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      With ‘The Kissing Booth 3,’ Joey King Closes a Chapter of Her Life

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      The actress started on the Netflix movies when she was 17 and grew along with her high school character, Elle: “I went through a lot of important life moments in her shoes.”In hindsight, it’s somewhat of a miracle that “The Kissing Booth 3” got made in the first place.Not because the 2018 “The Kissing Booth” was initially a stand-alone film — before the summery rom-com, about a high schooler who falls for her best friend’s brother, became an unexpected hit on Netflix. And not because of the pandemic; this final chapter was shot earlier, in 2019, at the same time as “The Kissing Booth 2.”With workdays that included wrestling in massive inflatable sumo suits, shooting a montage at a water park and racing go-karts in Mario Kart-like costumes, it’s remarkable that Joey King and her colleagues, who had a ball in the process, were able to focus enough to get the job done.“If you put us in a room and you expect us to get much done that’s productive, it’s going to be hard,” King, the franchise’s 22-year-old star, said in a video call. “We’re like 12-year-old boys.”The trilogy’s final film, which begins streaming Wednesday, follows Elle, King’s character, through her last summer before college as she juggles dating her boyfriend, Noah (Jacob Elordi), and checking off the aforementioned antics with her friend Lee (Joel Courtney) in a last-ditch effort to complete their childhood bucket list.One of her next projects has a different vibe: King described “The Princess,” which she’s shooting this summer in Bulgaria, as an action movie, “‘The Raid: Redemption’ meets Rapunzel.” She sat down for a video interview (energetic as ever, it’s worth noting, at 6 a.m. local time) to discuss the end of the series that has defined this phase of her career and how Elle’s coming of age has mirrored her own. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was it like shooting the last two films back to back?Actually, we shot them at the same time — meaning in one day, we’d be shooting scenes from both movies. It was so confusing.How did you keep everything straight?I can’t give myself that kind of credit, because I didn’t. I knew exactly what I was doing every day, but when I was on set and my director [Vince Marcello] would come over and say a note or something, I was like, “Wait, are we in Movie 3 right now?” He’s like, “No, we’re still in Movie 2.” It’s not like they were very similar, because their story lines do take crazy different turns. But it was kind of fun to marry them together.King filmed “The Kissing Booth 3,” above, and the previous film in the trilogy at the same time. “It was so confusing,” she said.Marcos Cruz/NetflixWas this film — along with “The Kissing Booth 2” — the first project you executive produced?It is, which was lovely. I’ve been putting my hand more into producing lately; I’m actually producing “The Princess” as well. But it was really special for me to start on those movies since I’ve been with them for such a long time.I’m a bit of a sponge. On set, it was more of me absorbing stuff from Vince and being like, “So why did we make that decision?” Just asking more questions. He was so willing to be even more collaborative with me and ask my opinion. I felt like I had a voice on set, but my voice really did come in on the back half of filming. I had a lot of say on what the final product was, and I also am very heavily involved in the marketing process. I’m very passionate about both of those things, and I feel like I am one of the target audiences. It’s fun to be able to have a say in something that I would want to watch at the end of the day.At the heart of these movies is a coming-of-age story. Did you find similarities to your own experiences at this stage of your life?I’ve always felt very connected to Elle. I remember receiving the script for the first movie. I called my team, and I said, “When can I audition for this? I want this so bad.” And they were like, “You don’t have to audition for it; it’s an offer.” If I had had to audition for it, I would have done anything to get that job.So when I started playing Elle, I felt like [she] and I were very, very similar. Her vibe, her sense of humor; I felt very in tune with it. And same thing goes for the second and third movie, if not more so — I went through a lot of important life moments in her shoes.King with Jacob Elordi in the final film in the series. King said, “I went through a lot of important life moments in her shoes.”Marcos Cruz/NetflixHow do you feel you’ve changed since then?I have changed so much. It’s actually quite