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      in Movies

      Mitzi Gaynor, Leading Lady of Movie Musicals, Is Dead at 93

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      She was best known for starring in the 1958 screen version of “South Pacific.” But her Hollywood career was brief, and she soon shifted her focus to Las Vegas and TV.Mitzi Gaynor, the bubbly actress, singer and dancer who landed one of the most coveted movie roles of the mid-20th century, the female lead in “South Pacific,” but who abandoned film as the era of movie musicals came to an end, died on Thursday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 93. Her managers, Rene Reyes and Shane Rosamonda, confirmed the death.The role of Nellie Forbush, a World War II Navy nurse and (in the words of a song lyric) a “cockeyed optimist” in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit 1949 Broadway musical, had been originated and defined by Mary Martin. But when it came time to cast the 1958 movie of “South Pacific,” some considered Ms. Martin too old (she was in her 40s) and perhaps too strong-voiced for any actor who might be cast opposite her. (Ezio Pinza, her Broadway co-star, had died.)Doris Day was considered. Mike Todd wanted his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, to play the role. Ms. Gaynor was the only candidate to agree to do a screen test, she recalled decades later, although she was an established actress, with a dozen films, seven of them musicals, to her credit.In fact, she was shooting “The Joker Is Wild” (1957), a musical drama with Frank Sinatra, when Oscar Hammerstein II came to town and asked to hear her sing. (Ms. Gaynor always credited Sinatra with making her best-known role possible, because he asked for a change in the shooting schedule that would give her a day off to audition.)Ms. Gaynor in 1962. A year later, she would make her last movie, but she became a star in Las Vegas.Don Brinn/Associated Press“South Pacific” was a box-office smash, and Ms. Gaynor’s performance, opposite Rossano Brazzi, was well received. (She turned out to be the only one of the film’s stars to do her own singing.) But she made only three more films, all comedies without music; the last of them, “For Love or Money” with Kirk Douglas, was released in 1963. She turned instead to Las Vegas, where she headlined shows at major resorts for more than a decade, and to television.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 Movies

      Mikey Madison Finds Common Ground With Her Character in ‘Anora’

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      Mikey Madison, by her own admission, cries a lot — whether she’s happy or sad, that’s how she expresses herself.During our conversation at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, the star of the Palme d’Or-winning “Anora” told me a number of stories that involved weeping. She cried on the way home from a horseback-riding competition when she was a teenager and realized she would have to choose between life as an equestrian or an actor. (She was too single-minded to do both.) She cried after every single acting class in the early days of her career. She cried after her first Russian language session in preparation for this latest role.But when she was living in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach to shoot “Anora,” Sean Baker’s film about a tough-as-nails sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son, she found that the tears didn’t come easily. “I was, like, holding it in in a way that I hadn’t done before,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Am I numb? What’s happening here?’” She ultimately realized it was something different: the title character, known as Ani, was taking hold of her in a way that had never happened in her career. She had heard fellow actors talk about that kind of thing, but had never related to it before.Mikey Madison with Mark Eydelshteyn in “Anora,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.NeonIt makes sense that Ani would exert a certain power over Madison because “Anora” is a monumental film in the 25-year-old’s career. Though she had memorable parts in the movies “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019) and “Scream” (2022) and a crucial role on “Better Things,” the critically acclaimed FX series, “Anora” raises her to a new echelon in Hollywood. Almost as soon as the film premiered at Cannes, Madison was given the “star is born” treatment and declared a potential Oscar nominee. When “Anora” hit the Telluride Film Festival a few months later, a producer told Variety, “I need to work with Mikey Madison ASAP.”The film begins one night at her strip club gig, when her boss instructs her to talk to a patron, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who asked for a Russian-speaking girl. Turns out he’s wildly rich, and their whirlwind romance leads to a quickie marriage. But when his parents learn of it and send heavies to arrange their annulment, Ani refuses to go quietly. She fights off men twice her size with piercing screams and shockingly powerful kicks. For all that ferociousness, Madison also conveys how Ani’s thick skin is a form of self-defense against a world that rewards those, like Ivan, with easy access to money and finds new ways to punish those who don’t. Over the course of the action, you watch exhaustion seep into her face, which once glowed with the possibility of a fairy-tale ending.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 Movies

