic pulpits on both sides of the Atlantic.Mr. Trintignant shared top billing with Vittorio Gassman in “Il Sorpasso,” which is widely considered Mr. Risi’s masterpiece. He played a shy law student who is enticed by Mr. Gassman’s libidinous extrovert and embarks on a rollicking car journey through the Italian countryside that ends tragically.Still more memorable was Mr. Trintignant’s performance eight years laterin “The Conformist.” Based on a novel of the same title by Alberto Moravia, the film is a chilling psychological portrait of a secret policeman in Fascist Italy. Mr. Trintignant, in the lead role, arranges the assassination of his old friend, a left-wing university professor, whose young wife he covets.Mr. Trintignant assumed his most romantic role, as a racecar driver, in “A Man and a Woman” (1966). The movie was an international hit, generating more box-office receipts than any previous French film. He said his early passion for racing — and an intimate knowledge of the sport conveyed to him by his uncles — had made his performance especially credible.But he professed that he was uncomfortable in the movie’s explicit love scenes, in which his co-star was Anouk Aimée, a longtime friend of his wife at the time, the director Nadine Trintignant.“It was embarrassing to find myself in bed with a woman that way,” he told The Times in 1970. “I had known Anouk for 10 years, and she was Nadine’s best friend, and the whole crew was watching.” The movie’s best scenes, Mr. Trintignant insisted, were his hairpin racing turns in Monte Carlo.He went on to appear in an average of three films a year for the next three decades, more often as a supporting actor than as the lead.Mr. Trintignant in “Amour” (2012), which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film. By then nearly blind, he portrayed a frail old man caring for his dying wife, played by Emmanuelle Riva.Sony Pictures ClassicsAn exception was the acclaimed 1994 film “Red,” the finale of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy. In a work that tracks the parallel lives of a group of people living outside Geneva, Mr. Trintignant played a cold retired judge who spied on his neighbors using high-tech surveillance equipment.He also continued to act onstage occasionally.Later in life Mr. Trintignant returned to his early passion for sports-car racing, participating in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1980 and the Monte Carlo Rally in 1984. In the ’90s he spent much of his time tending a vineyard he operated in the South of France or acting in theater. His return to film in “Amour” came after an absence of more than a decade.Mr. Trintignant’s first marriage, to the actress Stéphane Audran, ended in divorce. He married Nadine Marquand, then an actress, in 1960 and had three children with her: Vincent, now a director; Pauline, who died in infancy; and Marie, a successful actress (she had acted alongside her father at age 4 in “Mon Amour, Mon Amour,” which was directed by her mother) and the mother of four who at 41 was beaten to death in her hotel room in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the summer of 2003 while filming there.The murder was a sensation in the European press. Ms. Trintignant’s 39-year-old boyfriend, Bertrand Cantat, one of France’s biggest rock stars, later admitted in a Lithuanian court that he had beaten her in a jealous rage over her plans to vacation with an ex-husband.He was convicted of manslaughter in 2004 and released on parole in 2007, angering the Trintignant family and its supporters.After Marie’s death, Mr. Trintignant fell into a severe depression.“For three months I didn’t speak,” he told the Montreal newspaper The Gazette in 2012. “After that I realized I had to either stop living, commit suicide or continue to live.”In 2011 he withdrew from a planned one-man show at the summer Avignon Festival in France when he learned that Mr. Cantat was to appear at the festival as well in an acting role onstage.Mr. Trintignant’s marriage to Nadine Trintignant ended in divorce in 1976. He married Marianne Hoepfner, a racecar driver, in 2000. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Trintignant’s eyesight deteriorated in his later years, but he was accepting of his condition. “We weren’t meant to live more than 80 years,” he told The Gazette. “It’s not so bad as all that. I’m still happy when I’m alone. I have an inner life.”Even at the height of his popularity, Mr. Trintignant insisted that acting was always a struggle.“I am not a born actor,” he said in the 1970 Times interview. “Even today, I am not an instinctive actor. I prepare meticulously, and it is only when I am before the camera that I become completely free.” More