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    Lynne Marie Stewart, Miss Yvonne on ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ Dies at 78

    She was the “most beautiful woman in Puppetland” in the 1980s children’s show starring Paul Reubens, and more recently had a recurring role in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”Lynne Marie Stewart, who played Pee-wee Herman’s perky, bouffant-wigged neighbor, Miss Yvonne, in the 1980s children’s television series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and the sweet, timorous mother of one of the main characters in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 78.The cause of her death, at her sister’s home, was cancer, said her manager, Bette Smith. Her doctors found a tumor shortly after Ms. Stewart finished filming a movie called “The Dink,” a comedy starring Jake Johnson and Ben Stiller, in December, Ms. Smith said.Ms. Stewart played a variety of characters in a career that spanned six decades, and had nearly 150 credits as a screen, stage and voice actress starting in 1971, according to IMDb, the entertainment database.But she was perhaps best known for her role as Miss Yvonne, or “the most beautiful woman in Puppetland,” in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” which ran for five seasons on Saturday mornings on CBS.She was a fixture on the show as Pee-wee Herman’s extravagant neighbor with creative hairdos and a chipper personality.With its whimsical and slyly subversive sense of humor, the show swiftly attracted an audience beyond its core demographic of preadolescent children, and Ms. Stewart and other members of its cast embraced its anarchic and surreal spirit of make-believe.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    6 Takeaways From Alec and Hilaria Baldwin’s TLC Reality Show

    The series begins just before he was scheduled to stand trial in the fatal shooting on the set of “Rust.” The reviews have been somewhat uneasy.Reality television producers had been circling Alec and Hilaria Baldwin for years. His Hollywood fame and history of public combustibility, her social media following and their many children and pets were all classic ingredients for a slice-of-life series.Last year, the couple decided to let the cameras in.They did so at perhaps the most precarious time of Alec Baldwin’s life: the month before he was scheduled to stand trial in New Mexico on an involuntary manslaughter charge, in connection with the fatal shooting of a cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, on the set of the movie “Rust” in 2021. The result is a fly-on-the-wall series called “The Baldwins,” which premieres Sunday on TLC, a network whose marquee titles include “90 Day Fiancé” and “Sister Wives.”The first episode of the show has landed a bit uneasily with critics, who view the show as something of a crisis communications project. Here are six takeaways from the episode.The premiere begins just ahead of Alec Baldwin’s manslaughter trial.Alec and Hilaria Baldwin in court during in the “Rust” accidental shooting case. Alec Baldwin faced a charge of involuntary manslaughter.Pool photo by Ross D Franklin/EPA, via ShutterstockThe filming started in June last year, just before Baldwin was scheduled to stand trial in New Mexico. In the first episode, the couple drives their seven children (and six of their eight dogs and cats) from their home in New York City to their home in the Hamptons, where they often spend the summer.The decision to start filming was a risk. In the event that he had been convicted, Baldwin, who was handling a revolver on set when it discharged a live bullet, would have faced a potential maximum prison sentence of 18 months.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How to Watch the SAG Awards

    In a wide-open best picture race, the awards, which are streaming on Netflix, could offer some clarity.This year’s Oscars best picture race is, for the first time in years, wide open.Will the newly ascendant front-runner “Anora,” Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner about a stripper who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch, take the statuette? Will Brady Corbet’s epic “The Brutalist” find its way to the top? And what about the wild card, the papal thriller “Conclave,” which recently took top honors at the EE British Academy Film Awards, or BAFTAs — Britain’s version of the Oscars?With the days ticking down until the March 2 Academy Awards ceremony, the Screen Actors Guild Awards could offer some clarity. In four of the past five years, the SAGs have given their top honor — best ensemble — to the eventual Oscar winner.The 15 awards, which are voted on by actors and other performers who belong to the SAG-AFTRA union, honor the best film and television performances from the past year. The movie musical “Wicked” and the FX series “Shogun” are the leading nominees.Here’s how to watch, and what to watch for.What time does the show start, and where can I watch?The two-hour ceremony begins at 8 p.m. Eastern time (5 p.m. Pacific time) at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, a historic venue that has also hosted the Oscars. For the second year, the awards show will stream live and exclusively on Netflix; there is no way to watch without a subscription.Is there a red carpet?The red carpet preshow will stream live on Netflix beginning at 7 p.m. Eastern time (4 p.m. Pacific time). The YouTube star Lilly Singh and the actress and former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Sasheer Zamata will host the event, which will include interviews with nominees and the announcement of the winners in the best stunt ensemble categories.Who is hosting?Kristen Bell, who recently starred in the Netflix rom-com “Nobody Wants This,” will steer the ship. This will be her second time hosting; the first was in 2018.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Olga James, a Star of ‘Carmen Jones’ and ‘Mr. Wonderful,’ Dies at 95

