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      Camille Saviola, ‘Deep Space Nine’ and Stage Actor, Dies at 71

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      She was known for her comic work in cabarets, for her performance in the musical “Nine” on Broadway and for her role in a “Star Trek” spinoff.Camille Saviola, an actress and singer who made an impression in the musical “Nine” on Broadway, in assorted cabaret spoofs and on television in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and other series, died on Oct. 28 in a hospital in North Bergen, N.J. She was 71.Alyssa Romeo, a great-niece, said the cause was heart failure.Ms. Saviola frequently drew comparisons to Ethel Merman for her big voice, which she liked to use to comic effect. One character she played in more than one cabaret show received the Ten Commandments of Soul from James Brown, earning her something of a nickname: “the Italian Godmother of Soul.”Onstage, she was best known for originating the role of Mama Maddelena, a spa manager, in the original production of “Nine,” the Arthur Kopit-Maury Yeston musical about a film director having a midlife crisis, which opened on Broadway in May 1982 and ran for almost two years. She was featured in a comic number, “The Germans at the Spa.”But she wasn’t limited to comedy. In 2005, for instance, she starred in a production of “Mother Courage and Her Children,” Bertolt Brecht’s famed antiwar play, in Pasadena, Calif.“As Mother Courage, Camille Saviola is wily, indomitable and eminently practical,” Daryl H. Miller wrote in reviewing that performance in The Los Angeles Times.She endeared herself to a different group of fans when she was cast in “Deep Space Nine” as Kai Opaka, a spiritual leader on the planet Bajor. Though she appeared in only four episodes, from 1993 to 1996, Ms. Saviola was well known to followers of the franchise, many of whom posted about her death on social media.In a 1995 interview with a “Deep Space Nine” fan magazine that is quoted on the website Memory Alpha, Ms. Saviola talked about how she got the part.“I went in — every character actress was there — and did a little reading, the real thing,” she said, referring not to a script reading but to a tarot card reading. “My grandmother read cards and tea leaves down in Greenwich Village — she never charged people money — and I have a little bit of that gift.”Camille Saviola was born on July 16, 1950, in the Bronx to Michael and Mary (D’Esopo) Saviola. The performing bug bit early.“I wanted to be Elvis Presley, and at 6 I was already lip-syncing to his records and putting on magic shows,” she told The New York Times in 1985. “By the time I was 7, I knew a thousand jokes. Around puberty, I discovered Judy Garland.”Ms. Saviola in 2003. She was seen on Broadway, in cabarets and in more than 40 film and television roles. Bruce Glikas/FilmMagicShe graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York and, her great-niece said, studied voice for a time at City College, but she left to work Off Off Broadway and in summer stock. She also sang with an all-female rock group for a time.In 1980 she was in the original Off Off Broadway cast of “Starmites,” a science fiction musical, billed only as Camille and belting out a number called “Hard to Be Diva.” (The show made Broadway briefly in 1989, though without her.) She was also in a touring production of the rock opera “Tommy,” playing the characters the Mother and the Acid Queen.In March 1985, at the Ballroom Theater in Manhattan, she was the central figure in a cabaret musical called “Hollywood Opera” that parodied eight classic films.“At the center of this nonsense stands the commandingly funny singer-actress Camille Saviola, who delivers two showstopping bits,” Stephen Holden wrote in a review in The New York Times. “The first is a heaving caricature of Anna Magnani retelling the story of ‘The Rose Tattoo’ in a pattery tarantella called ‘Della Rose’s Turn.’ Later, with Perry Arthur taking the Paul Henreid role, Miss Saviola, impersonating Bette Davis with Groucho Marx eyebrows, demolishes once and for all our fond memories of the two-cigarettes-in-the-dark love scene from ‘Now Voyager.’”Later that year she incorporated some of those bits into her own cabaret show, “Secrets of the Lava Lamp,” which found her alternately singing and telling stories.Ms. Saviola had small parts in two Woody Allen movies, “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984) and “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), the first of her more than 40 film and television roles. She had recurring roles on the 1990s TV series “The Heights” and “Civil Wars” and, more recently, on “First Monday,” “Judging Amy” and “Entourage.” In 2018 and 2019 she had a recurring role on the TV Land series “Younger.”Ms. Saviola, who at her death lived in West New York, N.J., is survived by a sister, Mary Ann Horman. More

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      in Movies

      How Meryl Streep Prepared to Play the President in ‘Don’t Look Up’