      Hugh Grant on the ‘Freak-Show Era’ of His Career and Being a Family Man

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      Hugh Grant has been suffering from brand confusion since 1994, when his performance in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” established him as a quintessentially British romantic hero of winning charm and diffidence. But his recent run of strange and sometimes creepy characters plays so effectively against type that you begin to suspect you were mistaken about his type all along.He would be the first to say that something darker and more complicated lurks beneath his easy surface.“At school I had a teacher who used to take me aside and say, ‘Who is the real Hugh Grant? Because I think the one we’re seeing might be insincere,’” Grant said as he strolled through Central Park last month. He was comparing himself — or at least his powers of persuasion — to Mr. Reed, the charismatically articulate villain he plays in “Heretic,” a religious-horror movie due in theaters on Nov. 15. “The ability to manipulate and sort of seduce — I might be guilty of that.”At 64, Grant is enjoying what he calls “the freak-show era” of his career, playing an unlikely rogue’s gallery of suave miscreants (“The Undoing,” “A Very English Scandal”), seedy gangsters (“The Gentlemen”), power-hungry tricksters (“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”) and self-deluded thespians (“Paddington 2” and “Unfrosted”), not to mention the bumptious little Oompa-Loompa in “Wonka.” That abashed, floppy-haired, benign early version of himself — that was never who he was anyway, he says.“My mistake was that I suddenly got this massive success with ‘Four Weddings’ and I thought, ah, well, if that’s what people love so much, I’ll be that person in real life, too,” he said. “So I used to do interviews where I was Mr. Stuttery Blinky, and it’s my fault that I was then shoved into a box marked ‘Mr. Stuttery Blinky.’ And people were, quite rightly, repelled by it in the end.”Grant had just come from Toronto, where “Heretic” had its premiere. In New York it was a blazingly beautiful day, and he greeted the park like an old friend, passing some of his favorite landmarks: the Delacorte Clock, whose bronze animals were doing their delightful dance to music to mark the hour, and the statue of Balto, the heroic medicine-transporting Siberian husky posing imperiously on his rock not far from the children’s zoo.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 Movies

      Inside the Birthing Scene in ‘We Live in Time’

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      The stars and director of “We Live in Time” explain how a delivery became an action sequence, complete with a real baby and a few unwelcome surprises.You wouldn’t expect the romantic drama “We Live in Time” to have an action scene, but it does — at least that’s how Andrew Garfield sees it.In the middle of the time-hopping story of a young couple battling a cancer diagnosis, there’s a hilarious yet touching sequence when Almut, played by Florence Pugh, gives birth on all fours in a gas station bathroom as her partner, Tobias (Garfield), nervously coaches her through the delivery with the aid of two shockingly helpful employees.“It’s the big action event,” Garfield said. “It’s the Indiana Jones sequence.’”The birth scene is a showcase for both the acting skills of Pugh and Garfield and the unique tone of the film, which mashes up humor and tragedy. It was also a logistical challenge for the director John Crowley and the actors who had to deal with the intensity of the material as well as an actual weeks-old baby who arrived for the grand finale.For Crowley the birth was the reason he wanted to make the movie in the first place. A number of elements potentially swirling around each other meant “we could create a scene that was thrilling and refusing to be one thing at one time,” he said in a video interview, noting that the “absurdity of the situation” lives alongside the “genuine sort of jeopardy of it.”The idea for Almut’s chaotic labor was inspired, in part, by the screenwriter Nick Payne’s own experience when his wife was giving birth to their first child. The hospital where she was supposed to deliver was extremely busy at the time, and the couple was told they might have to go to another facility in a different part of London.“I just spent a long time very nervously worrying about that,” he said in an interview. The trip to a Croydon hospital would take him by a gas station, and “I would drive past that thing and think, ‘This is where we’re going to end up.’ It was basically my own anxiety.”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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      Christopher Reeve and 6 Takeaways From the Documentary ‘Super/Man’

