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      Jane Powell, Hollywood’s Girl Next Door, Is Dead at 92

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      Typecast from the outset, she was a star of movie musicals before she was out of her teens. But her big-screen career peaked when she was in her 20s.Jane Powell, whose pert good looks and lyrical soprano voice brought her Hollywood stardom before she was out of her teens — but whose movie career peaked when she was still in her 20s with a starring role in one of the last great MGM musicals, the 1954 extravaganza “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” — died on Thursday at her home in Wilton, Conn. She was 92. Susan Granger, her friend, confirmed the death.Ms. Powell, who was just over five feet tall and retained the guileless features of an innocent teenager well past adolescence, found herself typecast from the outset.Ms. Powell in Los Angeles, in 1944, the year her first film, “Song of the Open Road,” was released. “I should have been the happiest girl in the world,” she said of becoming a movie star in her teens. “Well, I wasn’t.”Associated PressShe was only 15 when her first film, “Song of the Open Road” (1944), was released. She played a disenchanted young film star who finds happiness when she runs away from home and joins a group of young people picking crops while adult farmworkers are at war. The film is noteworthy mostly because the name of the character she played, Jane Powell, became hers as well when the movie was released. She was born Suzanne Lorraine Burce. Ms. Powell had already been signed by MGM, but the studio lent her to United Artists for “Song of the Open Road.” Her first several MGM movies were mostly forgettable musicals, with slender story lines that were little more than frameworks for the songs.In “Holiday in Mexico” (1946), she played the daughter of the American ambassador to that country (Walter Pidgeon), while the piano virtuoso José Iturbi, the bandleader Xavier Cugat and Ms. Powell provided the music. In “Luxury Liner” (1948), she was a stowaway on a cruise ship captained by her father (George Brent), with Mr. Cugat and the opera singer Lauritz Melchior among the passengers.Her breakthrough was “Royal Wedding” (1951), the first movie in which she played an adult. This time Ms. Powell had an outstanding director, Stanley Donen; an outstanding score, by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner; and, most important, an outstanding co-star: Fred Astaire.Set just before the wedding of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, “Royal Wedding” centers on an American brother-sister song-and-dance act (Astaire and Ms. Powell) on tour in London. Cast at the last minute to replace Judy Garland, who had been fired (and who herself had replaced a pregnant June Allyson), Ms. Powell had almost no time to learn her dance routines. But she acquitted herself well, notably in a knockabout vaudeville-style number with Astaire, “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?”Her movie career appeared to be gaining steam. In fact, it was halfway over.After “Royal Wedding,” Ms. Powell, to her frustration, found herself once again cast as the girl next door in lightweight musicals like “Rich, Young and Pretty” (1951) and “Three Sailors and a Girl” (1953). It would be three years before she had another role of substance — but it was a memorable one.Set in a pioneer community in 19th-century Oregon, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” told the story of newlyweds (Ms. Powell and Howard Keel) whose first order of business as a married couple is to find wives for the groom’s six rowdy brothers. Directed by Mr. Donen, with a lively score by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer and acrobatic choreography by Michael Kidd, it earned a place on many lists of the greatest film musicals of all time. It was, Ms. Powell later said, “my last really wonderful role in a film.”Suzanne Burce was born on April 1, 1929, in Portland, Ore. An only child, she was still a toddler when her parents — Paul Burce, who worked for a bread company, and Eileen (Baker) Burce — began grooming her as a potential successor to Shirley Temple.By the time she was 5 she was taking singing and dancing lessons and appearing on the radio. When she was 14 her parents took her to Hollywood, where her performance on a popular radio talent show led to an audition for Louis B. Mayer of MGM and, in short order, a seven-year contract.Looking back on that time in her 1988 autobiography, “The Girl Next Door and How She Grew,” Ms. Powell wrote: “I should have been the happiest girl in the world. Well, I wasn’t.” All she wanted to do, she said, was return home, go to high school and make friends. Her parents’ relentless efforts to make her a star had made for a lonely, artificial childhood. Despite her almost immediate success, she wrote, “Sometimes I just wanted to run away from it all.”Ms. Powell in performance at a nightclub in Las Vegas in 1957.David Smith/Associated PressWith musicals beginning to fall out of fashion, she had few film roles after “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” (“I didn’t quit movies,” she once said. “They quit me.”) Two middling musicals followed: “Hit the Deck” (1955), her last film for MGM, and “The Girl Most Likely” (1958), in which she was courted by Cliff Robertson and two other men.Her big-screen career came to an anticlimactic end in 1958 with the dramas “The Female Animal,” in which she played the alcoholic daughter of a fading movie star (Hedy Lamarr), and “Enchanted Island,” in which she was improbably cast as a Polynesian islander. (“It was a terrible movie,” she said. “The best thing about it was that it gave the family a great vacation in Acapulco.”)Ms. Powell found a new home on television. A 1961 pilot for a sitcom, “The Jane Powell Show,” was not picked up, but she appeared regularly on dramatic anthology series, variety shows and musical specials, as well as in a recurring role as Alan Thicke’s mother on the sitcom “Growing Pains” in the late 1980s and in a long-running ad campaign for denture products. Her last TV appearance was on an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” in 2002.She also performed in touring productions of musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music” and “Carousel.” She made her Broadway debut in 1974, when she replaced her friend and frequent MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds as the title character in the hit revival of the 1919 musical “Irene.”Ms. Powell in 1984 with Dick Moore, who, like her, had been a child star, and whom she would marry four years later.G. Paul Burnett/Associated PressShe never returned to Broadway, although she played the queen in a 1995 New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” and occasionally appeared Off Broadway. She seemed headed back to Broadway in 2003, when she played the mother of the entrepreneurial Mizner brothers in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Bounce” in Chicago and Washington. But the show was poorly received and never made it to New York. (It was later reworked, retitled “Road Show” and staged at the Public Theater in New York in 2008, without Ms. Powell in the cast.)Ms. Powell’s first four marriages ended in divorce. In 1988 she married Dick Moore, whom she met when he was writing a book about child actors. Although, as Dickie Moore, he had once been a child actor himself, their paths had never crossed until he interviewed her for his book.Ms. Powell at her apartment in New York in 1996. She appeared frequently on television until 2002.Jack Manning/The New York TimesMr. Moore died in 2015, and Ms. Powell died in the home they had shared. She is survived by a son, Geary Anthony Steffen III; two daughters, Suzanne Steffen and Lindsay Cavalli; and two granddaughters.Looking back in 1988 on her youthful stardom and her place in the Hollywood studio system, Ms. Powell was philosophical.“I get angry when I hear other actors blame the studios for all their problems,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It really bothered me when Judy Garland used to say, ‘The studio made me do this, the studio made me do that.’“Nobody makes you do anything. You make your own choices.”Alyssa Lukpat More