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      Meryl Streep explains how she prepared to play a fictional (and not especially competent) U.S. president in Adam McKay’s apocalyptic satire “Don’t Look Up.”Who would you turn to if you learned a comet was on a collision course with Earth and decisive action was required to prevent the extinction of all life on this planet? If your first thought was Meryl Streep, you have made both an excellent and terrible choice.In “Don’t Look Up,” from the writer-director Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Vice”), two scientists played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence find themselves facing this end-of-the-world scenario and must turn to a United States government led by the fictional President Orlean for assistance.The good news (for the movie, which will reach theaters on Dec. 10 and Netflix on Dec. 24) is that Orlean is played by Streep, the venerated film and TV star; the bad news (for humanity) is that Orlean is a self-centered scoundrel who cares a great deal about her public image but little to nothing about running the country.Orlean is one of several malefactors in “Don’t Look Up,” a social satire that McKay wrote about climate change but that he fully expects will be interpreted as a commentary on the pandemic. The president is also a character whose many faults and shortcomings Streep delighted in bringing to life, and she credits McKay for giving her and her co-stars the latitude to indulge in awfulness.As Streep explained in a recent phone interview, “He never lost heart or confidence in this vision that he had for this thing, which was to make an atmosphere as free as possible for everybody — just go nuts and do what you want. But with a deadly serious intent.”Here, Streep and McKay explained the steps they followed to put President Orlean in the Oval Office.Create a back story.Based on what she’d read in McKay’s screenplay, Streep said she was already envisioning how President Orlean could have won office. “You could imagine a group of various miscreants was pulled together, and she was the least bad of a lot of other candidates that they could have put out there,” Streep said, adding that she thought of Orlean “as someone whose elderly husband had a lot of money, and she got rid of him, and it was in California so she got half. She had no real agenda except to have and retain power, and when she got there, she just realized that the job was pretty easy.”McKay said that in naming the character, he was thinking of New Orleans — “It’s a fun city, but it’s kind of in jeopardy” — and not the fact that Streep played the author Susan Orlean in “Adaptation.” (The notion that he manifested Streep in the role by naming it for her, McKay said, is “definitely not the case.”)Draw on real-life inspiration.McKay said he thought of President Orlean as “a goulash” of recent chief executives. That meant “the self-serving con man aspects of the last president, the dangerous inexperience of George W. Bush, the slick polish of Bill Clinton, the celebrity of Barack Obama and the coziness with big money,” McKay said. Another inspiration was the finance expert Suze Orman, whom McKay described as “a brash populist with a strong fashion statement.”To that recipe, Streep said she added a dash of the “Real Housewives,” whose televised squabbles often play in her house when her daughters come to visit. Though Streep won an Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” she said that performance was instructive only up to a point. Thatcher, she said, “wielded a kind of femininity that was intimidating to men, and part of her power was how she could pull it together — it was very specific to the ladder she climbed there.” Orlean, she said, is “more of our time — algorithmically put together.”Streep on the set. Her look was modeled on that of news anchors.Niko Tavernise/NetflixLook the part.Streep had a hand in devising Orlean’s fashion sensibility, which she said communicated something essential about the character: “So what if she’s 70 years old and dresses like she’s 35?” she explained. “No one told her you can’t be 35 forever.” That meant attire modeled after TV news anchors who, Streep said, “tend to pick these broad swaths of bright, happy colors to put on themselves — no prints, no polka dots or plaids or, God forbid, florals. None of the things that other people wear. Just these power suits and pencil skirts.” It also called for a specific hair regimen: “When I was in high school, you’d set your hair in rollers, then take it out and brush it 100 times,” Streep said. “This is the kind of hair where you take it out of rollers and just leave it like that — the longer the better. And then those are sprayed and crisped and the ends curl out in weird ways. And that’s a thing. It has always escaped me why this was good. So I thought, well, I’m going to try to that — God knows I won’t do it in my real life.”Get ready to face the crowds.All that advance planning may still not fully prepare you for the demands of the presidency, as Streep discovered on her first day of shooting. She had spent several weeks in isolation, as screen actors have been required to do during the pandemic. Then, on the appointed day, she said, “I bundled up in my big down coat, put the dog in the back of my car, drove through a snowstorm to Worcester, Mass., and got out at a stadium and parked.” Once there, Streep said, “They tried to turn me away at several points to get into the set. I said no, I’m in it.” After getting into hair, makeup and costume, Streep took to the stage where she saw her face on a Jumbotron and heard the delayed echo of her voice as she spoke to a crowd of several hundred extras. “And I just lost it,” she said. “I thought, well, I clearly have to retire. I can’t do this. I actually can’t do this. It was really a crisis of confidence.” Needless to say, Streep did find her bearings, but, she said, “it took a while.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Aunjanue Ellis Leans Into a Supporting Role in 'King Richard'