unbelievable to me. I never thought I was going to change as a person, and I was so wrong. That’s the beauty of being young. My perspective on life changed — my perspective on family, on relationships, on career. So that’s why, when I feel like I’ve really gone through so much with Elle, it’s because I have changed so much as a person and learned so much.In what ways?I became a little bit more present. I started meditating. I found a very incredible relationship [the director and producer Steven Piet]. Obviously I’ve always loved my family, but I have found a deeper appreciation for them. And career stuff, too: I started becoming more zeroed in on exactly what I wanted to do and how much I didn’t want to do certain things. And that was really interesting, just to feel a little more empowered in my own abilities to make decisions. I’m actually quite an indecisive person. If you take me to a restaurant, I have no idea what I want. And that’s even if we decide where we should go. But when it comes to my career, my brain switches over to a decisive mode. That’s a new development for me.You’ve had such a range of roles at this point — “The Kissing Booth” is very different from “The Act.” [King was nominated for an Emmy for her performance in the Hulu true-crime drama, as a young woman convicted of killing her mother.] When you talk about narrowing down what you want to do, do you hope to keep that sort of variety? Or do you prefer certain roles?I personally love to keep a wider range, and I never really have a specific “this is what I want to do next.” I want to keep excited about it. I love the fact that they [“The Kissing Booth” and “The Act”] were polar opposites. And I’m hoping that people are excited to see me in different kinds of roles, because I very carefully decided that this is what I want to do.This was, as far as we know for now, the final “Kissing Booth.” But if the opportunity arose, can you see yourself returning to Elle and this story in the future?I started these movies when I was 17. We were just like, we hope people like it — if anyone even sees it. Little did we know what a big impact this would have. I’ve never tired of playing Elle. It’s so fun. Watching this story be wrapped up so nicely in like a beautiful bow, I think it would be a little hard to come back after that. We made this ending exactly what I think it needed to be. Selfishly, do I want to play Elle again? Absolutely. But I think that the story is on its final chapter. More

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      Elizabeth Banks Swears By Rob Reiner and Finger Sandwiches

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      The actress, Hollywood power player and host of a new sex and sexuality podcast discusses classic sitcoms, summer at Tanglewood and the revelation that is canned wine.“I’ve never met somebody who said, ‘Gosh, my parents talked to me about sex too much,’” Elizabeth Banks said.Banks, 47, an actress, writer, director and producer, is a mother to two boys. And as one of them neared puberty, she knew she would have to start talking soon. To prepare, she created “My Body, My Podcast,” an intimate, chatty series that Audible released on July 29. Its six episodes explore sex, sexuality, gender and body image with guests including Laverne Cox, Lindy West and Banks’s own mother. Peggy Orenstein stops in to discuss hookup culture; Jameela Jamil puts the diet industry on blast.Banks, speaking from Dalkey, Ireland, where she is shooting the comedy “Cocaine Bear,” refers to the podcast as her “continuing sex ed” and the most personal work she has ever created. Like all of her recent projects — the “Charlie’s Angels” reboot, the “Pitch Perfect” franchise, “Shrill” — “My Body, My Podcast” centers women’s stories, without apology. “I’m trying to be quietly revolutionary,” Banks said.Huddled in a cozy sweater and drinking a glass of warm tea with a few ice cubes tossed in — “They don’t have iced tea here. It’s not a thing,” she sighed — she discussed the art and ideas that influence her current work and the cultural experiences and artifacts that bring her pleasure. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Girls and Sex” and “Boys and Sex” by Peggy Orenstein These are books in which Peggy Orenstein interviews young people about all of their sexual experiences. I read “Girls and Sex” with my book club, and we were all a little bit devastated at how Peggy presented just how little fun any young women are having. It was a total wake-up call for me as a woman, as a parent, as an advocate and as an artist. It really inspired me to create “My Body, My Podcast.” Peggy followed it up with “Boys and Sex,” which I also read, which confirms that boys and men are desperate for connection and that the standards for them are just as insanely high as they are for girls and women.2. Female Athletes I was sporty as a kid. I’m a sporty person. I just celebrate every single woman who undeniably reaches the top of her field and then uses that platform to make the world better for the rest of us. For me, it started with Billie Jean King fighting for Title IX and pay equity. U.S. women’s soccer, Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, Serena Williams. Even right now with the Olympics, these are women who are doing the absolute most and best with their female bodies. And yet those same bodies are still up for discussion and dissection.3. Tanglewood Tanglewood is a music venue in Lenox, Mass. I grew up in Pittsfield, a factory town just north of Lenox. Looking back, I can see how aspirational it was to go there as a kid. I got to listen to John Williams and the Boston Pops. It was fancy music for fancy people. True bliss for me is laying on the lawn on a warm summer night bathed in music, watching the stars with family and friends by my side.4. Jackson Browne, “Running on Empty” It was a favorite album of my aunt Barbara, Auntie Babs, who passed away during the early Covid lockdown. I started listening to honor her. She introduced me to that album on a road trip that she and I took together, and the album is all about a road trip. There’s a comforting feeling of nostalgia that I get listening to it.5. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari “Sapiens” is a book about the history of humanity across culture. As a woman and a feminist, this book was an important reminder that we, as humans, just kind of decided that birthing and caring for babies was not as important as selling cows, tilling land, using weapons. So women don’t amass any of that wealth and power. This book clarified for me why I feel so strongly in my bones that reproductive rights are the basis for women’s equality.6. “Stand by Me” I love Rob Reiner’s films. I aspire to a filmmaking career like his. This one is an incredible treatise on the damage of toxic masculinity, which were not words when this movie came out, and the obvious antidotes, which are connection, support, brotherly love. My husband and I are raising boys, and we want them to feel connected to us, to their family, to their friends, to nature and to appreciate every day. All of those lessons are in that film.7. Nia DaCosta and Chloé Zhao There is this Hollywood narrative about men who make a small personal film that goes to a festival and then immediately get the keys to the kingdom, the big Hollywood job. The continuing narrative is that women either don’t want those jobs or can’t handle those jobs. Nia DaCosta and Chloé Zhao just busted that narrative all up. They made their personal films, and they also got the big jobs. Chloe’s doing “Eternals”; Nia is doing “The Marvels.” They’re being allowed to have ambition, which is very tricky for women in any industry. It’s that blatant ambition that inspires me the most. I want that.8. High tea I’ve recently rediscovered it, here in Ireland. Growing up, I would go to Boston and have high tea with my great-aunts. For me, it’s a scone with clotted cream and jam, finger sandwiches, petit fours, English Breakfast tea with a little milk and a sugar cube dropped in with real silver tongs. It’s something I love doing no matter where I am in the world.9. Canned wine We do so much hiking, biking, trails, lakes, rivers. And I just don’t really love beer. But I do love wine. A can of wine in the cooler floating down the river? It was like light bulbs going off. I saw how canned wine fit into my life immediately upon being introduced to it.10. Classic sitcoms David Wain, the writer-director on “Wet Hot American Summer,” we’re working on a project together right now. We just started talking about our appreciation for well-crafted jokes, starting with “I Love Lucy” and Jackie Mason. A well-crafted joke and the ability to deliver it, and the timing, it’s just something that is top of my mind as an artist right now. “Friends,” “30 Rock”? Those guys were perfect. More

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      Jane Withers, Child Star Who Later Won Fame in Commercials, Dies at 95