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      Joan Washington, Dialect Coach to the Stars, Dies at 74

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      She taught Barbra Streisand, Penélope Cruz and countless other performers how to sound like someone else.Joan Washington, an acclaimed dialect coach who taught Penélope Cruz to sound Greek, Jessica Chastain to sound Israeli and an entire cast of British actors to speak like Brooklyn Jews, died on Sept. 2 at her home in Avening, England. She was 74.Her husband, the actor Richard E. Grant, announced her death on Twitter. He later said the cause was lung cancer.In a career spanning four decades, Ms. Washington developed a reputation as a sort of reverse version of Henry Higgins, the elocutionist who taught Eliza Doolittle the King’s English in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion.” She instructed actors to speak not just in national dialects but also in regional and local lilts, even historical ones.She taught actors for most of Britain’s leading national and regional theaters; if a British performer appeared onstage speaking a thick American patois — say, in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” — there was a good chance it was Ms. Washington’s handiwork.She also worked on a steady stream of films. She teamed up with Ms. Cruz for “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), Ms. Chastain for “The Debt” (2010), Kate Beckinsale for “Emma” (1996) and the British actress Thandie Newton for “W.,” Oliver Stone’s 2008 take on the life of George W. Bush, in which she played Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. national security adviser.Jessica Chastain in a scene from “The Debt” (2010). Ms. Washington trained Ms. Chastain to sound Israeli for that movie, in which she played a secret agent.Laurie Sparham/Focus FeaturesDialect, Ms. Washington said, was not just about mimicry, about reading a script with an accent. It had to be built into the core of a performance.“A dialect coach must be there from the start,” she told the British newspaper The Independent in 1991. “Otherwise the bad habits are set; it becomes just a bandaging job. There’s enough undoing as it is.”Ms. Washington was something of a performer herself, though never onstage or onscreen. She could instantly adopt whatever dialect she was teaching, and she claimed to have mastery over 124 vowel sounds — just six shy of what Professor Higgins boasted.Though she was born and raised in Scotland, Ms. Washington employed a standard English accent when teaching Americans. She said they brought too many assumptions about what “proper” English sounds like and might be confused by her natural Scottish elocution.“The problem for Americans doing English is that they pronounce their consonants too precisely, which makes it sound rather acquired and middle class,” she said in a 1986 interview with The Sunday Telegraph. “The grander we are, the less we rely on consonants.”Ms. Washington came about her talent thorough research. Before working with actors, she had taught standard English pronunciation at the Royal College of Nursing, whose students arrived from all over Britain and the Commonwealth. Her recordings of their accents formed the basis of a vast library of tapes she kept as reference.She interviewed and recorded older Britons to capture what Liverpudlian or Geordie — an accent from Tyneside, in northeast England — might have sounded like decades ago. To show what English sounded like in the 1910s, she relied on recordings of British prisoners made by Germans during World War I.Her instructional methods were intense. She would often begin by interviewing performers to gauge what they thought a Boston Brahmin or a Warsaw Pole might sound like. She took notes, reams of them, and then handed them to the actors along with copies of her tapes.Over a series of sessions, she would tweak Rs, adjust inflections and suppress unwanted sibilants until an American actress like Emma Stone sounded like an authentic 18th-century English courtier, as she did in the 2018 film “The Favourite.”Barbra Streisand in “Yentl” (1983), the first film on which Ms. Washington worked. She taught Ms. Streisand how to speak like an Ashkenazi Jew in early-20th-century Poland.MGMMs. Washington always worked freelance, but she was most closely associated with the Royal National Theater, where she worked on more than 70 shows. Her first film was “Yentl” (1983), for which she taught the star and director, Barbra Streisand, how to speak like an Ashkenazi Jew in early-20th-century Poland.Ms. Washington had her own theories about accents and where they came from. She said that Britain’s plethora of dialects and accents, all crammed onto a medium-size island, derived from its varying geography and climate.“Cornish is harder and more nasal than Devon because it’s a windy peninsula,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “If you’ve got the wind in your face, you’ve got to speak without giving much away.”Joan Geddie was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1946. Her father, John, was a doctor, and her mother, Maggie (Cook) Geddie, was a nurse.When she was 18 she moved to London to attend the Central School of Speech and Drama. After graduating, she taught speech, first at a reform school for girls and then at the Royal College of Nursing.In 1969 she married Keith Washington; they later divorced. Along with Mr. Grant, she is survived by her son, Tom Washington; her daughter, Olivia Grant; and her brother, David Geddie.While teaching, Ms. Washington also picked up side jobs as a dialect coach. In the class-conscious England of the postwar decades, millions of Britain’s expanding middle class sought to erase any trace of their proletarian origins, starting with their accents, which provided her with an abundance of work.Her clients included doctors and clergymen as well as actors — the only ones, she said, who went the opposite direction, seeking instruction on how to sound less posh.She was teaching at the Actors Center in London in 1982 when she met Mr. Grant, who had been born and raised in Swaziland (now Eswatini), in Africa, and was taking her class to sound more like a native Englishman.Mr. Grant was smitten, he later recalled, and he asked if she could give him private lessons. She said yes, at £20 an hour — about $43 in today’s dollars.“But I can only afford £12,” he replied.“All right,” she said, “but you’ll have to repay me if you ever ‘make it.’”The two married in 1986, a year before Mr. Grant made his film debut in “Withnail and I,” which overnight made him one of Britain’s most in-demand actors. He later won acclaim for his performances in movies like “Gosford Park” (2001) and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (2018), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.Ms. Washington learned she had lung cancer late last year, and the disease advanced quickly. She did have one final assignment, though: Mr. Grant had been cast to play Loco Chanelle, a drag queen, in the film version of the stage musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” and he needed help with his character’s Sheffield accent.A few days after her death, Mr. Grant posted a video on Twitter that Ms. Washington had made of him practicing for the role, with her, offscreen, giving instructions. More