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      The actress is used to secondary parts, but with “King Richard” she is being singled out for her turn as the mother of Venus and Serena Williams.The actress Aunjanue Ellis is nearly 30 years into an onscreen career, but until about a decade ago, she thought it was all a fluke.The 52-year-old Mississippi native grew up on a farm and had no drama experience outside of performing in Easter and Christmas plays at church. She began her undergraduate studies at Tougaloo College, the historically Black university where an acting instructor encouraged her to consider taking the craft seriously.“My feet had no path and he just gave me one,” she said in an recent interview.Now, she’s just weeks away from the release of a biopic that is generating Oscar chatter about her performance: “King Richard” is the story of Richard Williams (played by Will Smith), the father of tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams. Ellis plays Oracene Price, his wife.Looked at in one light, it’s a typical part in a career that can perhaps be best characterized as a series of roles ranging from minor to supporting. But Ellis, who went on to earn degrees at Brown and New York Universities, has fully leaned into them and made them her own: whether that’s showcasing her comedic chops in “Undercover Brother” or gravitas in dramas like “Ray” and “The Help.”In recent years she’s earned critical acclaim in productions like “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel,” and Emmy nominations for her turns in “When They See Us” and “Lovecraft Country.” Her performance as Price may be another step on the awards path: she has been singled out by critics and Oscar pundits alike when it played on the festival circuit ahead of its Nov. 19 release on HBO Max and in theaters.On a video call from Chicago, where she’s filming her next project, “61st Street,” a series set to air on AMC, Ellis spoke about what she hopes audiences take from her performance as Oracene Price and the pressure to choose roles that reflect well on Black women. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.From left: Demi Singleton as Serena Williams, Saniyya Sidney as Venus Williams and Ellis as their mother, Oracene Price, in “King Richard.” Warner Bros.Your first onscreen role was on the TV show “New York Undercover.” Do you remember how it felt when you got cast?I say this with intention because somebody will hear this and feel themselves reflected in my story. My grandmother stood in line for government cheese, for peanut butter, just so we could eat — to sustain us. I was raised on AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children]. I would hide because I would be so embarrassed that my grandmother was paying for our groceries with public assistance.There was nowhere in my imagination that I would be making a living doing something creative. Absolutely none. I got the “New York Undercover” job, I just thought it was a fluke. It wasn’t probably until 10 years ago that I started to believe that I could sustain my life and my family by acting.What makes you say yes to a role?I’m real childish about this. Is it going to be fun? Am I going to have a good time? Can I do it and not be embarrassed and stand by the fact that I’ve done it? That’s a challenge I’m still navigating. I have a responsibility that the people I generally work with don’t have. I know what it’s like to have done a film and when it’s over, Black women are looking at you like, “Why did you do that? You failed us by doing that” and having to answer for that. I think Black women particularly have to answer for that in a way that nobody else does. Those are my considerations: Is it fun to play and am I doing a service to Black women?How did the script come to you and what were your initial thoughts after you read it?I know there were probably other candidates that they were looking at, that they were going to go to originally. I’m used to that. I just bided my time and waited for the possibility that I would get a chance to read for it — and I did.The wife of the hero can be utterly boring to play because they are stick figures and their only purpose is to, as I’ve read somewhere, create problems for the hero. I felt that [the screenwriter] Zach Baylin had done something where that wasn’t the case with Ms. Oracene — she had a life outside her husband. I thought that was going to be fun to play..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How did you prepare for the role? Did you get a chance to speak to her?I play the character of Ms. Oracene Price. I’m not doing a recreation of her life. So I approach it in the same way I approach any other role. The other great thing is that I have material to work with. There’s history there, information that I don’t just get out of my own head.Zach and Reinaldo Marcus Green, the director, did extensive interviews with Ms. Oracene, so I listened to those tapes over and over again. She’s a particular kind of woman that is more of a challenge for me. When I play characters, I try to find things on the outside of them that I can capture like accents, how they walk, how they talk. But Ms. Oracene is a very interior person, so I had to rely on her words about herself. Her daughter Isha Price was on set every day, so she was a great resource as well.I’m curious about what you’re channeling. Is it a person? Where does that kind of intensity come from?[On] Wikipedia she was referenced as a coach and I had such a cynical response to that. I thought, why is she calling herself a coach? Isn’t that an overreach? I mean, it’s great that she’s in the stands with her children and cheering them on, but that doesn’t make you a coach.And hearing these tapes, listening to her daughters talk about her, you find out that Ms. Oracene was as much a coach to these girls as Richard Williams was. She was designing their approach to their play. I didn’t know that. I think 99 percent of the world doesn’t know that about Ms. Oracene.Mr. Williams is the architect of the new face of the new generation of tennis; Ms. Price is the builder of that. Now she does all this while working two jobs — plural — and she trained herself for years so she could coach her kids. There are so many women living lives like this. I wanted people to know who Ms. Oracene Price was and is. That is what drove me. I’m speaking for this woman.Ellis was Emmy Award-nominated for her role in the HBO series “Lovecraft Country.”Eli Joshua Ade/HBOI wonder if you see parallels with your own career. Does it feel like your time?I don’t know. It’s strange. I toiled. I was in a whole bunch of stuff that nobody saw and nobody liked. They let me know they didn’t like it. God knows I’ve been in things that were golden and glossy but I wasn’t as proud. But I’m so proud to be a part of something that hopefully gives this family their flowers.What you brought to this role is making you a possible contender for the Oscars. How does that feel?The reality is there’s a practical side of that, right? When that is next to your name, it helps you get more work. I lose jobs all the time to chicks that have that thing at the end of their name. If it happens, it would be great because it expands my job options and everything that comes with that. But the other side of that is, it’s a further extension for me to shout out Oracene Price. She stood in the stands and clapped for her daughters, but it would be so cool to hear people clap for her.Are there any directors you’d like to work with?Reinaldo Marcus Green of “King Richard” — I’d love to work with him again. Raven Jackson, a Southern woman, is doing her first feature. She’s a wonderful writer. I hope that I’ll have a chance to work with her.There are things people send my way — my managers and agents — they come from these reputed directors. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in Black folks who are hungry to tell stories about Black people and doing it in really interesting, innovative ways.Would you do a buddy cop film or a romantic comedy?Listen, there’s nobody throwing scripts my way. That sound you hear, that’s not people throwing scripts at me.That might change.Well not right now. That’s not my life. So if I had to choose, I certainly am going to choose a “King Richard,” I’m going to choose “When They See Us.” I get joy out of doing that kind of work.Acting is not something that you necessarily do for a hobby, it is how you pay your rent. I do what I need to do to take care of my family. If I had to choose, this kind of work that I’m doing now is the kind of work I’ll continue to do.Do you think about the kind of film you’d like to be the star of?Certainly. There are things I’m working on right now and trying to make happen. I’m from the South, and one of the great travesties is the erasure of Black women who were so central in the freedom rights movement. And I say the freedom movement, not the civil rights movement, because they were two different demographics. So what I’m living to do is to correct that.​​ More

