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      Conrad Janis, Father on ‘Mork & Mindy’ and Much More, Dies at 94

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      His role on the hit sitcom was just one of more than 100 film and television credits; he was also a fine jazz trombonist and co-owner of an art gallery.Conrad Janis, an actor familiar to television viewers as Mindy’s father on the hit sitcom “Mork & Mindy” who was also a skilled jazz musician and a gallerist well known in the New York art world, died on March 1 in Los Angeles. He was 94.Dean A. Avedon, his business manager, confirmed the death.Mr. Janis, a child of the noted art collectors and gallerists Sidney and Harriet (Grossman) Janis, moved easily between the worlds of high art, jazz and acting, sometimes switching one hat for another in the same evening.“Conrad Janis Is Glad to Live Three Lives,” the headline on a 1962 Newsday article read. At the time he was starring in the romantic comedy “Sunday in New York” on Broadway and, after the Friday and Saturday night performances, playing trombone with his group, the Tailgate 5, at Central Plaza in Manhattan. (On Sundays he’d trek to Brooklyn to play at the club Caton Corner.) When not onstage or on the bandstand, he could often be found at his father’s art gallery.Sixteen years later he found himself on one of the most popular shows on television when he was cast on “Mork & Mindy,” which premiered in September 1978, as the father of Mindy (Pam Dawber), a Colorado woman who befriends an eccentric alien (Robin Williams). On Sundays during this period, he played in the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band at the Ginger Man, a club in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose owners included Carroll O’Connor of “All in the Family.”The key to juggling three areas of expertise, Mr. Janis told Newsday, was keeping his personas separate.“It just wouldn’t do to tell a knowledgeable art patron that ‘man, I dig Picasso the wildest,’” he said.Mr. Janis, an accomplished trombonist as well as a busy actor, peformed regularly with the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band. Among the other members of the band, seen in performance in 1980, was his fellow actor George Segal, who played banjo and sang.Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, via AlamyConrad Janis was born on Feb. 11, 1928, in Manhattan. His parents had a successful shirt-making business early in their married life, which gave them the wherewithal to begin collecting art and, in 1948, open the Sidney Janis Gallery, which became, as The New York Times put it in Sidney Janis’s obituary in 1989, “a major pacesetter for the art world in the 1950s and ’60s.”Harriet Janis also wrote books with the jazz historian Rudi Blesh, including “They All Played Ragtime” (1950). That connection led to Conrad’s musical expertise. Mr. Blesh’s daughter played trombone in her school’s marching band but lost interest; the spare trombone ended up in Conrad’s hands. He particularly studied the music of the influential New Orleans trombonist and bandleader Kid Ory.“I memorized a lot of what he did,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.His acting developed alongside his musicianship. When he was 13, a classmate at the Little Red School House in Manhattan told him that “Junior Miss,” a popular Broadway comedy about a teenage girl, was holding auditions for a road company. He auditioned, got in, and spent two years with the tour, advancing to a leading juvenile role. He started doing radio voice work at the same time.“I played kids of 14 and old men of 40” on the radio, he told The New York Times in a 1945 interview.He landed a role in the pre-Broadway run of “The Dark of the Moon,” which got him noticed by a Hollywood talent scout. He remained with the play when it went to New York, making his Broadway debut in March 1945, but within a few months he was on the West Coast to make his first film, the comedy “Snafu,” in which he played a teenager who lies about his age to enlist.It was the first of more than 100 film and television credits. In the movies, he played alongside some famous names: Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in the notoriously bad “That Hagan Girl” (1947), Charlton Heston and other prominent stars in “Airport 1975” (1974), Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker” (1975), George Burns in “Oh God! Book II” (1980).He was on television from the medium’s earliest days, playing numerous roles in the late 1940s and ’50s, many of them on shows like “Suspense,” “Actor’s Studio” and “The Philco Television Playhouse” that were broadcast live. Some of those roles took advantage of his familiarity with musical instruments.