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      As a girl, she landed leading roles that were the antidote to Shirley Temple’s. As an adult, she was known as Josephine the Plumber in ads for Comet cleanser.Jane Withers, a top child star in the 1930s who played tough, tomboyish brats in more than two dozen B films and achieved a second burst of fame as an adult as Josephine the Plumber in commercials for Comet cleanser, died on Saturday in Burbank, Calif. She was 95. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Kendall Errair.In her first major movie role, in 20th Century Fox’s “Bright Eyes” (1934), the 8-year-old Jane played a spoiled rich kid who wanted a machine gun for Christmas and took a ghoulish delight in sending her dolls to the hospital. She was the antidote to the movie’s star, Shirley Temple, the always cheerful, always obedient, always smiling orphan.The titles of some of the films in which Ms. Withers starred said it all: “The Holy Terror” (1937), “Wild and Woolly” (1937), “Rascals” (1938), “Always in Trouble” (1938) and “The Arizona Wildcat” (1939).At the end of most of her movies, “just to satisfy everybody, I get a good spanking,” Ms. Withers told Norman Zierold, the author of “The Child Stars” (1965). “The minute they slapped me in ‘Bright Eyes,’ everybody just yelled and waved, they were so happy. Well, I don’t mind. I had my fun.”As an adult, Ms. Withers played Vashti Snythe, the neighbor of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson who delighted in spending her oil money in “Giant” (1956); appeared in several TV series; and voiced the gargoyle Laverne in the animated “Hunchback of Notre Dame II” (2002), a role she first took on after the death of Mary Wickes in 1995.But her most memorable and long-lasting role was as Josephine the Plumber, in a white cap and overalls, in the 1960s and ’70s. Nearly 40 years later, she was still being recognized for that character.“I can be at a market and I’ll be talking to somebody there about a can of peas and all of a sudden they’ll say, ‘I knew that was you! I recognized your voice right away,’” Ms. Withers told The Long Beach Press-Telegram in 2007.Ms. Withers and Richard Clayton in “A Very Young Lady” in 1941.LMPC, via Getty ImagesMost of her films were made at Fox’s small studio in Hollywood. Shirley Temple’s mother, Gertrude, who was said to be choosy about who was allowed to play with her daughter, had Ms. Withers banished from the studio’s grand Westwood lot, according to another former child star, Dickie Moore. In his memoir, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” Mr. Moore wrote that Gertrude Temple was so protective of Shirley that Jane was not even allowed to say hello to her when the children performed together in “Bright Eyes.”Although her Hollywood success did not survive adolescence, Ms. Withers was the rare child actor who entered adulthood prepared for the real world — and with money in the bank. Her parents “taught Jane bookkeeping at age seven,” Mr. Moore wrote, in contrast to almost all the other parents, who refused to allow their meal tickets to grow up and, in most cases, squandered their money. It was a point of pride for her father, a Goodrich executive, that his salary paid the family’s expenses.Jane Withers was born in Atlanta on April 12, 1926, to Walter and Lavinia Withers. Her mother, a movie fan, picked Jane as a name because she thought it would look good on a marquee. By the age of 4, the pudgy child with the Buster Brown haircut was singing, dancing and imitating Greta Garbo; billed as “Dixie’s Dainty Dewdrop,” she had her own local radio program.When Jane was 6, the family moved to Hollywood. After two years of department store modeling and bit parts, she was cast as Joy Smythe in “Bright Eyes.”Like Ms. Temple, Ms. Withers played an orphan in most of her films. In “Paddy O’ Day” (1935), her rescuer was Rita Cansino — soon to be renamed Rita Hayworth — in her first leading role. In “45 Fathers” (1937), she was adopted by a group of old men.By 1937, Ms. Withers was in sixth place on theater owners’ list of the Top 10 box office stars, despite the fact that she performed only in B movies. And sales of Jane Withers paper dolls, hair bows, socks and mystery novels similar to the Nancy Drew series earned her more money than her movies.Stardom also brought Ms. Withers thousands of dolls and teddy bears, most of them sent by fans. Those fans included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had his wife, Eleanor, hand deliver a teddy bear.Jane Withers in 1935. At the end of most of her movies, she once said, “just to satisfy everybody, I get a good spanking.”Film Publicity Archive/United Archives, via Getty ImagesAs she entered her teenage years, Ms. Withers wrote a story for herself, under the pseudonym Jerrie Walters. It was made into the movie “Small Town Deb” (1942). As her contract with Fox ended, she starred as a peasant girl in Samuel Goldwyn’s “The North Star” (1943).Ms. Withers married a Texas oilman, William Moss Jr., in 1947. They had three children and divorced in 1955, leaving Ms. Withers with several oil wells. That same year she married Kenneth Errair, who had been a member of the singing group the Four Freshmen. He was killed in a plane crash in 1968. (Information on her survivors was not immediately available.)In August 2004, Ms. Withers auctioned several hundred dolls, many of them likenesses of film and radio stars and characters of the 1930s, including Sonja Henie, the Lone Ranger and Snow White.Ms. Withers may never have surpassed Ms. Temple’s popularity on the screen. But in the 2004 sale, a Shirley Temple doll dressed in her “Little Colonel” costume sold for $3,100; a Jane Withers doll sold for $5,600. More