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      Paul Newman Will Tell His Own Story, 14 Years After His Death

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      Knopf plans to publish a book next year based on hours of recordings the movie star left behind, as well as interviews with family, friends and associates.Decades ago, the actor and philanthropist Paul Newman, frustrated by all the unauthorized biographies and coverage of his life, recorded his own oral history, leaving behind transcripts that for years were forgotten in the basement laundry room of his house in Connecticut.Now his family has decided to turn those transcripts into a memoir, which will be published by Knopf next fall.“What he recorded, and in essence what he wrote, was so honest and revealing,” said Peter Gethers, an editor-at-large at Knopf who will edit the book, which does not yet have a title. “It showed this extraordinary arc, a guy who was very, very flawed at the beginning of his life and as a young man, but who, as he got older, turned into the Paul Newman we want him to be.”Newman — known for his blue eyes and 50-year acting career in movies such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Hud” and “Cool Hand Luke” — died in 2008 at age 83.The book began more than 30 years ago as an oral history project put together by one of Newman’s closest friends, the screenwriter Stewart Stern. Stern, whose 1968 film “Rachel, Rachel,” was directed by Newman and starred his wife, Joanne Woodward, spent several years interviewing people from all corners of Newman’s life, including his children, his ex-wife Jacqueline Witte, close friends, and actors and directors who worked with him. This produced thousands of pages of transcripts and convinced Newman he should do his own version. Stern peppered him with questions, Gethers said, and they created recordings that are a mix of interview and Newman speaking without prompts..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The recordings, completed about 10 years before his death, describe Newman’s early life, including his difficult relationship with his parents, as well as his troubles with drinking, his shortcomings as a husband in his first marriage, and his flaws as a parent. It is candid about his sorrow when his son, Scott, died of a drug and alcohol overdose at 28.One of several photos of Newman and his family that will appear in his forthcoming memoir.via KnopfThe book also delves into Newman’s insecurity in his younger years, exploring his jealousy of peers like James Dean and Marlon Brando when they were all working in Hollywood.“He said that his mother did not so much think of him as flesh and blood, but as a decoration,” Gethers said. “He says that if he was not a pretty child, she never would have paid attention to him at all. It’s a devastating thing to read, and clearly forms so much of his life and his insecurity about being an actor.”The memoir will also cover his marriage to Woodward, which Gethers called “remarkably loving, affectionate and sexy,” as well as his acting career and racecar driving.The book was purchased at auction this spring, Gethers said. It will be about 80 percent memoir, with the remaining part based on the recordings Stern made with people close to Newman. It will also include previously unreleased family photographs.The transcripts were given to Knopf, which was then charged with turning it into a book. (After the publisher bought it, more transcripts were found in a storage unit in Connecticut, in a banker’s box marked “PLN / HISTORY,” Gethers said.) Stern died in 2015, so Newman’s daughters are participating in the editing process, in essence as an author would, approving changes and drafts.Gethers himself is the author of 13 books and several screenplays, and has produced movies and television shows. He said that while wooing the Newman family during the bidding process, he told them that his father, a TV writer and producer, wrote one of Newman’s earliest starring roles in 1956 on a show called “Rag Jungle.” Gethers also mentioned that he had two cats named for Newman roles: Harper and Hud. More