“All through the ’50s,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1981, “I was in so many TV shows as a young musician on drugs, desperately trying to kick the habit, that I’m sure I helped cement in the public’s mind a relationship between musicians and dope. All they cast me in were shows in which I did or didn’t kick the habit. I was always saying, ‘Hey, man, I just got to have a fix.’”He continued to play small parts on TV in the 1960s and ’70s before landing his best-known role, Mindy’s father. His character operated a music store, but although “Mork & Mindy” ran for four seasons, he never got a chance to play his trombone on the show, something he regretted.“The producers wouldn’t go for it,” he told The Albany Democrat-Herald of Oregon in 1990. “We had a really cute script where I got together with my old Dixieland jazz band, but they didn’t think it was funny enough.”Mr. Janis with Thomas Scott, left, and Steven Scott in the 1996 movie “The Cable Guy.”He continued to work in television after “Mork,” with appearances on “St. Elsewhere,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Frasier” and other shows. His later movie appearances included small roles in “Mr. Saturday Night” (1992) and “The Cable Guy” (1996). He sometimes collaborated with his wife, Maria Grimm, including directing two movies she wrote, “The Feminine Touch” (1995) and “Bad Blood” (2012).Mr. Janis’s acting career also included a dozen Broadway credits, among them the Gore Vidal play “A Visit to a Small Planet” in 1957 and a revival of “The Front Page” in 1969.Throughout his musical and acting adventures, Mr. Janis also kept a hand in the art world.Arne Glimcher, the founder and chairman of Pace Gallery and a friend of Mr. Janis’s for almost 60 years, said Mr. Janis worked for his father at the Sidney Janis Gallery and was responsible for certain artists there, including Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann.“His knowledge of 20th-century art and Modernism was really encyclopedic,” Mr. Glimcher said in a phone interview.When Sidney Janis reached 90, he turned the Janis Gallery over to Conrad and his brother, Carroll, who kept it going until 1999.Mr. Janis’s first marriage, to Vicki Quarles, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Ronda Copland. Ms. Grimm, whom he married in 1987, died in September. He is survived by his brother; two children from his first marriage, Christopher and Carin Janis; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Glimcher said that in recent years some of Mr. Janis’s old jazz pals would come to his home in Beverly Hills on Thursdays and play. When his wife died, Mr. Glimcher said, Mr. Janis gave her a jazz funeral, then changed the location of those jam sessions.“Every Thursday,” Mr. Glimcher said, “he took the jazz band to her mausoleum and played there.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Cabaret,’ Starring Eddie Redmayne, Leads Olivier Award Nominees

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      A revival of the 1966 musical, with Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles, is up for 11 awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.LONDON — A revival of “Cabaret” that has been a topic of conversation here for its sky-high ticket prices as much as its stellar cast dominated the nominations for this year’s Olivier Awards — Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys — that were announced on Tuesday.The musical secured 11 nominations including a nod for best musical revival, as well as for best actor and actress in a musical for its stars Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley.Its prominence was perhaps unsurprising given the acclaim “Cabaret” has received since opening last December in a production that transforms the West End’s Playhouse Theater into a seedy nightclub straight out of 1920s Berlin.Audiences enter the show through the theater’s backstage corridors, and can even have a preshow meal once inside, partly explaining why tickets cost up to 325 British pounds (or about $420).Matt Wolf, reviewing the show for The New York Times, called it “nerve-shredding” for its portrayal of a world on the verge of Nazism. Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph called it “2021’s kill-for-a-ticket theatrical triumph,” suggesting readers “dig like your life depended on it into your pockets” to pay for a ticket.Even with such praise, “Cabaret” faces stiff competition in the musical categories, especially from a revival of Kathleen Marshall’s 2011 Broadway production of “Anything Goes” at the Barbican, which secured nine nominations including for best musical revival and a best actress nomination for Sutton Foster as Reno Sweeney. Foster won a Tony in 2011 for the same role.Sutton Foster has been nominated for an Olivier for her role in “Anything Goes.”Peter Nicholls/ReutersIn the nonmusical categories, the nominations are led by “Life of Pi,” Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel telling the story of a boy stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger. That play, at Wyndham’s Theater, has secured nine nods, including a best supporting actor nomination for the seven puppeteers who bring the tiger to life.