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      Ashley Nicole Black Is Competing Against Herself for an Emmy

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      The comedian was nominated twice in the same Emmy category for her television writing. She’s just getting started.At first, Ashley Nicole Black didn’t get why people kept sending her the meme of Spider-Man pointing at an identical Spider-Man, an image often used to joke about situations in which two incredibly similar people face off.But when someone Photoshopped Ms. Black’s face onto both Spider-Mans, it clicked. The 2021 Emmy Awards nominations had just been announced, and Ms. Black, 36, had been nominated twice in the same category.She was competing against herself.Ms. Black was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series for “The Amber Ruffin Show” and “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” Two other people have been nominated twice in this category in the past five years: John Mulaney and Seth Meyers, both in 2019.I CANT WITH YALL 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/YE7gBnqjw0— Ashley Nicole Black (@ashleyn1cole) July 14, 2021
      “I feel like that kid still, who’s on the side of the playground, who nobody’s noticed,” Ms. Black said in a recent video interview. But that’s just impostor syndrome talking. Ms. Black has been nominated for an Emmy eight times: twice for writing for a variety special and six times for writing for a variety series. She also won once, in 2017, for her work on “Not the White House Correspondents Dinner” with Samantha Bee.Ms. Black has written for many critically acclaimed series and shows, including “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” “Ted Lasso” and “Bless This Mess.” Although “A Black Lady Sketch Show” is Ms. Black’s first time as a series regular, she was a correspondent on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” and acted in “Drunk History” and the 2014 film “An American Education.”Robin Thede, the creator of “A Black Lady Sketch Show” on HBO — which was also nominated this year as an Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, and twice for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (Yvette Nicole Brown and Issa Rae) — sees Ms. Black as “a force of nature and of comedy.”“I have been lucky enough to work with her as a writer and performer and know firsthand how ridiculously good she is at both,” Ms. Thede wrote in an email. “She’s truly a powerhouse who will leave an indelible mark on this industry.”Ms. Black described herself as “someone who’s observing what’s going on in the world, and trying to reflect it back to people.” “To me,” she said, “that’s art.”She is from a family of musicians, so singing in an ensemble, she said — whether it was musical theater or show choir — meant learning to breathe with others and sound like one voice. This set her up for the moment she found improv comedy, because she already knew how to collaborate — and how not to steal a scene. “I was, I think, picking up all the pieces I needed to get where I was going,” she said.After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2007, she began a Ph.D. program in performance studies at Northwestern University. She hated it and was anxious all the time, she said, so her parents bought her an improv class at the Second City comedy club in nearby Chicago to blow off steam.When she took a comedy writing class there, a teacher pulled her aside to let her know she was a writer.“People had been telling me, ‘You should try this. You should try this,’ and I had been uncomfortably trying it,” Ms. Black said. “But ‘you’re a writer’? I was like, ‘yes.’ I completely shifted my view of myself to be a writer first. And that was when everything started to fall into place.”Chicago, Ms. Black said, is the best place in the world to learn comedy writing. There’s an “emotionality” she found in Chicago that she values in many of her collaborators, including Ms. Bee and Ms. Ruffin.