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      ‘Maybe I Do Have a Story to Tell’: Kal Penn on His Memoir

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      Starring in the buddy stoner comedy “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” is good material for a memoir. One might think that serving as a staffer in Barack Obama’s White House is good material for another memoir, by a different person. But the actor Kal Penn writes about both experiences in “You Can’t Be Serious,” which Gallery Books will publish on Tuesday.The book has attracted early attention for its most personal detail: Penn is gay, and engaged to Josh, his partner of 11 years. Their relationship is conveyed in one chapter that is mostly about their earliest dates, during which they seemed comically mismatched.Penn also writes about growing up in suburban New Jersey and fully catching the acting bug while performing in a middle-school staging of “The Wiz.” He is candid about his fight against the entertainment industry’s tendency to cast actors of color in stereotypical roles. And he recounts the “sabbatical” he took after establishing a Hollywood career to campaign for Obama and then serve in the public engagement arm of his administration.Below, Penn talks about finding the story he wanted to tell, the self-loathing he first felt while writing it and the filmmaker who inspired his career.When did you first get the idea to write this book?The first idea, which I rejected, came the day I left the White House. My manager called me. I describe him in the book as like every character from the TV show “Entourage” in one person. Heart of gold but also a lion..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}And he said, “You need to write a book. I’ll set you up with meetings.” I said, “Dan, what am I going to write a book about?” He said, “There aren’t many actors who have been in politics.” I said, “The governor is literally Arnold Schwarzenegger.” And the reason I took the sabbatical was not to write a book. I don’t like the optics of that and, more importantly, I don’t have a story to tell.Later I thought, maybe I do have a story to tell: I’d love to write a book for the 20-year-old version of me. There was never a book that said, “This is how you navigate the entertainment industry as a young man of color.” And I’ve met a lot of people who were told they’re crazy for having multiple passions. We’re in a society that just doesn’t encourage that kind of thing. So I thought maybe my experiences might make somebody smile or feel a little more connected, and I had a chance to put it together and write it during the pandemic.What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?There was a point three months into writing it when I felt the kind of self-loathing that I haven’t felt since middle school. I texted a bunch of my writer friends, and they all either said, “Yeah, buddy, welcome to being an author,” or “Why do you think so many of us drink so much Scotch?” Just a sea of those types of responses.Up until that point, I’d written fiction, essentially scripts and characters. It’s very different when you’re creating a character or a plotline: That’s not you, you can take a break from it. With this process, it’s “Oh my God, there’s no escaping my own brain.” I was not prepared for it.In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?I was sure that I wanted to share two stories: one about my parents and their upbringing; and the story of how Josh and I met. He showed up with an 18-pack of Coors and turned my TV from “SpongeBob” to NASCAR. I thought, “This guy’s leaving here in 40 minutes with 16 beers.” So the fact that we’re together 11 years later is funny because so many people have stories of dates that went awry but now they’re married and have kids.In the book’s outline, there was no ending. I always struggled with that. I thought there was going to have to be some kind of a positive wrap-up, a story of triumph after years of typecasting and racism. And then “Sunnyside” happened. I sold this show after I had already started writing the book. There’s a chapter I write about how it’s truly my dream show: a big network [NBC], a diverse, patriotic comedy that would hopefully bring people together and make them laugh.And then it slowly unraveled. With everything else in the book, I have the perspective of time. This was still raw. I ended up putting it as the last real chapter because it’s a perfect example of how much has changed and how much has yet to change.We often think of goals as: Everything has now been fixed, so end of story. In reality, everything is a constant mess of back and forth.What creative person who isn’t a writer has influenced you and your work?I always say Mira Nair, and I would have said this years ago, before this book was ever on the table. Her second film, “Mississippi Masala,” came out when I was in eighth grade. It was the first time I’d seen South Asian characters onscreen that weren’t stereotypes or cartoon characters.They were deeply flawed, deeply interesting humans. They make love, they have financial problems. And that happened around the time “The Wiz” happened, so she was one of the people who inspired me to pursue a career in the arts.So when I got a chance to work with her on “The Namesake,” it meant a lot to me. And “The Namesake,” the novel — Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing was introduced to me by John Cho, from “Harold & Kumar.” All of those influences intersecting are very meaningful to me.Persuade someone to read “You Can’t Be Serious” in 50 words or fewer.If you want to feel like you’re having a beer with somebody who smoked weed with a fake president and served a real one, whose grandparents marched with Gandhi and whose parents certainly didn’t move to America for him to slide off a naked woman’s back in his first film. More