“Life of Pi” was also nominated for best new play, where it is up against “2:22: A Ghost Story,” a haunted-house thriller that was at the Noël Coward Theater, “Cruise,” a tale set in London’s Soho in the ’80s (that was at the Duchess Theater), and “Best of Enemies,” James Graham’s play about the rancorous 1968 TV debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal that was at the Young Vic.One of the most highly contested categories is likely to be best actress in a play, where Cush Jumbo is nominated for her performance as Hamlet at the Young Vic Jumbo is up against Emma Corrin, nominated for her role in “ANNA X” at the Harold Pinter Theater, the singer Lily Allen for “2:22: A Ghost Story” and Sheila Atim for a revival of “Constellations,” at the Vaudeville Theater.The winners will be announced in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London on Apr. 10. More

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      in Movies

      Mary Badham, Who Starred in 'Mockingbird' Film, Joins Broadway Tour

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      Six decades after she played Scout in the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mary Badham takes on the role of a neighbor in the play’s national tour.Mary Badham describes herself as “just a retired old lady who likes to be in her garden and play with her grandkids.”But in 1962 she was a child star, captivating the nation with her Oscar-nominated portrayal of Scout, the daughter of Atticus Finch, in the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”Now, six decades and many careers later, she is helping to dramatize the story once again, this time from a different vantage point. Badham, who has not previously worked as a stage actor, is now in rehearsals for a national tour of the “Mockingbird” Broadway production in which she will play Mrs. Dubose, Scout’s mean, and morphine-addicted, neighbor.“I’m going full circle,” Badham said in an interview. “This is something I never contemplated.”Badham, now 69, is still a little hazy on how this happened. She says she got a call out of the blue from the production, inviting her to audition. The play’s director, Bartlett Sher, said Badham’s name had come up during brainstorming for the tour, and that the casting team had tracked her down; he said as soon as he saw her do a workshop, he knew she could do it.In the 1962 film, Badham was 10 years old when she played Scout opposite Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images“She has not been on a stage, and that was a big adjustment for her, but she’s going to be great — she has a bright, blazing intelligence, and good listening and sharp delivery and all the things you need as a great actor,” Sher said. “And it was incredibly fascinating — I have never had an experience quite like it, to have this voice from the cultural history of the very work we were doing, and to see how we’ve changed and how she’s changed. It was beautiful to have her in the room.”Badham has always been a bit of an accidental actor. She had no experience when a talent scout showed up in Birmingham, Ala., where she lived, looking for a Southern girl to star as Scout in the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel about a white Alabama lawyer — Finch — who agrees to represent a Black man accused of rape. Badham’s mother performed in local theater, and her brother (who became a film director) was in drama school; she aced a screen test, and before she knew it, she was off to California, performing alongside the actor Gregory Peck, who became an important mentor and friend.“I had no idea what was going on — I was just out there playing,” she said. “I don’t even think we got complete scripts, because there were certain words and things that were deemed unseemly for children to hear. I did not have a clue what the film was about until we started going to premieres, and then all of us were in tears.”In the decades since, Badham has worked selling cosmetics, became a certified nursing assistant, and even occasionally appeared on film and television. She never became a large animal veterinarian — her childhood aspiration — but, along with her husband and two children, she did make a Virginia farm her home. “I always wanted to live on a farm and have horses and animals, and we’ve had that through the years,” she said.“I’m not an actor,” she added. “Acting is something that has just happened to me.”She said she has a hard time watching the film “because all my friends are gone now — there’s only a few of us left.” But she usually says yes when given new “Mockingbird” opportunities; she has spent decades talking about the story at schools, universities and social clubs. “‘Mockingbird’ has been my life,” she said.