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      Max Harwood Steps Up in 'Everybody's Talking About Jamie'

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      Two years ago, Max Harwood made a video in his bedroom.A second-year student at a musical theater school in London, he introduced himself and said where he was from. He talked about how, as a child, he would don a bouffant wig and perform Rizzo’s songs from “Grease,” making his grandmother laugh so hard that she nearly wet herself.That minute-long video was Harwood’s first audition for the movie “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” an adaptation of the sparkly West End musical about a teenager in the north of England with dreams of being a drag queen. Seeking new talent, the producers held an open call, which yielded thousands of tapes. Jonathan Butterell, the film’s director, watched nearly all of them, and Harwood’s stood out immediately.“He had this kind of magic about him,” Butterell recalled. “He is fabulous without being arrogant.” He called Harwood back six more times, for dance calls, for recording sessions, for chemistry reads, for drag challenges. The magic didn’t fade.So now Harwood — who had no professional credits, couldn’t get into a first-class drama school and had been told that he should aim for ensemble parts — is filling some very high-heeled shoes. His ice-blonde crop and princeling looks occupy nearly every frame of “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” which premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday.“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood, 23, said on a recent evening while lolling on a sofa at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York. “This is who I am.”“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHarwood had arrived in the city the previous day, driving in from the Hamptons on a whistle-stop press tour for the film. The tour had taken him across America — which, mid-pandemic, mostly meant airports and hotels. He has louche, generous features, the outsize eyes of a startled deer and an unforced warmth. He wore a spotted T-shirt. And if his Converse sneakers lacked the pizazz of the glittery heels that Jamie covets, they did have platform soles. He carries himself like the dancer he trained to be, which makes him seem taller than 5 feet 10 inches.He grew up in Basingstoke, a town in south central England without a professional theater company. He knew he wanted to act, even if the drama schools that he applied to didn’t see it the same way. But his local theater society gave him a scholarship for a one-year course at the Guildford School of Acting. The teachers there weren’t entirely encouraging.“I was told that if I wanted to do musical theater, because of how I looked, I would be typically cast in the ensemble, and I needed to get my dancing up,” Harwood said. What exactly was wrong with his looks? “I’m not, like, the strapping leading man.”A scene from the film, an adaptation of the stage musical about an English teenager with dreams of being a drag performer.John Rogers/Amazon StudiosHe was directed to the Urdang Academy, a musical theater training program in London. Although he enjoyed the classes, he struggled there. He wanted to stand out, and the work of an ensemble member, who has to look and dance just like everybody else, never suited him. He wasn’t supposed to audition during the program, but he had seen “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” onstage, and had loved the sight of a story centered around a young gay man that didn’t depend on trauma.“He didn’t die at the end,” Harwood said. “He wasn’t comic relief. He didn’t come in for two scenes to be the gay best friend. And that was really nice.”So, when a friend told him about the open call for the movie, he put himself on tape. During the months of auditions that followed, he kept up with his schoolwork and his part-time job as a supervisor at a sneaker store. He never really thought that Butterell and the producers would cast him, but when he was called back for a day that involved a full drag makeup test, he let himself dream.Butterell had conceived the musical after watching the BBC documentary “Jamie: Drag Queen at 16,” which followed Jamie Campbell, an English teenager who wanted to wear a dress to prom. “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” opened in Sheffield, in the north of England, and quickly transferred to the West End in London. In The New York Times, the critic Ben Brantley called that production a “determinedly inspirational show.”In adapting the musical for the screen, Butterell and the other creators, the writer Tom MacRae and the composer Dan Gillespie Sells, didn’t want a strapping leading man to play Jamie. “Because what’s radical about Jamie is the fact that you’ve got an authentically effeminate male hero,” Gillespie Sells said in a phone interview. “That’s something you don’t see very often.”The creators saw it in Harwood. When Butterell told him that he had the part, Harwood screamed, swore and asked if he could call his mother.“Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” isn’t a coming out story; Jamie is out already. Instead it’s a tale of stepping confidently into your identity, in appropriately glamorous footwear. Jamie’s story isn’t really Harwood’s. Though Harwood liked playing dress-up, he never felt compelled to perform drag. But then again, maybe it’s everyone’s story: Doesn’t everyone want to be seen for who they really are?The dancing came easily to Harwood, and so did the songs, which are mostly pop- and R&B-inflected. Gillespie Sells praised his voice: “It was exactly that thing, that very pure, young male, perfect pop voice that was so good for Jamie because Jamie is pop personified. Everything about him is bright and hopeful.”Harwood didn’t always feel hopeful. Butterell, however, never doubted him. Neither did his colleagues, including Richard E. Grant, who gives a moving performance as Jamie’s drag mother. “He looks very young, sings and dances to the manner born, is emotionally open and giving, instantly likable, and of course, has talent by the bucket load,” Grant wrote of Harwood in an email.“I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” Harwood said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut there were moments — such as a scene between Jamie and his best friend, Pritti (Lauren Patel) — when Harwood worried whether he could deliver the right performance. He felt frightened. He felt vulnerable. Butterell took him aside and told him to breathe. Maybe in these moments Jamie felt vulnerable, too, Butterell suggested.The day they shot Jamie’s drag performance was even more anxiety-inducing, but Jamie Campbell, the musical’s inspiration, happened to be on set that day. “And I said to Jamie, ‘I’m so scared, I’m so scared,’” Harwood recalled. “And he was like: ‘You’re in exactly the right place. And if you weren’t in that place, you would not be human.’”So Harwood’s anxiety became Jamie’s anxiety, which layers the musical’s sequins and chiffon with a febrile authenticity. If the film is about Jamie coming into his own, it’s also about Harwood doing the same. “Max went on a similar journey to what Jamie’s going through,” Butterell said. “Max went looking for who he was in this. Where Max and Jamie meet is in this duality of sheer joy and the fear that you have to step through to maintain that joy.”Starring in a movie musical as your first professional gig is one more joy. But even a decade ago, young queer actors might have fretted about being birthed into the industry in a role like Jamie, because it could lead to a typecast future. That doesn’t bother Harwood. He believes in Jamie’s story, which he describes as “a little beacon of light and hope and joy.”Sprawled on that couch in New York, he said that story, however universal, is only one story — and queer youth deserve more. “I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” he said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.” More