    An operatic soprano, she had high-profile roles on film and stage in the 1950s. But after that, she mostly spent her career away from the limelight.Olga James, an actress and operatic soprano whose career highlights occurred nearly back to back in the mid-1950s — as Harry Belafonte’s jilted girlfriend in the all-Black musical film “Carmen Jones” and as Sammy Davis Jr.’s love interest in the Broadway show “Mr. Wonderful” — died on Jan. 25 in Los Angeles. She was 95.Her death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her niece Janet Adderley.Ms. James had performed with an opera company in France and in a popular musical revue in Atlantic City, N.J., when her manager, Abe Saperstein — the basketball impresario behind the Harlem Globetrotters — landed her an audition in 1954 for “Carmen Jones,” the movie version of Oscar Hammerstein II’s hit 1943 Broadway update of Georges Bizet’s opera “Carmen.” The opera is set in 1820s Spain; the setting of the film, like that of the Broadway musical, is the American South during World War II.Auditioning for the role of Cindy Lou, whose boyfriend, Joe (played by Mr. Belafonte), a soldier headed for flight school, is seduced by Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge), a worker in a parachute factory, Ms. James sang an aria at the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon Theater) for Otto Preminger, the film’s imperious director.“It wasn’t a stretch for me,” she was quoted as saying in “Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King” (2007), by Foster Hirsch. “I was that character, a country-looking girl. I was just a little ingénue.”Ms. James with Harry Belafonte in a publicity photo for “Carmen Jones.” She did her own singing; his singing voice and Dorothy Dandridge’s were dubbed because they could not sing in an operatic range.20th Century Fox, via Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesShe won the role. “Carmen Jones” would be her first movie — and her last.Of the film’s three lead performers, only Ms. James did her own singing; Mr. Belafonte’s and Ms. Dandridge’s songs were dubbed because they could not sing in an operatic range.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In Stephen Graham’s World, Nice Guys Finish First

    The British actor, who stars in the new Hulu show “A Thousand Blows,” has built a career playing intimidating bruisers. But behind the scenes, he’s a peach.In 2012, the actor Stephen Graham and his wife were having a quiet dinner at a chain chicken joint in London when a young man approached the table. The man, James Nelson-Joyce, told Graham that he had just left drama school and wanted to be an actor, too. Many would have sent the 20-something away with some polite encouragement, but Graham asked for Nelson-Joyce’s email, and kept in touch, offering him regular advice and eventually recommending the younger actor to his agent.More than a decade later, Graham and Nelson-Joyce are playing brothers in “A Thousand Blows,” a rip-roaring new Hulu drama set in the grimy East End of London in the 1880s.Graham’s character, a bare-knuckle boxer known as the East End Gladiator, is of a type with the intimidating bruisers that he built his career playing, including a skinhead English nationalist in Shane Meadows’s “This Is England” and Al Capone in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.”.But over cups of tea on a recent gray afternoon in London, Graham, now 51, choked up while recounting his history with Nelson-Joyce. It means a lot, he said, laughing at the tears in his eyes, to be able to pass “the baton on” to younger actors. It also reflects Graham’s ethos that “you’re never above anyone, and you’re never below anyone.”This egalitarian approach also applies when Graham works with some of Hollywood’s biggest names. In an email, Leonardo DiCaprio recalled that on the set of Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” more than 20 years ago, Graham’s “fearless unpredictability kept everyone on their toes. But more than that, he brought truth to every scene.”Graham with James Nelson-Joyce, who plays his brother in “A Thousand Blows.”Robert Viglasky for Disney+/ HuluWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    George Clooney Is Making His Broadway Debut With ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’