“It’s just weird, and I put it to the man upstairs — I just feel like he has something he wants me to say, and he picked me to say it and keep saying it,” she added. “My job has been basically to keep this story alive, and have people talk about it, so we can try to move forward with all of these problems that we still have.”And what is the message of “Mockingbird”? “We should try to learn to love each other and be good people,” she said.“‘Mockingbird’ has been my life,” Badham said. Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesThe show’s tour, led by Richard Thomas as Atticus and Melanie Moore as Scout, begins performances on March 27 in Buffalo and opens on April 5 in Boston, followed by runs around the country. This adaptation, written by Aaron Sorkin, opened on Broadway in 2018, had an enormously successful run before the pandemic and sold strongly again when Jeff Daniels returned to lead the cast as Atticus Finch. As Daniels departed and the Omicron variant surged, the show announced it was taking a nearly six-month hiatus, with a planned resumption in a smaller theater on June 1. A London production is scheduled to begin performances on Thursday.Badham said she agonized over whether to play Mrs. Dubose, because the character uses racist language to describe Black people. “I had a real problem with accepting this role, because I have to use the N-word, and I have to be this horrible, bigoted, racist person,” she said. “I went to my African American friends, and said, ‘Do I want to walk around in the skin of this awful old lady?’ And they were like, ‘This is important. This is part of the story. You have to go out there and make her as mean as you can, and show what it was really like.’”Badham also said she believes that the character of Mrs. Dubose, as a morphine addict, is important at a time when many Americans are struggling with opioid addictions. “That gives me another facet of the story to concentrate on,” she said.After a few weeks of rehearsal, she said she is feeling more comfortable.“It’s scary — I’ll tell you point blank, I’m mortally terrified every time I have to open my mouth, and I had no idea I was going to be onstage so much,” she said.But, she said, she can feel the presence of others who have told the story before, and that strengthens her. “I feel like they’re with us, supporting us,” she said, “because they know this needs to be said.” More

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      Mitchell Ryan, Who Played the Villain in ‘Lethal Weapon,’ Dies at 88

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      Mr. Ryan, who appeared in the TV series “Dark Shadows,” played a brutal businessman in “Santa Barbara” and a wealthy father in the sitcom “Dharma & Greg.”Mitchell Ryan, an actor known for his role in the gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows” and who played a heroin-dealing retired general in the action movie “Lethal Weapon,” died at his home in Los Angeles on Friday. He was 88.The cause was heart failure, Ro Diamond, who represented Mr. Ryan for more than 40 years, said on Saturday.With his square jawline and slicked-back hair, Mr. Ryan entertained moviegoers and television fans in a career that spanned more than 50 years, beginning with an uncredited part in the movie “Thunder Road” (1958).His breakout performance came in 1966 when he landed a role in “Dark Shadows,” a popular soap opera about the adventurous lives of the affluent Collins family. Set in the fictional town of Collinsport, Maine, the family experiences supernatural events and are tormented by strange beings, such as ghosts, witches and zombies.Mr. Ryan played Burke Devlin, an ex-convict who returns to Collinsport and seeks revenge on the family.“It was a wonderfully written Gothic kind of melodrama and Burke was this marvelous, mysterious character,” Mr. Ryan recalled decades later in an interview. “And actually, there wasn’t a whole lot to do with it except bring a lot of my passion to it and just allow it to come out.”He was fired from the show because of his alcoholism.Mr. Ryan, second from left, with Joan Bennett, left, and Louis Edmonds, second from right, in “Dark Shadows” in 1966.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesHe recalled in his memoir, “Fall of a Sparrow,” how grateful he was to have overcome his struggles with sobriety. “I’m blessed that, 30 years a drunk, I’ve managed to live a working actor’s life to be envied,” he wrote.He added that “sober for the next 30 years, I’m told I’ve come out of it all a good and a useful human being.”Another major role came in 1987, when he played an antagonist in “Lethal Weapon,” which starred Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Mr. Ryan recalled in an interview that people involved with the film initially believed it was destined to flop.