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      Ben Platt Isn’t the Oldest Adult to Play a Teenager Onscreen

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      Here are our picks for the most memorable performances with the biggest age gaps between star and character. Did they pull it off?Can a mop of curly hair, a backpack and an outfit that looks like a mother’s choice for school picture day send a 27-year-old actor back to his senior year of high school?That will be the question facing filmgoers when Ben Platt reprises his performance as the titular awkward teenager in the film adaptation of the heartbreaking Broadway musical “Dear Evan Hansen,” due Sept. 24 in theaters.When the first trailer was released in May, initial reactions to Platt’s attempt to shave off a decade were, well, less than rosy.“Raise your hand if you felt personally victimized by Ben Platt’s wig this morning,” the writer Jorge Molina tweeted, prompting comparisons to the scene-stealing wig Sarah Paulson wore in “The People v. O.J. Simpson.”But that part of his look, at least, was the real thing. Platt set the record straight in a now-deleted Twitter post. “I’m v flattered that ppl think my locks are a wig and I hate to burst bubbles,” he wrote. “But sadly those are my own.”Platt is hardly the first full-grown adult to return to his locker and letterman jacket days for a film, and nowhere near the oldest, though some of them — *cough* Tobey Maguire — look like they should be carrying briefcases instead of backpacks. (Child labor laws make it easier to cast actors over 18 as high school students than to work around regulations for younger actors.)Here are some of the most memorable attempts by 20- and 30- somethings to pass as teenagers. Who makes the grade, and who should have dropped out?John Travolta as Danny Zuko in ‘Grease’John Travolta with, from left, fellow adults Michael Tucci, Barry Pearl and Kelly Ward.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesDanny’s age: 18John Travolta’s age: 23Travolta’s not-so-malevolent gang leader might look a few years older than the “he was sweet, just turned 18” Sandy pegs him for, but it works because he’s a youngster compared with the fellow “high schoolers” around him. Olivia Newton-John was 29; the show-stealing Stockard Channing, at 33, was old enough to play Rizzo’s mother. “Grease” (1978) became the highest-grossing musical film up to that point, so audiences clearly weren’t too concerned — and Travolta’s schoolboy rhapsodizing over Newton-John in that skintight black bodysuit seemed all too real.Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood in ‘Sense and Sensibility’Emma Thompson, left, with her (much) younger screen sister, Kate Winslet, and Gemma Jones.Clive Coote/Columbia PicturesElinor’s age: 19Emma Thompson’s age: 36If you remember that Thompson’s character is supposed to be 19 in the Jane Austen novel on which the 1995 film is based, her matriarchal, self-possessed Elinor won’t fool you for a second. Kate Winslet, who was 20 when she played Elinor’s 16-year-old sister, Marianne, emphasizes the gulf. But if it’s been a while since you’ve read the novel and just assume that Elinor is in her late 20s or early 30s, you might give Thompson a passing grade. After all, her intellect and frequent apologies on behalf of the impassioned, though imprudent, Marianne make her closer to a mother than a sister.Alan Ruck as Cameron Frye in ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’Alan Ruck, left, and Matthew Broderick are high school seniors. We’ll buy it.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesCameron’s age: 17Alan Ruck’s age: 29Actors pushing 30 don’t have a great track record of pulling off 17-year-olds, and Ruck, despite imbuing Cameron with pitch-perfect humor and sensitivity as Ferris’s wingman, is no exception. Matthew Broderick, who plays Ferris, helped distract from the true discrepancy — he was 24 when the 1986 film was released — but not enough to sell the subterfuge. Luckily, this was one case where the movie was so good that nobody seemed to care.Shirley Henderson as Moaning Myrtle in ‘Harry Potter’Shirley Henderson as a ghost isn’t as spooky as the 23-year difference between her and her character.Warner Bros.Myrtle’s age: 14Shirley Henderson’s age: 37All hail the power of pigtails! (And a 5-foot stature.) Is it creepy, in retrospect, for a fully grown woman to play a giggly 14-year-old ghost flirting with a prepubescent Daniel Radcliffe in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (2002)? Sure. (It would be weird enough to have an actual 14-year-old playing Myrtle, who would have been in her 60s had she not had a fateful encounter with a basilisk.) But honestly, watching the film when I was growing up, I’d never have guessed she was old enough to be Harry’s mother.Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker in ‘Spider-Man’An adult Tobey Maguire climbing the walls as a teenage Peter Parker.Zade Rosenthal/Columbia PicturesPeter’s age: 17Tobey Maguire’s age: 27Maguire, unfortunately, is about as successful at passing for a teenager as Peter Parker is at concealing his identity as the title character in “Spider-Man” (2002). When his character is bitten by a radioactive spider during a class field trip to Columbia University, the actor looks more like he should be a teaching assistant in the lab than a high school student. But he’s far from the only (relatively) over-the-hill Peter Parker, though things turned around in 2015 when a 19-year-old Tom Holland was cast as Marvel’s new Spider-Man.Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’Audrey Hepburn, opposite George Peppard and Patricia Neal, doesn’t look like a recent high schooler, but who cares?Paramount PicturesHolly’s age: 19Audrey Hepburn’s age: 31Sure, Hepburn’s doe eyes and elflike features shaved years off her appearance, but she was clearly a woman in the 1961 film based on the Truman Capote novel. (Though Capote’s first choice for Holly, Marilyn Monroe, then 35, was even older.) Yet Hepburn embodies the novel’s striking, self-sufficient young bohemian, and Holly’s free spirit is as alive in her as in a recent high school grad — even if she never looks like one in her sleek, sophisticated black gown.Jennifer Grey as Baby in ‘Dirty Dancing’Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze are both years apart from their characters.LionsgateBaby’s age: 17Jennifer Grey’s age: 27No one puts Baby in a corner, and no one was about to tell Grey she was a decade too old to play the doctor’s daughter who gets tangled up with Patrick Swayze’s bad-boy dance instructor in “Dirty Dancing” (1987). It helped that Swayze, who played 25-year-old Johnny Castle, was 34 at the time, but Grey’s small stature (she’s 5-foot-3), wild curls and big brown eyes made it entirely believable that she was 17.Rachel McAdams as Regina George in ‘Mean Girls’Rachel McAdams, left, Lacey Chabert and Amanda Seyfried as the title trio with more pressing concerns than age.Michael Gibson/Paramount PicturesRegina’s age: 16 or 17Rachel McAdams’s age: 26Do you want to call McAdams’s Regina George an impostor to her face? Mark Waters, the director of “Mean Girls” (2004), initially passed over McAdams for the part because he didn’t think she could pull off a teenager, but then he decided it would make sense if Regina grew up a little too fast. Our take: Even if Regina looks more like she should be gatekeeping for a sorority than a school-lunch table, it works for a conniving character who’s always a few steps ahead of her classmates. More