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      in Theater

      Audra McDonald to Star in ‘Ohio State Murders’ on Broadway

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      The production brings the world of the playwright Adrienne Kennedy, 90, to Broadway for the first time.The actress Audra McDonald has agreed to star in a Broadway production of “Ohio State Murders,” bringing the work of the eminent experimental playwright Adrienne Kennedy to the nation’s most prominent stage for the first time.The play, first staged in 1992 at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, is about a Black writer who returns to her alma mater, Ohio State University, to talk about violence in her work. Set in the 1950s, the play is a compact exploration of the destructive power of racism, with six roles and a usual running time of 75 minutes.Kennedy, 90, is both acclaimed (in 2008 she was honored for lifetime achievement at the Obie Awards) and also unfamiliar to the general public; the New York Times critic Maya Phillips wrote this year that Kennedy “is often shelved among the ranks of the ‘celebrated’ and the ‘influential’ who are rarely produced.”The Broadway production is to be directed by Kenny Leon, and produced by Jeffrey Richards, Rebecca Gold, Jayne Baron Sherman and Irene Gandy. On Monday, Richards announced that the production is in development, but did not specify the timing.Earlier this year, McDonald and Leon collaborated on a streamed reading of “Ohio State Murders.” The play had an Off Broadway production, with a different cast and creative team, in 2007, presented by Theater for a New Audience.McDonald, with six Tony Awards, has won more competitive Tony Awards than any other performer in history. She last appeared on Broadway in a 2019 revival of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.”One of McDonald’s Tony Awards was for her performance in a 2004 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” which Leon directed. Leon then won his own Tony Award in 2014, when he directed another revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” More