“It was a total scary mess for everybody,” he said, noting that the script was constantly being rewritten. “Nobody knew what was going on.”Mr. Ryan played a retired general-turned-heroin smuggler who delivers commands in a calm and collected cadence but is inclined to raging outbursts.The film would gross more than $100 million worldwide at the box office.“We were all absolutely totally shocked and dumbfounded when it turned out to be an enormous hit,” Mr. Ryan said.He joked that the series of films that followed made everybody richer, except him because his character, Gen. Peter McAllister, was in a vehicle that was struck by a bus. “Poor Mitch, I got killed,” he said.Mr. Ryan continued to play parts in more than two dozen television series but found that his ego was getting inflated. He wrote on his website that “the more successful I became, the easier it was to take credit for what ‘I’ accomplished.”Mr. Ryan, left, star of Arthur Miller’s play “The Price,” with Lee Marvin, right, and Mr. Marvin’s wife, Pamela, backstage at the Playhouse Theater in New York in 1979.Dan Grossi/Associated PressIt was a behavior that he believed would be “deadly in the long run and not in accordance with reality,” he wrote.Still, in interviews, he would frequently say that he was grateful for his long acting career, which, as a child, seemed unlikely.Mitchell Ryan was born on Jan. 11, 1934, in Cincinnati and raised in Louisville, Ky., by his mother, who was a writer, and his father, who was a salesman. Information about survivors was not immediately available on Saturday.He said that, as a boy, he would often invent people he could be one day and had no idea that he was “acting a role, as it was all real to me.”He served in the U.S. Navy and then pursued work in theater. “I can’t count the number of plays I have done, but it could easily be over one hundred,” he wrote.For 15 years, he acted in a play almost every night in road shows, on Broadway and Off Broadway. Even while working on “Dark Shadows,” he was still performing plays at night after leaving the television set, which, he said, was “not a very good idea.”In 1989, he played Anthony Tonell, a brutal businessman, in “Santa Barbara,” a television series about several wealthy families in California. From 1997 to 2002, he portrayed Edward Montgomery, a wealthy and eccentric father, in the sitcom “Dharma & Greg.”In the preface of his memoir, Mr. Ryan wrote: “A young man became an actor because someone thought he had the right look for a part. A pleasing voice. And he wasn’t doing something else just then.”“And he stayed an actor,” he added, “because, remarkably, he was good at it.” More

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      Actress Morena Baccarin Cooks a Brazilian Stew

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      The actress stars in the NBC thriller, “The Endgame.”“If I take these home to my kids and they don’t like them, I’m going to kill them,” the actress Morena Baccarin said.This was on a sopping morning at Rio Supermarket, a Brazilian grocery in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. Ms. Baccarin, an Emmy-nominated actress, moved from Rio to New York City at 10. She still craves the foods of her childhood, like coxinhas, chicken and potato croquettes, formed into a golden-brown kiss. She placed two orders — one for her, one for her children — in rapid Portuguese and then bit into a croquette, somehow managing not to smear her lipstick.“It’s not part of my diet, but I can’t not eat these,” she said. “It’s deep fried and it’s heaven.”Ms. Baccarin, 42, had come to Rio Market on a recent Friday at the suggestion of two of her cousins, the same cousins who had given her the flamingo pink earrings she wore. She had an afternoon shoot for “The Endgame,” the thriller series that recently premiered on NBC. But she hoped to have just enough time to shop for ingredients and then rush home to make moqueca, a Brazilian fish stew, for her three children: an 8-year-old son, whom she co-parents with her first husband, the producer Austin Chick, and a 5-year-old daughter and 11-month-old son with her current husband, her “Gotham” co-star Ben McKenzie.Ms. Baccarin in a scene from “The Endgame,” a TV thriller in which plays an international arms dealer.Virginia Sherwood/NBCShe grabbed a basket and began to fill it with frozen cheese bread, bay leaves, herbal tea and a carton of brigadeiros, Brazilian sweets made from condensed milk, cocoa powder and butter.“The kids will forgive me for working all day if I bring that home,” she said, striding through the aisles in a camel-hair coat. Her manner was energetic, efficient, self-effacing. Her hair hung like a skein of silk, immune to humidity.Ms. Baccarin started acting early — her mother had been an actress in Rio, her father a journalist at Globo. “I love hiding in character,” she said. “I mean, obviously, it’s me, but I like to pretend that it’s not. I tell myself that I’m creating this whole new person.”So even as she struggled to assimilate to Manhattan life, she kept at it, honing her craft first at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, and then at the Juilliard School. She never felt that she fit in there.