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      in Theater

      Andrew Garfield Can’t Remember Who He Was Before ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’

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      In the movie musical, Garfield plays the creator of “Rent,” who died unexpectedly at 35. Making the film helped Garfield process a death in his own life.Jon (Andrew Garfield) is throwing a party, though there’s hardly a reason to celebrate. He’s riven with anxiety, his cramped apartment is overpacked with people, and he’s just spent money he doesn’t have, a down payment on success that will not come within his lifetime. But still, with a wide grin, Jon toasts his friends, leaps on his couch and sings, “This is the life!”Jon is Jonathan Larson, the composer and playwright who died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm at age 35 in 1996 just before his new musical, “Rent,” would become a global smash. The new film “Tick, Tick … Boom!” portrays Larson struggling to find success in his late 20s, as he frets about whether he should pack it in and choose a more conventional path than scripting musical theater.Larson originally created “Tick, Tick … Boom!” as a solo show, “Boho Days,” starring himself in 1990; after his death, it was reworked by the playwright David Auburn into a three-person production that the “Hamilton” creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, saw in 2001, when he was still a senior in college.“Here’s this posthumous musical from the guy who made me want to write musicals in the first place,” said Miranda, who’s now made his feature directorial debut with the film.Miranda saw Garfield in the 2018 Broadway production of “Angels in America” and thought he was “transcendent” in that show. “I just left thinking, ‘Oh, that guy can do anything,’” the director recalled. “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything. So I cast him in my head probably a year before I talked to him about it.”Miranda put Garfield through his paces, sending him to a vocal coach and ensuring that the actor would be able to play enough piano so the camera could pan from his fingers to his face throughout the film. But those are just the technical aspects of a performance that is impressively possessed: Garfield plays the passionate, frustrated Larson with enough zealous verve to power all the lights on Broadway.Garfield as Jonathan Larson in a scene from “Tick, Tick … Boom.”Macall Polay/NetflixIt’s all part of a very busy fall for the 38-year-old actor, who recently appeared in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” as the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and, it’s rumored, will suit up alongside Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” out in December. (Of that supersecret superhero team-up, Garfield can divulge nothing.) Still, it’s clear that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” meant much more to him than he initially expected.“It’s a strange thing when there’s someone like Jon that you didn’t have any relationship to before, and then suddenly now there’s this mysterious forever connection that I am never, ever going to let go,” Garfield told me on a recent video call from Calgary, Canada, where he’s shooting “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a limited series. “I just feel so lucky that Jon was revealed to me, because now I don’t remember who I was before I knew who Jon was.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.How did “Tick, Tick … Boom!” originally come to you?One of my best friends in New York is Gregg Miele, and he’s the great body worker and massage person of New York City — he works on all the dancers and actors and singers on Broadway and beyond. Lin was on his table one morning and asked, “Can Andrew Garfield sing?” And Gregg, being the friend that he is, just started lying, basically, and said, “Yes, he is the greatest singer I’ve ever heard.” Then he called me and said, “Hey, go and get some singing lessons because Lin’s going to ask you to do something.”Lin and I had lunch, and he told me briefly about “Tick, Tick” and Jon. I’m not a musical theater guy in my history — it’s not something that I’ve been introduced to until the last few years, really. So Lin left me with a copy of the music and lyrics, and he wrote at the front of it, “This won’t make sense now, but it will. Siempre, Lin.”Garfield hadn’t done much singing when he was cast in “Tick, Tick … Boom” opposite musical theater veterans. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesYou’ve performed in plays like “Angels in America” and “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway, but in this film, Lin surrounded you with a lot of musical-theater ringers, and even some of the smallest roles and cameos are filled by major players from that world. That had to have been a daunting space to step into.I remember a very specific moment where we were in music rehearsal. Alex Lacamoire was at the piano walking us through the songs — he’s Lin’s musical arranger and producer — and I was with [“Tick, Tick” co-stars] Robin de Jesus and Vanessa Hudgens and Josh Henry and Alex Shipp. You can imagine how I’m feeling! They’re all just pros, they know exactly what they’re doing, they’re making notes. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to die.”Then it comes time for me to get into the song and I’m just trying to get through it. I remember Alex Lacamoire going, “Woo, Andrew!” And then everyone behind him, like Josh and Vanessa and Alex and Robin, were like, “Yeah baby, that’s it baby! You got it, baby!” I go beet red and five minutes pass, and I’m just like, “Hey guys, sorry.” I start crying, and I say, “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy in my entire life, to be surrounded by the most supportive liars I have ever known.”Garfield working with his director, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who cast him after seeing the actor in “Angeles in America.” Miranda recalled, “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything.”Macall Polay/NetflixJonathan spends the movie anxious about this ticking that only he can hear. How did you interpret that?There was a line in the original one-man show “Boho Days”: “Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to explode.” It was too on-the-nose for people after he passed away, and they had to cut it, but he spends the story trying to figure out what this ticking is: “Is it turning 30? Is it that I haven’t succeeded? Is it some unconscious idea of my girlfriend’s biological clock combined with the pressure of my career? Or is it all of my friends who are losing their lives at a very young age because of the AIDS epidemic?”It could even be a musical metronome. The way you play Jonathan, as this theatrical person who feels so deeply and urgently, it’s almost like he needs to break into song because normal life just doesn’t cut it.Everything is up at an 11. Even when he’s making love, it’s at 11! Somehow he knows that this is all going to end, that this is all so ephemeral, and I think he was acutely, painfully aware that he wasn’t going to get all of his song sung. And I think he was also agonizingly aware that he wasn’t going to get the reflection and recognition that he knew he was supposed to have while he was still breathing.On the last day of shooting, what I understood is that Jon had it figured out. He knew that this is a short ride and a sacred one, and he had a lot of keys and secrets to how to live with ourselves and with each other and how to make meaning out of being here. Once he accepted that, he could be fully a part of the world, and then he could write “Rent.” I don’t think there’s an accident in that. That very visceral knowing of loss and of death, that’s what gives everything so much meaning. And without that awareness, we will succumb to meaninglessness.So what kind of meaning did this story give to you?Every frame, every moment, every breath of this film is an attempted honoring of Jon. And, on a more personal level, it’s an honoring of my mom. She is someone who showed me where I was supposed to go in my life. She set me on a path. We lost her just before Covid, just before we started shooting, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. So, for me, I was able to continue her song on the ocean and the wave of Jonathan’s songs. It was an attempt to honor him in his unfinished song, and her in her unfinished song, and have them meet.I think that’s part of the reason I didn’t want this movie to end, because I got to put my grief into art, into this creative act. The privilege of my life has been being there for my mother, being the person that gave her permission when she was ready. We had a very amazing connection, and now an audience will know her spirit in an unconscious way through Jon, which I just find so magical and beautiful.“I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing,” Garfield said, adding, “Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm.”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesStill, that’s a lot to deal with while you were shooting this movie. It can’t have been easy.I was hesitant whether I was going to share that, but I feel like it’s a universal experience. In the best-case scenario, we lose our parents and not the other way around, so I feel very lucky that I got to be with her while she was passing, and I got to read her favorite poems to her and take care of her and my dad and my brother. I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing. It’s the person that gives you life no longer being here. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm. For me, everything has changed: Where there was once a stream, there’s now a mountain; where there was once a volcano, there’s now a field. It’s a strange head trip.You put parts of yourself in other people, almost like they’re the stewards of who you are. And when you lose those people, suddenly you become their steward.As you say, it’s like my mother now lives in me in a way that maybe is even stronger than ever when she was incarnate. I feel her essence. For me, it only comes when one can accept the loss, and it’s so hard for us to do that in our culture because we’re not given the framework or the tools to. We’re told to be in delusion and denial of this universally binding thing that we’re all going to go through at some point, and it’s fascinating to me that this grand adventure of death is not honored.Actually, the only thing that gives any of this meaning is if we walk with death in the far corner of our left eye. That’s the only way that we are aware of being alive in this moment. I think that was the legacy that Jon leaves and the legacy that my mom leaves for me personally, is just to be here. Because you’re not going to be here for long.It reminds me of what was written on your script before all of this happened: “You don’t understand now, but you will.”“You don’t understand now, but you will.” I’m still reeling from the download of understanding what Jon’s life was about, what my mother’s life was about, what all of this is about. Oh God, how lucky to explore that in one’s work! More