    George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke.Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for president and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking.“I had to get better at inhaling,” he said. “I go outside so the kids don’t see and smoke a little bit.” He plans to switch to herbal cigarettes when he makes his Broadway debut next month in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie, “Good Night, and Good Luck.”Smoking has been unpleasant, he said, because in his Kentucky clan “eight uncles and aunts all died of lung cancer — it’s a big deal.” He noted that his aunt Rosemary Clooney, the torch singer and movie star, was 74 when she died in 2002 from complications of lung cancer. “My dad’s the only one that didn’t smoke, and he’s 91.”Clooney, looking slender in a black Theory shirt and navy pants, sat on a rose-colored couch late last month at Casa Cipriani, a hotel at the bottom of Manhattan. He would sit there for the next five hours, until the sun set over the bay, not bothering with lunch, not looking at his phone, not checking with his minders, just spinning ensorcelling tales about love, Hollywood and politics like a modern-day Scheherazade.Unlike in the film, where he took on the nonsmoking role of Fred Friendly, the producer of the CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, on Broadway Clooney will play Murrow himself, who had a three-pack-a-day habit and died in 1965 at the age of 57 of complications from lung cancer. A decade before his death, Murrow was one of the first to report on links between smoking and lung cancer on his show, “See It Now.” It was the rare episode in which he didn’t light up.In the film version of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney, standing, played the news producer Fred Friendly, while David Strathairn, seated in the background, played Edward R. Murrow.Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Independent PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    With ‘Companion’ and ‘Novocaine,’ Jack Quaid Makes Comedy Painless

    Jack Quaid can guess what people must think of him: Entitled. Overconfident. A jerk, no doubt about it.“Who I am comes with a certain expectation,” he said over breakfast — black coffee, fruit plates — on a Thursday in late January.Quaid, 32, is the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. (That DNA is strong. You can see his father when he smiles, his mother when he squints.) He grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., grabbing snacks from the craft services table on his parents’ sets and attending a private school with a common room where he could screen his camcorder movies. (An early magnum opus: “Bicycle Cops.”) Which is all to say that Quaid grew up with privilege, and he knows what privilege, unexamined and unacknowledged, can do to a person. He can turn that arrogance on for auditions, which explains why his first role was as a villain in “The Hunger Games” and why he can now be seen as a very bad boyfriend in the thriller “Companion” (in theaters).But the real Quaid is earnestly, acutely, even painfully aware of his privilege. In rooms where people don’t know him, he finds himself, he said, “apologizing for existing.” He isn’t jealous of his parents. (Please, he has been to therapy.) He loves his parents. He loves the life they have given him. “But there’s definitely a need to prove myself,” he said. “There is a little bit of something with identity and thinking, do I have any value outside of them?” As he said this, the divot in his forehead, which deepens when he’s stressed or concerned, had become a crevasse. “Not to say I’m complaining,” he added.Jack Quaid, the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, is earnestly aware of his privilege.Hannah Edelman for The New York TimesOver the last several years, Quaid has proved himself. And as the star of two movies out this winter, his value as a leading man is confirmed. He is beautifully smarmy in “Companion,” a romantic thriller with a sci-fi twist. (Avoid the trailer if you don’t want that twist unfurled.) And he is a sweetheart of an accidental action hero in the punchy thriller “Novocaine,” due March 14, in which he plays a timid assistant bank manager with a congenital inability to feel pain. (Quaid’s own pain threshold: “Not high!”) He is also currently wrapping the fifth and final season of “The Boys,” Amazon’s body fluid-soaked antisuperhero show. He leads the cast as Hughie, a normal-ish guy in an enthusiastically abnormal world. And he has two other movies in postproduction, the thriller “Neighborhood Watch” and the action comedy “Heads of State.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    South Korean Actress Kim Sae-ron Is Found Dead

    The 24-year-old star, once a prolific child actor, appeared at the Cannes Film Festival and on Netflix, until a drunk-driving incident in 2022 derailed her career.South Korean actress Kim Sae-ron, a former child star whose promising career suffered a setback in recent years after a drunk-driving incident, was found dead in her home on Sunday afternoon, police said.Ms. Kim, who was 24, was discovered by a friend who had visited her house, according to the Seongdong Police Station in Seoul. The police on Monday said Ms. Kim’s death was a suicide. One of South Korea’s most lauded young actors, Ms. Kim had not appeared in any shows since she faced public criticism after being convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol in 2022.Her death marks the latest tragedy to strike South Korea’s booming but high-pressure entertainment industry, which has faced criticism for the toll it places on the mental health of its burgeoning stars. A celebrity’s popularity is often contingent on a spotless reputation, experts say.Over the past few years, several young stars were ruled to have died by suicide, one after receiving hate messages for being outspoken and opinionated, and another after a legal battle put her romantic and sex life in the public domain.Ms. Kim started her acting career by starring in “A Brand New Life,” a film about a girl abandoned in an orphanage, in 2009. She was 9 years old when the movie premiered and was invited to the Cannes Film Festival.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More