“I was not a favorite,” she said. “I had a lot of attitude.” Juilliard taught her technique, stamina, survival, but not how to embrace her strengths or her ethnicity. After graduating, she thought she would do classical theater; Hollywood called instead. “I felt like I was letting everybody down,” she said.She had a breakout role as a courtesan in Joss Whedon’s short-lived space Western “Firefly.” (She did not experience abuse from Mr. Whedon, but she does not dispute that others may have.) On set she discovered that her training helped her to handle elevated, stylized text and make it sound natural, which probably explains why she has found her way to so many superhero projects including “Gotham,” “Deadpool,” and “Justice League Unlimited.” Her work on the Showtime thriller “Homeland” earned her an Emmy nomination.Her character in “The Endgame,” an arms dealer and criminal mastermind named Elena Federova, has no superpowers. She doesn’t need them. “What’s really fun about this character is I just get to mess with people constantly and poke at their weak spots,” Ms. Baccarin said. She also gets to do stunts. In heels.That day she wore sensible ankle boots, which clacked against the ground as she added palm oil to her basket, then hot sauce for her husband. She spotted a 12-pack of soda flavored with guaraná berries. “It’s the best. So sweet,” she said. She upgraded her basket to a cart.Ms. Baccarin wore googles as she chopped an onion at home for a traditional Brazilian stew.Shina Peng for The New York TimesAfter adding coconut milk, herbal tea, hearts of palm, biscuits, juice, cheese and a pair of Havaianas flip flops for her nanny, she paid, toting her haul to a waiting SUV. Half an hour later it delivered her to her South Brooklyn kitchen, in the basement of a brownstone.Growing up, Ms. Baccarin rarely cooked. “My mom always swore that I would never cook for any man,” she said. But as a working actress, she learned to cook for herself and her friends. “It feels like the most like caretaking and loving stuff you can do,” she said.She learned some Brazilian dishes from her cousins, some from cookbooks. Her husband, despite having grown up in Texas, taught her a few more.After removing her coat, she laid out the ingredients and then snapped on a pair of swimming goggles as she briskly chopped an onion, which she slid into bubbling palm oil. Minced garlic followed, then sliced bell peppers, then leeks, a last-minute substitute for lemongrass. “I’m doing it a little bit differently,” she said.From the refrigerator she took a packet of fish and another of shrimp, which her husband had bought that morning. The shells were still on the shrimp. “Guys never get it right, but he’s so sweet I can’t complain,” she said. The shrimp, still unshelled, went in too, along with a bottle of coconut milk, a squeezed lemon, cilantro and salt.“And bay leaves,” she said. “I’m a rebel.”She stirred the soup, blew on it, tasted it. She added more salt and more cilantro and tasted it again. Then she took a sip from a freshly chilled guaraná soda.“I’m such the quintessential Brazilian right now,” she said. More

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      in Theater

      Andrei Belgrader, Director Who Influenced Future Stars, Dies at 75

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      His Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater productions included early work by Cherry Jones, Mark Linn-Baker and more, and he directed starry Off Broadway shows.Andrei Belgrader, who directed numerous high-profile stage productions off Broadway and in regional theaters and was an important influence in the careers of John Turturro, Cherry Jones, Tony Shalhoub and other respected actors, died on Feb. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 75.His wife, Caroline Hall, said the cause was lung cancer.Mr. Belgrader, who emigrated from his native Romania in the 1970s after chafing at the artistic censorship there, caught the eye of Robert Brustein, founder of the Yale Repertory Theater, who by the end of the 1970s had him directing there. When Mr. Brustein, who had also been dean of the Yale School of Drama, moved to Harvard University and founded the American Repertory Theater there in 1980, Mr. Belgrader began directing productions there as well.Both A.R.T. and Yale Rep were proving grounds for young actors, and Mr. Belgrader challenged them in ways that had a lasting effect.