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      Art Metrano, Actor and Comic Once Felled by an Accident, Dies at 84

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      He had built a career in stand-up comedy and in film and TV, but a fall from a ladder left him with a personal struggle.Art Metrano, a comedian and actor who appeared in more than 120 television shows and films, including the “Police Academy” movies, before a fall from a ladder left him severely injured, an ordeal he turned into a one-man show he performed all over the country, died on Sept. 8 at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 84.His son Harry confirmed his death. The cause was not given.Mr. Metrano first gained attention with a spoof magic act. Introduced as the Amazing Metrano or with some equally grandiose appellation, he would come out and perform a series of tricks that weren’t really tricks. He’d present each hand to the audience, index finger raised, then bang his hands together behind his back and present them again — now, two fingers on one hand would be raised, none on the other.The schtick got him appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and assorted other programs in the early 1970s. By then he was also building an acting career, having landed small parts on “Mannix,” “Bewitched” and other series in the late ’60s; that run continued in the ’70s with “Barney Miller,” “Movin’ On,” “Starsky and Hutch” and dozens of other shows.The 1980s brought more acting work, including a recurring role on “Joanie Loves Chachi” and, in 1985, a part in “Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment,” a follow-up to the hit 1984 comedy. He played Mauser, a career-driven officer who becomes a captain and is the butt of jokes; in one scene, he shampoos his hair with epoxy resin. He reprised the role in 1986 in “Police Academy 3: Back in Training.”Carol Rosegg/Everett CollectionBut Mr. Metrano’s career was interrupted one September day in 1989. He and his wife at the time had put a house up for sale, and he stopped by to check on it in advance of a showing by a real estate agent. They had work done on the pool, and he noticed that as a result there was gray cement spray all over the back walls and balcony. He decided to hose the gunk off.“I grabbed the ladder that was leaning against the wall and set it firmly against the balcony,” he wrote in a memoir, “Twice Blessed” (with Cynthia Lee, 1994, later retitled “Metrano’s Accidental Comedy”).Something went wrong, and Mr. Metrano fell from the ladder, hitting the ground head first and snapping his neck. He couldn’t move. He lay there, imagining the scene if he were still lying there when the real estate agent showed up.“I’d look up and say, ‘Hi, I’m the owner,’” he wrote in his book. “‘I just broke my neck, but not to worry. House looks great, eh? Nice gourmet kitchen!’”The humor was characteristic of the way he later told the story in print and onstage (a neighbor eventually came to his aid before the real estate agent arrived), but the injury was serious. He had broken several vertebrae, and permanent paralysis was a possibility.“When you’re lying paralyzed in a hospital bed,” he said during the stage show, “your past becomes your constant companion because your future is a question mark.”At first he could neither move nor speak, but he was eventually able to talk again, and to walk, sometimes with the help of a crutch. Within a few years he was telling his story in a one-man show written with Ms. Lee that was performed, under various names, across the country.When it played in Manhattan in 1996 at the Union Square Theater under the title “The Amazing Metrano: An Accidental Comedy,” Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, said that Mr. Metrano “gives new meaning to the term stand-up comedy: it isn’t the comedy that amazes, but the fact that Mr. Metrano is standing up.”“‘The Amazing Metrano’ is therapeutic, inspirational theater,” Mr. Canby wrote. “Mr. Metrano is now publicly working through his trauma, finding resources in himself he never knew he possessed.”Arthur Mesistrano was born on Sept. 22, 1936, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Bensonhurst section of that borough. His father, Aaron, worked in the garment industry, and his mother, Rebecca (Russo) Mesistrano, was a homemaker.He played football at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn and attended the College of the Pacific in California on a football scholarship, but left college to return to New York to study acting and work on his stand-up comedy. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting in 1958.In his book, he told of trying to worm his way into show business by taking a job selling a phone system that enabled busy people to speed-dial numbers; that got him onto studio lots.“That was the plan,” he wrote, “sell the product, make some money, meet producers and directors, and then show them my 8×10 glossy and phony résumé.”It appeared to work, because by 1960 he was getting small roles. In 1971, he landed a leading role in a CBS sitcom, “The Chicago Teddy Bears,” though the show was short-lived. He had another leading role in a 1986 sitcom, “Tough Cookies,” but that show too didn’t last, either.Mr. Metrano in a publicity photo with the actor Craig T. Nelson in 2001. Mr. Metrano was a guest star on the CBS crime drama “The District,” starring Mr. Nelson. Tony Esparza/CBSAfter his accident, he continued to get occasional TV roles, including on “L.A. Law,” “The District” and “Party of Five.”Mr. Metrano married Rebecca Chute in 1972; they divorced in 2005. His survivors include his wife, Jamie Golder Metrano; two children from his first marriage, Harry and Zoe Bella Metrano; a daughter from an earlier relationship, Roxanne Elena Metrano; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.In 1977, Mr. Metrano reached out to a son he had fathered when younger but who had been given up for adoption. That son, Howard Bald, now a rabbi, performed a memorial service for him over the weekend in Florida. More