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      in Television

      Cobie Smulders Communes With Sharks

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      She plays a deliciously coldblooded Ann Coulter in “Impeachment.”A white shark nudged closer, gliding just above the actress Cobie Smulders, like a fan asking for a selfie. Ms. Smulders welcomed the intrusion. “This is cool,” she said, rapt, as the shark slid past in the waters of the New York Aquarium.Ms. Smulders, adored for her nine seasons on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” has loved aquariums for as long as she can remember. As a mermaid-obsessed child in British Columbia, she visited the Vancouver aquarium often and spent weekends on her father’s sailboat, wondering about the life below the water’s surface. The University of Victoria accepted her to its marine biology program.But a few months before school began, she fell in with some theater actors and deferred for a year. And then another year. And then another.An avid scuba diver and an ambassador for Oceana, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting and restoring the world’s oceans, Ms. Smulders never gave up on the water. She participates in beach cleanups near the Los Angeles home she shares with her husband, the actor Taran Killam, and their two daughters. And she campaigns against the single-use plastics that clog waterways.“It’s a human conversation that needs to be talked about more loudly,” she said.She still has mermaid fantasies. “I still think it could be a possibility,” she said. And she still loves aquariums, though only those that favor conservation.Ms. Smulders studied marine biology before she became an actress.  Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesOn a recent trip to New York City to promote the FX limited series “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” she took a car to Coney Island to visit the aquarium’s shark exhibit.She breezed in from the boardwalk just before noon, showing her vaccine card to a giddy employee. “I thought I recognized you!” the woman said as she checked Ms. Smulders’s ID. Rather than dressing for the beach, Ms. Smulders had chosen a monochrome look: belted black Chanel blazer, black jeans and black boots with stamped metal buckles that shone in the October sunlight. Pearls plucked from some very talented oysters hugged her neck.In the first building, she cooed over yellow snappers and pointed out some angelfish, then admired the stripes on some zebrafish. “Mother Nature knows what’s up,” she said approvingly.A cow nose ray caught her eye, as did a yellow rose goby. “I want to be the person who gets to name these,” she said. “You can have a lot of fun with that job.”Ms. Smulders, 39, seems to have fun with most jobs. On “Impeachment,” which revisits the impeachment of Bill Clinton, she plays the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, a member of the Elves, a group of conservative lawyers who advised Paula Jones’s team.With hair like a Westminster-winning Afghan hound, legs like the Eiffel Tower and a voice as clipped and polished as a high-end manicure, her version of Ms. Coulter finds pleasure everywhere she goes, usually because she brings multiple bottles of wine along. And yet she remains as coldblooded as the aquarium’s sharks.“You’re all too nice,” her Ms. Coulter says of her fellow Elves during a late-night strategy scene.Initially, Ms. Smulders had resisted the role. The “Impeachment” producers had approached her a few weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the first in which Ms. Smulders, a proud Canadian who recently became an American citizen, could vote. Ms. Smulders votes a liberal ticket, so sharing head space with Ms. Coulter, who has written books such as “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism,” didn’t seem healthy or fun.But Mr. Killam was already attached to the series as Steve Jones, Paula Jones’s husband. And “Stumptown,” the moody procedural on ABC in which Ms. Smulders starred, was canceled because of the pandemic, freeing up her schedule.“Isn’t it just so peaceful here?” Ms. Smulders said of the shark exhibit.  Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesSo after Donald Trump lost the election, Ms. Smulders taped an audition. Playing an ultraconservative — especially an ultraconservative with a miniskirt wardrobe and a champagne habit — no longer felt so dark to her.“She’s the only one who can actually have any fun,” Ms. Smulders said of her character. “This confidence that this woman has, to be able to walk into a room and think you’re the smartest person in the room, that you’re the most powerful person in the room, that is the polar opposite of me and my life.”In the shark building, which Ms. Smulders had entered after passing a harbor seal (“Hi, friend!”) and a waddling penguin (“You can do it, buddy!”), it was clear where the power lay. Crawling into a tunnel just past the coral reef section, she marveled at the zebra sharks and bamboo sharks swimming just inches away. “I want to set up a little cot in there,” she said when she emerged. “Waking up to that? Heaven! Heaven!”Not everyone enjoys intimate encounters with fish that might find you delicious, but Ms. Smulders does. On a recent family trip to Oahu, she went for a cage dive with huge Galápagos sharks. “That was a crazy thing,” she said. She enjoys humbler marine life, too. Polyps are an obsession, as is algae, which has a mutualistic relationship with reefs.Further into the shark exhibit, past a re-creation of a shipwreck, Ms. Smulders stopped at Hudson Canyon’s Edge, a dramatic wall of water. She admired the rays, floating past like cheerful ghosts, and a whiskered fish that swam beneath them. “I love a little mustache on a fish,” she said. A loggerhead cruised by, pausing to admire her Tod’s bag. Sharks surrounded her, some of them grinning toothily. Ms. Smulders smiled at each predator.“Isn’t it just so peaceful here?” she said. More