“He would make odd but incredibly imaginative requests of you as an actor and would be delighted when you could fulfill these requests,” Mark Linn-Baker, who was Touchstone in Mr. Belgrader’s 1979 “As You Like It” at Yale Rep while still a student at the Yale drama school, said by email.Four years later Mr. Linn-Baker, who would soon find television fame on the long-running ABC series “Perfect Strangers,” played Vladimir, one of the leads (John Bottoms was Estragon, the other of Beckett’s famous tramps), in “Waiting for Godot” at A.R.T. directed by Mr. Belgrader. Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe called the production “a perfect Beckettian vaudeville act on the precipitous edge of the void.” Also in that production, in the supporting role of Pozzo, was Mr. Shalhoub, now an Emmy and Tony Award winner.“One of his great skills was bringing people out of their comfort zones in terms of their performances,” Mr. Shalhoub, who two decades later would recruit Mr. Belgrader to direct episodes of his hit TV series, “Monk,” said in a phone interview. “He had a way of instilling courage and moments of abandon.”Mr. Belgrader, who was partial to Beckett, revisited “Godot” in 1998 at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan, with Mr. Shalhoub elevated to the role of Vladimir and playing opposite Mr. Turturro as Estragon, and Christopher Lloyd as Pozzo. Mr. Turturro, who had studied under Mr. Belgrader decades earlier at Yale, worked frequently with him over the years, including in an acclaimed staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at Classic Stage in 2011. Ben Brantley of The New York Times named it one of the 10 best productions of the year. “Andrei Belgrader’s funny, sad and freshly conceived interpretation opened the walls between Chekhov’s then and our now,” he wrote.Mr. Turturro, in a phone interview, said Mr. Belgrader excelled at helping actors mine playwrights like Beckett and Chekhov for the deepest meanings and emotions in their work. The key, he said, was that he gave the actors time to make the discoveries.“I remember many times in rehearsals you would think, ‘This is terrible,’ and he would just be very, very patient,” Mr. Turturro said.It was something Mr. Turturro experienced in 2008 in a Belgrader-directed production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in which the character he played, Hamm, has a particularly difficult monologue.“He worked me to death in that monologue,” Mr. Turturro said. “He wasn’t unsatisfied, but he knew you could go further, and then one day you did.”John Turturro and Dianne Wiest in Mr. Belgrader’s 2011 staging of “The Cherry Orchard,” which Ben Brantley of The Times called one of the best productions of the year.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAndrei Belgrader was born on March 31, 1946, in Oravita, Romania. His father, Tiberiu, was an economist, and his mother, Magdalena (Gross) Belgrader, was a translator.He began training to be an engineer but didn’t like it and instead gained entry to the Institute of Theater and Film in Bucharest, where he began directing.“In Romania, theater was more important, I think, than in the West,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “It was really the only form where, in a hidden way, things could be discussed.”Well, up to a point. Romania was under Communist rule, and Mr. Belgrader had his first run-ins with censors while still a student.“They banned almost everything, even Romanian comedies,” he said. “Our trick was to do classical plays, because it was hard to say Shakespeare was anti-Communist.”But battles with censors eventually wore him down, and in the late 1970s he left the country. Ms. Hall said he spent time in a refugee camp in Greece and eventually, with the help of a charity, was able to come to New York, where he stayed with other Romanians and drove a cab to improve his sparse English.“Cabbies in New York don’t speak English and they don’t know where they’re going,” he told The Chronicle. “I was one of them.”Somehow he managed to mount two small theater productions, Buchner’s “Woyzeck” and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” The second is the one that caught Mr. Brustein’s eye.Mr. Belgrader was still not particularly fluent when he began directing at Yale Rep.“It was very peculiar,” Thomas Derrah, who was in the cast of the 1979 “As You Like It” with Mr. Linn-Baker, told The Globe in 1998. “He was trying to communicate what he wanted me to do, and there wasn’t a whole lot of English in there.”A year later, at A.R.T. in Cambridge, he mounted another production of the same play and essentially started the career of Ms. Jones, who had only recently graduated from the drama program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when she was cast as Rosalind.