“What attracted me to Sam and Amber is that they’re admitting to you that they live in the world,” she said. “And they might be upset about it, and they might be angry about it, and they might cry about it on camera, because they’re not removed from it. They’re a part of it.”This is the “good stuff” of comedy, in Ms. Black’s eyes: The stuff that happens when characters have feelings, and when they’re flawed. People who have been to therapy and have their lives together aren’t nearly as fun to embody, she said. A good example of a character who embodies that tension: Ashley’s perfectionistic alter ego on “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”In the show, Ms. Black plays a woman (also named Ashley) who is a bossy know-it-all. She is trying for total control, and in the process, irritating her friends. “I am not like that and take great pains not to be,” Ms. Black said, “but it’s so much fun to play.”“All day, you have anxiety. You’re trying to make sure everyone around you is comfortable,” she said of real life. “You’re thinking about what you say and what you do and how it affects people. And then, when you get to play those characters who aren’t that way, it’s so freeing.”Ms. Black said she tends to be quiet and a little shy, and that she used to worry that not being “on” all the time might disappoint people. “But I’ve sort of released feeling bad about that,” she said, “because I just try to be present and have honest experiences.”During the pandemic, those experiences included spending time with her family in Los Angeles, being a hardworking dog mom to Gordi the Sato and watching every Marvel movie ever made. “I just wanted to watch good guys win some things,” she said.Right now she’s evaluating what she wants to do next and what percentage of her time she wants to spend on each thing. Ms. Ruffin wrote in an email about Ms. Black, “she’s gone from ‘a writer’ to ‘theeeee writer.’” But Ms. Black is still hoping for a 70-30 or 60-40 writing to acting split, she said.For now, “It really made me so happy that people — oh my gosh, I’m getting emotional — care what I’m doing,” she said. “So I’m just really grateful that anybody noticed that I was working so hard.” More

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      Udo Kier’s Latest Provocation: Leading Man

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      In 1966, a pouty-mouthed Udo Kier made his movie debut in a zippy short called “Road to Saint Tropez,” playing a gigolo who has a fling with an older woman. Their day at Baie des Anges is a romp, but by the time they get to the film’s title beach town, he breaks her heart.This summer, Kier is again in a movie that was shot by the water. But it’s nowhere near the French Riviera, and he’s no lady killer.In “Swan Song,” a new movie from the writer-director Todd Stephens, Kier plays Mr. Pat, a flamboyant former hairdresser languishing in a grim nursing home outside Sandusky, Ohio, a working-class city on the Lake Erie shore. With the promise of money, he hitchhikes into town to fulfill the wish of his recently deceased ex-client Rita (Linda Evans): that he style her corpse’s hair and makeup for her open-casket funeral.While roaming Sandusky, Mr. Pat crosses paths with Dee Dee, a protégée turned rival (Jennifer Coolidge), and Dustin, Rita’s gay grandson (Michael Urie). But here’s the thing: Rita is a “demanding Republican monster,” as Mr. Pat sasses, and he’s torn over whether to “make a dead bitch look human.”When it came to the role, Kier said he “had no fear whatsoever,” a tombstone-worthy way to describe his own career, which has been defined by unreserved performances as outré characters for renegade directors.“I was looking forward to making the movie because I don’t ever want to say: I can’t do that,” he said. “I would go as far as to say it was like a dream project for me.”Kier as a retired hairdresser in the film. He said he “had no fear whatsoever” about the role.Chris Stephens/Magnolia Pictures“Swan Song,” now in theaters and on demand starting Aug. 13, completes Stephens’s indie Ohio Trilogy, which began with writing “Edge of Seventeen” (1998) and co-writing and directing “Gypsy 83” (2001), stories of Gen X gay boys itching to leave Sandusky for New York. With Mr. Pat, the trilogy shifts its spotlight to an older gay man who built a life in Ohio.Stephens said he spent more than a year trying to cast the right actor to play a Stonewall-generation peacock who favors fancy fedoras and mint-green leisure suiting. Then a casting director brought up Kier.