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      Kaycee Moore, Actress in Black Directors’ Seminal Films, Dies at 77

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      She explored her characters’ inner lives in movies like “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts,” independent works that grew out of the L.A. Rebellion movement.Kaycee Moore, whose nuanced acting documented Black American life in movies by a group of young, Black independent directors in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Aug. 13 at her home in Kansas City, Kan. She was 77.The death was confirmed by the Watkins Heritage Funeral home. No cause was given.Ms. Moore made only a handful of movies, but they had an outsize impact on American cinema. Her portrayals defied the traditional roles for Black women of her era, in action-packed or trauma-filled blockbusters, and instead laid bare the interior lives of her characters.Her debut came in “Killer of Sheep” (1978), the director Charles Burnett’s first feature. (It was his thesis for the film program at the University of California, Los Angeles.) Mr. Burnett was a member of the community of independent filmmakers that would later become known as the L.A. Rebellion.Their movies, unlike many mainstream Hollywood pictures, humanized Black characters and celebrated Black family life, though they did not shy away from hardship. Ms. Moore’s characters in “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” (1983) were both struggling wives who wanted the best for their children and husbands in a system portrayed as designed to keep Black Americans down and out.“Killer of Sheep” follows a Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker whose leading of lambs to their death takes on biblical resonance. Ms. Moore played the worker’s unnamed wife as she raises their family in the blighted Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Critics lauded the film’s stark visual style, and The Sacramento Bee called Ms. Moore’s performance “incandescent.”Upon the film’s rerelease in 2007, the critic Stuart Klawans, writing in The Nation, praised the “profoundly moving” work of Ms. Moore and Henry G. Sanders, who played her husband. “Their lives are denuded in many ways, materially impoverished and spiritually numbed,” he wrote, “but for all that, they have the grandeur of unchallengeable fact.”“Bless Their Little Hearts” came next for Ms. Moore. She played Andais, the wife of the protagonist, Charlie (Nate Hardman). The film, directed by Billy Woodbury and written by Mr. Burnett, charts Charlie’s struggle to find permanent work and the temptations he faces to turn to crime, all set against the backdrop of a newly begun extramarital affair.Looking back at the L.A. Rebellion films in an essay in The New York Times in 2020, the critic Ben Kenigsberg found Ms. Moore’s performance naturalistic. “She is shown in contrasting scenes riding the bus: in one, she nods off from fatigue; later, having discovered that Charlie is having an affair, she is wide-awake,” he wrote. “When the two finally fight about the fling, the scene, staged in a single take, feels utterly extemporaneous.”Acting in “Bless Their Little Hearts” was not always easy for Ms. Moore. She recalled in the production notes for the film that the climactic argument scene, filmed in one take, included actual physical violence. But “for the most part,” she said, “it was a film set that was full of love.”Her acting style, Mr. Woodberry, the director, said in an interview, was not naturalistic but realistic, informed by small expressions and actions and drawn from personal experience. “She’s a person who knew a lot about life,” he said of Ms. Moore, “and she could bring that to the character.”Ms. Moore later joined an ensemble cast of Black actors in Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), which is generally considered the first film by a Black woman to achieve a wide release in the United States. In the film, Ms. Moore played Haagar Peazant, a discontented member of the insular Gullah community in the islands off South Carolina during the Jim Crow era. Ms. Moore imbued the character, who wants to leave the community, with an iron will.“The film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians,” The Times critic Stephen Holden wrote in 1992.L.A. Rebellion movies have entered the pantheon of American film. “Daughters of the Dust” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” were made part of the prestigious Criterion Collection, and “Killer of Sheep” was one of the first 50 films introduced into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1990.Kaycee Collier was born in Kansas City, Kan., on Feb. 24, 1944. Her mother, Angie Mae (Sandifer) Aker, was an activist and advocate for Black Americans with sickle cell disease. Kaycee had seven siblings, two of whom died of sickle cell anemia, inspiring her mother’s devotion to the cause, according to “Kansas City Women of Independent Minds,” a 1992 book by the Kansas City historian Jane Fifield Flynn. Kaycee’s father, Andrew Collier, died shortly after her birth, Ms. Flynn wrote.She married John Moore Jr. in 1959 and later married Stephen Jones. She is survived by the two children of her first marriage, John Moore III and Michelle Moore Swinton; her siblings Margaret Hall, Angie Ruth Wesley, Frances Collier and Jimmie Collier; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.It was in the 1970s that Ms. Moore headed west to audition for Hollywood roles and met Mr. Burnett, the filmmaker who would cast her in “Killer of Sheep.” Her last major film role was in “Ninth Street” (1999), by the writer-director Kevin Willmott.After her mother died in the 1990s, Ms. Moore took over her role as executive director of the Kansas City chapter of the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America. More