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      The new film chronicles the life of the paralyzed star, covering his friendship with Robin Williams and gut-wrenching details about his care and family.The documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” traces the life of the Juilliard-trained actor who found megastardom in the 1970s and ’80s playing Superman, and in 1995 as a different kind of hero, after an accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. It features never-before-seen footage of Reeve, who died in 2004 at 52, chronicling his early days; his pivotal friendship with his Juilliard roommate, Robin Williams; and his transformation, in a wheelchair and on a ventilator, into a leading disability and research advocate. Friends like Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg and John Kerry offer their observations; disability rights activists do, too. It’s a thought-provoking tear-jerker.It also doubles as a family movie, showing Reeve in his role as a father to his three children — Matthew Reeve and Alexandra Reeve Givens from an early relationship that he fled at the height of his fame, and Will Reeve, his son with his wife, Dana Reeve. With unwavering support, she largely gave up her career as a singer and actress to care for her husband. She died of cancer in 2006, just 18 months after him, leaving behind their son, then 13.The compounded tragedy is leavened by the hope that Reeve embodied, especially with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which has invested $140 million in the search for a cure for spinal cord paralysis. The film — which arrived in theaters 20 years after Christopher Reeve’s death, almost to the day — chronicles their determination, and doesn’t flinch from the darkest moments, including money worries and the relentlessness of day-to-day caregiving.Reeve, left, and his wife, Dana, with the comedian and actor Robin Williams after Reeve’s appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1996.Vince Bucci/AFP, via Getty ImagesThe unvarnished approach — and the timing, with Reeve’s children having reached solid footing as adults — led the siblings to agree to the project after years of turning down other offers, said Will Reeve, 32, a correspondent for ABC News and a look-alike to his father. They hoped their home movies and archival material “would provide a deeper meaning and greater texture to his story,” he said, “and remind folks of the fullness of life that one can have, despite whatever catastrophic injury they may suffer, whatever disability they may have.”In a video interview from London, where they’re based, the filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui discussed their rationale for not putting Reeve “on a pedestal,” as Ettedgui described it. “It was really important to show how someone who you might think of as being somehow perfect — the ideal hero — how they experience the same insecurities, the same family issues that the rest of us might,” he said.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 Television

      Nobuyo Oyama, the Japanese Voice of Doraemon, Dies at 90

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      Her alto timbre, which led to teasing as a child, and radiant laughter shaped how millions experienced the blue cartoon robot in the quintessential children’s anime of the same name.Nobuyo Oyama, the voice actress whose alto timbre and radiant laughter shaped how millions in Japan experienced Doraemon, the blue cartoon robot in the quintessential children’s anime of the same name, died at a hospital in Tokyo on Sept. 29. She was 90.Her death was confirmed by phone on Friday by Yozo Morita, the chief executive of her agency, Actors 7, who said that she had suffered a stroke in 2008 and been living with dementia for years.For about 25 years, Ms. Oyama was the voice of Doraemon, a character that first appeared in a manga created in 1969. Doraemon is a robot from the future, sent by its owner to the present day to help his great-great-grandfather solve his childhood problems and change his family’s fortunes.The plump, earless, catlike robot typically helped the boy, Nobita Nobi, using gadgets from the future that he kept in his magical pocket. His deepening friendship with Nobita and his family was part of what made “Doraemon” one of the longest-running shows in Japan and beyond.Ms. Oyama found her talent while coping with being bullied for her voice as a child, she told Kakugo TV, an online interview series. She was often told by her classmates that she had a “boy’s voice,” she said. The students, laughing whenever she spoke, discouraged her from speaking in public.When her mother saw her withdrawing socially, she gave her a piece of advice that would shape her career: She should not hide her voice but find a way to use it. So she joined a broadcasting club in high school, where she hosted radio shows and performed in radio dramas.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 Movies