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      in Television

      Val Bisoglio, Oft-Cast Character Actor, Dies at 95

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      He was seen on “Quincy, M.E.” and “The Sopranos.” He also memorably played John Travolta’s father in “Saturday Night Fever.”By 1986, after 30 years in the business, Val Bisoglio had made such an impression as a character actor that Danny Arnold, a producer casting a new police series called “Joe Bash,” wrote in a casting notice for a particular part simply that he was looking for “a Val Bisoglio-type.”Mr. Bisoglio saw the notice and figured that he was probably as good a Val Bisoglio-type as anybody. He called Mr. Arnold and landed the role, a desk sergeant.“Joe Bash” was short-lived, but the anecdote shows just how much Mr. Bisoglio was able to do with an Everyman-ish face, a distinctive voice and a versatility that enabled him to play cops, tough guys, bartenders, judges, fathers.He was perhaps best known for portraying the father of John Travolta’s character in the film “Saturday Night Fever” in 1977 (he whacks Mr. Travolta upside the head several times in a memorable dinner scene) and the owner of a restaurant preferred by the title character, a medical examiner played by Jack Klugman, on the television drama “Quincy, M.E.” from 1976 to 1983. But from the 1960s through the ’80s, television viewers were likely to encounter him in a seemingly endless list of guest roles.“If it was a popular TV show,” his wife, Bonnie (Ray) Bisoglio, said in a phone interview, “he was on it.”Mr. Bisoglio, right, with Jack Klugman in an episode of “Quincy, M.E.” He played the owner of a restaurant, and Mr. Klugman played a medical examiner. “Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant.”United Archives via Getty ImagesMr. Bisoglio died on Oct. 18 at his home near Los Olivos, Calif. He was 95.His wife said the cause was late-onset Lewy body dementia, which had been diagnosed a year ago.In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”Italo Valentino Bisoglio (pronounced bee-ZOL-yoh) was born on May 7, 1926, in Manhattan. His father, Mario, was a greengrocer during the Depression, then worked in construction, and his mother, Virginia (Gallina) Bisoglio, did piecework sewing. Both had emigrated from the Piedmont region of northern Italy.Growing up in New York, he said, he was more interested in going to vaudeville and other theaters than in going to school; he dropped out after 10th grade and at 16 made his way to Los Angeles, where he lived for a while, also spending time in Las Vegas. But he came to acting late; first he worked at various jobs, including, in his early 20s, selling water-softening devices, which made him a significant amount of money.“It went through my hands faster than water could soften it,” he told The News, largely because he developed a fondness for gambling.Ms. Bisoglio said that migraine headaches helped drive her husband to take acting classes as a form of tension-relieving therapy. He studied with Jeff Corey, a character actor who after being blacklisted in the 1950s became a well-regarded acting teacher, and by the early ’60s Mr. Bisoglio was back in New York and establishing himself as a theater actor.At the Off Broadway Sheridan Square Playhouse in 1965, he was part of a production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” that also included Robert Duvall, Jon Voigt, Susan Anspach and Richard Castellano, all then still early in their careers. The next year he made his only Broadway appearance, in Frederick Knott’s “Wait Until Dark,” playing a con man (Mr. Duvall played another).He began to find television work as well, appearing in episodes of “Bonanza” and “Mayberry R.F.D.,” among other shows, and in 1969 he landed a recurring role on the soap opera “The Doctors.” By the ’70s he had residences on both coasts to accommodate his increasingly busy TV and stage careers.Mr. Bisoglio tended to be offered roles as mobsters and other heavies — he held up Archie Bunker and family in a 1972 episode of “All in the Family” — but, as his wife said, “he yearned for roles where he could show something else,” and he turned down the thug parts when he could. Partly, he said, that was because they stereotyped a particular sort of Italian, one not representative of his family’s origins; his mother bristled whenever he took such a part.“She doesn’t cook much pasta,” he told United Press International in 1977. “We northern Italians in the Po Valley area eat mostly rice. We’re from peasant stock.”But, he told The Daily News, he also disliked such roles because they reminded him of his time as a gambler.“When I was a New York gambler I had to mix with those tough guys,” he said. “God, they were tough. Their arms were like iron. Their necks were like iron. Now it’s embarrassing for me to play them.”That said, his final credits were in three episodes of “The Sopranos” in 2002, playing a character named Murf who was part of Junior Soprano’s crew. But Mr. Bisoglio said he always enjoyed the chance to play comic roles.In the early 1980s, for instance, he was in several episodes of “M*A*S*H,” playing a cook named Pernelli. In one, Alan Alda’s Hawkeye lectures him at length on how to delicately prepare the perfect French toast. Mr. Bisoglio then ignores him and dumps all the ingredients, including the bread, into a giant pot.Another role that took Mr. Bisoglio a long way from Italian stereotypes came in 1979, when he played an erudite Indian chief named Gray Cloud in the comic western “The Frisco Kid,” with Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford. George American Horse, an actual American Indian, was an adviser on the film, and in 1978 he told The New York Times that, the uncomfortable cross-cultural casting notwithstanding, Mr. Bisoglio’s portrayal was a welcome change from “the stoic Indian sitting on his pony with his arms crossed and wearing war paint.”Mr. Bisoglio’s marriage to Joyce Haden was brief and ended in divorce. He and Ms. Bisoglio married in 1996. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Joseph Bisoglio and Scott Chapman. More