“In June 1980 I was the last audition of the last day of auditions for Andrei’s ‘As You Like It’ at the A.R.T.,” Ms. Jones, now a multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner, said by email. “Andrei was unlike any director or man I’d ever seen. And with an accent I’d never heard. In an instant he transformed the trajectory of my life.”Stanley Tucci, Elaine Stritch, Oliver Platt, Dianne Wiest and Marisa Tomei are also on the long list of actors directed by Mr. Belgrader over the years. When he wasn’t directing, he was teaching — at Yale, Juilliard, the University of California at San Diego and, at his death, the University of Southern California.He gravitated toward challenging plays that had dark elements, but that also had humor.“He’s a great farceur,” Mr. Brustein once said of him. “He finds that area where farce and dreams meet.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2001, Mr. Belgrader is survived by a daughter, Grace, and a sister, Mariana Augustin. He lived in Los Angeles.On a 2005 episode of “Monk,” Mr. Belgrader showed that he could direct even the most inexperienced actors. In the episode, “Mr. Monk and the Kid,” a beloved one to fans of the series, Mr. Shalhoub’s obsessive-compulsive title character gets help solving a crime from a 22-month-old boy (played by 2-year-old twins, Preston and Trevor Shores). The toddler character had a lot of screen time, placing particular demands on Mr. Belgrader.“It was a tricky episode,” Mr. Shalhoub said, “and he knocked it out of the park.”Ms. Jones said that Mr. Belgrader liked to demonstrate that his dog, Hector, could sing along to Janis Joplin.“Before he put the recording on he told me not to laugh during Hector’s truly astonishing howls,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You must respect the artist.’ And he meant it. Whether a dog or an actor.” More

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      Farrah Forke, Who Played a Helicopter Pilot on ‘Wings,’ Dies at 54

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      Forke, the namesake of a not-yet-famous family friend named Farrah Fawcett, played Alex Lambert on three seasons of the popular sitcom, a fixture of the NBC schedule in the 1990s.Farrah Forke, the actress who catapulted to fame playing a helicopter pilot on the NBC sitcom “Wings,” died at her home in Texas on Friday. She was 54.Her death was confirmed by her mother, Beverly Talmage, who said in a statement that her daughter had had cancer for several years.Forke played the alluring pilot Alex Lambert on three seasons of “Wings,” which aired from 1990 to 1997 and followed the adventures of the offbeat characters at a small airport on Nantucket.Her character’s affections were battled over by Joe and Brian Hackett (Tim Daly and Steven Weber), brothers who ran a one-plane airline.On Instagram, Weber described Forke as “every bit as tough, fun, beautiful and grounded as her character ‘Alex’ on Wings.”Farrah Rachael Forke was born on Jan. 12, 1968, in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Chuck Forke and Beverly (Mendleski) Forke. She was named after Farrah Fawcett, a family friend who wasn’t a well-known actress at the time Forke was born.“They just liked the name,” Forke told The Dallas Morning News in 1993.Forke began her acting career with a role in a Texas production of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” In 1989, she moved to New York, where she studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute in Manhattan.Her acting career took off when she joined “Wings” as the smart and saucy Alex.“I don’t mind playing pretty women,” Forke told The Dallas Morning News. “But I do mind playing bimbos. Alex is definitely a sexy woman. But she’s also focused, and there’s a lot of qualities about her that people will admire.”The show, which was created by the “Cheers” and “Frasier” writers David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee, ran for 172 episodes and was a mainstay of the NBC schedule for years. The show also starred Crystal Bernard, Tony Shalhoub and Thomas Haden Church.From 1994 to 1995, Forke had a recurring role as the lawyer Mayson Drake on “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” on ABC.Her other television acting roles included “Dweebs,” “Mr. Rhodes” and “Party of Five.” After making her film debut in “Brain Twisters” in 1991, she appeared in “Disclosure” (1994), directed by Barry Levinson, and “Heat” (1995), directed by Michael Mann.Later in her career, she supplied the voice of Big Barda on the DC Animated Universe television series “Batman Beyond” and “Justice League Unlimited.”Forke had health problems related to leakage from her silicone breast implants, which she had implanted in 1989. She had them removed in 1993 and then filed a lawsuit a year later against the manufacturer and her doctor for damages, noting that neither the implant makers nor her doctor properly warned her of possible complications, according to The Associated Press.In addition to her mother, Forke is survived by her twin sons, Chuck and Wit Forke; her stepfather, Chuck Talmage; and three sisters, Paige Inglis, Jennifer Sailor and Maggie Talmage.Kirsten Noyes More