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      Nino Castelnuovo, ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ Star, Dies at 84

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      Mr. Castelnuovo, who brought an incandescent charm to the screen, became famous during a golden age of Italian cinema. But his breakthrough role was in a French film.Nino Castelnuovo, a popular Italian film and television actor who found success beyond his home country when he starred alongside Catherine Deneuve in the soaringly sentimental French New Wave musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” died on Sept. 6 in Rome. He was 84.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his representative, Simone Oppi.Mr. Castelnuovo, who brought an incandescent charm to the screen, became a star during a golden age of Italian cinema. He collaborated with leading directors like Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica and acted alongside greats like Alberto Sordi and Claudia Cardinale.If he achieved international notice with “Umbrellas,” he did not truly attain fame in Italy until 1967, for his role as Renzo in a television series based on Alessandro Manzoni’s 1827 literary epic, “The Betrothed,” which takes place during a plague in the 17th century. Such was that show’s popularity, Mr. Castelnuovo once said, that Pope Paul VI became a fan and requested to meet him. (“Castelnuovo, I wish you to be as good, wise and respectable as your Renzo,” he recalled the pope telling him — to which he said he replied, “Likewise.”)Mr. Castelnuovo became a fixture in Italian living rooms in the 1980s as the athletic middle-aged spokesman for Olio Cuore, a brand of corn oil. In television commercials for the product, he vaulted over a fence to display his good health.“He’s one of the excellent underrated Italian actors,” Antonio Monda, who teaches a course on Italian cinema at New York University and is the artistic director of the Rome Film Festival, said in a phone interview. “He was praised abroad, especially in France, but was somewhat overlooked in Italy. His curse was doing that infamous oil commercial.”Mr. Castelnuovo secured his place in the international film canon for his performance in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” Jacques Demy’s 1964 New Wave romance in which all the dialogue was sung, almost as though it were a cinematic opera. (Michel Legrand wrote the music; Mr. Castelnuovo’s voice was dubbed.) The movie was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and received five Academy Award nominations, including one for best foreign-language film and one for the song “I Will Wait for You.”“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” set in a Normandy port town, recounts the youthful love affair between a garage mechanic named Guy, played by Mr. Castelnuovo, and Geneviève, the daughter of an umbrella shop owner, played by Ms. Deneuve. Their romance ends when Guy is drafted into the Algerian war. Geneviève soon discovers she is pregnant with Guy’s child. When they finally meet again, they have married other people, and their love is a bittersweet memory.Revisiting the film in 2011, The New York Times critic A.O. Scott called it “one of the most romantic films ever made.” “The romance between these young lovers was not meant to be,” he added, “but our romance with this incomparable film will last forever.”Mr. Castelnuovo in Paris in 1966 with Christine Delaroche, his co-star in the Vittorio De Sica film “A New World.”Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesFrancesco Castelnuovo was born on Oct. 28, 1936, in Lecco, Italy. His father, Camillo, worked in a button factory. His mother, Emilia Paola (Sala) Castelnuovo, was a maid.Growing up, Francesco held jobs as a mechanic and a house painter to support himself. He often found refuge in the darkness of movie theaters and idolized Fred Astaire, whose films inspired him to become a gymnast and a dancer in his teens.In 1955, he moved to Milan to study at the Piccolo Teatro repertory theater. He also found work as a mime on a children’s television show about a magician named Zurli. He made his film debut in 1959 with a small part in Pietro Germi’s crime thriller “The Facts of Murder,” and he appeared the next year in Visconti’s acclaimed “Rocco and His Brothers.”Among Mr. Castelnuovo’s other films were “The Hunchback of Rome” (1960), which was notable for featuring the director Pier Paolo Pasolini in an acting role, and De Sica’s 1966 drama, “A New World.” He appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s segment of “Amore e Rabbia” (1969), a series of short stories directed by various cinema luminaries. He reunited with Deneuve in Agnès Varda’s film “The Creatures” in 1966.He is survived by his wife, Maria Cristina Di Nicola; his son, Lorenzo; and his sister, Marinella.In 1996, at the age of 60, Mr. Castelnuovo played the archaeologist D’Agostino in Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient.” He continued acting into his 70s, performing in productions of works by the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni and playing a judge on the television series “Tuscan Passion” from 2013 to 2015. He also worked to raise awareness of glaucoma, from which he had long suffered.In interviews, Mr. Castelnuovo often reflected on the glorious era of Italian cinema that he had witnessed firsthand. He sometimes complained that Italian films had become less, well, Italian.“I come from a cinema that is very different from now,” he said in a Roman television interview in 1999. “It was a time when Italian film was the most respected cinema in the world.”“We’ve decided to follow the Americans and other big nations,” he continued. “We’ve lost sight of just how much talent we Italians have.“We’re a country of marvelous people. Marvelous in the sense that, without our imaginations, we cannot live. We’re not very good realists, which makes us very imaginative people.” More