      5 Places to Visit in Wilmington, Delaware, With Aubrey Plaza

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      Wilmington, Del., is often in the news as the hometown of President Biden and as a hub for corporate litigation, but it’s hardly on tourists’ radar. It has no theme park, no professional sports teams, no famous regional cuisine that demands a pilgrimage.But if Wilmington occupies a kind of blank space in the American mind, that’s fine by the actress Aubrey Plaza, who grew up there. Ms. Plaza, 40, whose credits include the TV shows “Parks and Recreation” and “The White Lotus,” and the new film, “My Old Ass,” calls Wilmington “this magical little gem in the country, this little secret.”Ms. Plaza is known for her deadpan humor and weirdness, but get her talking about Wilmington and she becomes an enthusiastically earnest tour guide, telling you her favorite local cafe, Brew HaHa!, recommending the red-sauce joint Mrs. Robino’s and sharing local legends, like the one about the allegedly haunted “Devil’s Road.”Ms. Plaza is known for playing deadpan and offbeat roles in TV programs like “Parks and Recreation” and “The White Lotus” as well as the new film “My Old Ass.”Peter YangOne reason Ms. Plaza is so fond of her hometown is the way the small city of about 71,000 punches above its weight culturally and in its amenities. Wilmington has abundant green spaces, institutions such as the Delaware Art Museum and the Delaware Contemporary, and more than 40 pocket neighborhoods, including its own Little Italy.“It’s got a small-town vibe, but it has every kind of neighborhood and community in the tiniest concentrated city,” said Ms. Plaza, who now lives in Los Angeles but returns to Wilmington regularly to visit family.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 Theater

      Jonathan Groff, Fresh Off Tony Win, Will Return to Broadway as Bobby Darin

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      “Just in Time,” a new musical about the “Mack the Knife” pop singer, will open next spring at Circle in the Square in Manhattan.Jonathan Groff, who won his first Tony Award in June for starring in a hit revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” will return to Broadway next spring to play Bobby Darin in a biomusical he has been developing for years.The musical, “Just in Time,” is to begin previews March 28 and to open April 23 at Circle in the Square Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The theater, with its close approximation of an in-the-round experience, will be configured to accommodate an immersive nightclub-like staging, with a 16-person cast, an onstage big band, two stages and some cabaret-style seating.The show began its life in 2018 at the 92nd Street Y as a five-performance concert called “The Bobby Darin Story,” and has been developed through a number of workshops. In an interview, Groff said he hadn’t been sure what to expect from that initial run, but that “it lit me up.”“There is some sort of kinetic magic that happens with the live execution of his material,” said Groff, 39, who was also a Tony nominee for “Hamilton” (he played King George III) and “Spring Awakening” (his breakout role). He has worked extensively on television (“Glee,” “Looking” and “Mindhunter”) and reached global audiences with his voice work as Kristoff in Disney’s “Frozen” films.Darin, a singer-songwriter whose pop career peaked in the 1950s and ’60s, is best known for the songs “Splish Splash,” “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea.” He suffered from a heart condition, and died at the age of 37.“Dramatically he’s really interesting, because what do you do when your whole career is on borrowed time?” said the musical’s director, Alex Timbers, who won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!” “His life was lived at high-octane speed. A woman he thought was his sister ended up being his mother. He went on a whole voyage into folk and pop and then decided he was a nightclub animal.”The musical has a book by Warren Leight (a Tony winner for “Side Man”) and Isaac Oliver and will be choreographed by Shannon Lewis. The show was conceived by Ted Chapin, who wrote the initial script and produced it at the Y as part of that institution’s long-running Lyrics & Lyricists series.“We all got invested and excited about the idea of telling his life story in this environment of a night club,” Groff said. “We’re playing with the genre of the biomusical, trying to find our own unique point of view and way into not only his story but also the genre itself. There’s a bit of experimentation happening here.”The lead producers of “Just in Time” are Tom Kirdahy, Robert Ahrens and John Frost; the musical is being capitalized for up to $12.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More