“I hadn’t thought of him because he’s German,” said Stephens, who based the character on Pat Pitsenbarger, a hairdresser and drag performer he encountered as a teenager exploring his own sexuality in Sandusky’s gay circles in the ’80s. “I had always thought of him in villain roles. But on the other hand, he’s so amazingly fabulous. Mr. Pat had big blue eyes like Udo. As soon as I met him, I knew he was Mr. Pat.”Over five decades as an actor, Kier has put those ice-blue eyes to provocative use as a vampire for Paul Morrissey (“Blood for Dracula” in 1974), a psychiatrist for Dario Argento (“Suspiria” in 1977), a john for Gus Van Sant (“My Own Private Idaho” in 1991), and a demon and a baby for Lars von Trier (“The Kingdom” series in the ’90s). He was Madonna’s dungeon companion in her 1992 book “Sex.”Still to come for the prolific actor are the dark comedy “My Neighbor, Adolf,” in which he plays a man suspected of being Hitler, and a recurring role in the second season of the Amazon Prime series “Hunters,” about Nazi hunters.With “Swan Song,” Kier scored a rarity for an actor at 76: a juicy leading role. Over the phone from his home in Palm Springs, Calif., Kier took the conversation in multitudes of directions. These are edited excerpts.How does it feel to have a leading role?In all the films I did, from “Blade” to “Shadow of the Vampire,” I always had — I hate that word supporting — I had smaller roles. This is the first time after “Dracula” and “[Flesh for] Frankenstein” that I played the lead. I’ve always wanted to play a villain in a James Bond film, but somehow that didn’t happen.Kier opposite Dalila Di Lazzaro in “Flesh for Frankenstein” Compagnia Cinematografica ChampionTell me about shooting with Linda Evans.In Germany, they called “Dallas” and “Dynasty” street cleaners because when they were on television, nobody was in the street. [Laughs] I first met her in a restaurant the night before we were going to shoot, and she was so normal. I was surprised because she wanted to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. I liked that.When we were shooting, we were real. There was no acting. I learned over the years that the good actors are the nicest people. It’s only the insecure who complain all the time. Linda is one of the nicest.How much did Sandusky influence your making of the film?Everything was wonderful, easy. The main street became for me like the studio at Paramount. I wanted to make the movie as chronologically as possible. Since we started in the retirement home, I slept there alone without a camera and got a feeling for the corridors and for the bathrooms. Then I had an apartment in Sandusky.Was there a gay man from your past who inspired your performance?There were many. There were still friends of the real Pat around, and they told me how he’d hold his cigarette. There were also little things over my life that I have seen in clubs or privately, how people, when they sit down, put one leg over the other just so. But I also wanted to go away from clichés. I did not want to say, “Yes, girl.”Do you identify anywhere under the L.G.B.T.Q. umbrella?When I was a young man in Germany, if two men lived together and the neighbors could hear erotic noises, they would call the police and the people would be arrested. I think it’s wonderful what has been achieved everywhere, especially in America.“I’ve always wanted to play a villain in a James Bond film, but somehow that didn’t happen,” Kier said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesYou’ve worked with some true gay auteurs, including Fassbinder. What’s your favorite memory of him?I met Fassbinder when he was 15, and I was 16, in Cologne in a working-class bar with a mix of truck drivers and secretaries. I went to London to work and learn English. One day I bought a magazine with his face on it calling him a genius and an alcoholic, and I thought, that’s Rainer from the bar.When I went back to Germany, he offered me a role in “The Stationmaster’s Wife” and that was our first work together. We made a lot of movies together. We also lived together. Somewhere it says that we had an affair, but that’s a lie. He was the only director who captured how Germany was after the war.Is there a film of yours people might not know about but you wish they’d discover?I did “House of Boys,” a very important film for the gay community. It’s set [in 1984] in a nightclub in Amsterdam, which my character runs. The boys are there doing stripping, and I come out like Marlene Dietrich. The film is important because AIDS was coming, and nobody knew what AIDS was. I think it’s something people should see.In “Swan Song” and in real life, there’s a generational divide between older gay men who remember the worst years of AIDS and younger men who don’t.Cookie Mueller, my good friend, died of AIDS. I also lost many friends in Germany. In front of the camera, I had that in mind.Have you thought about what you’d like to look like when you die?[Laughs] I don’t care. I guess if someone said that I had seven hours to live, I would have a party with wonderful drinks. After seven hours, I would jump in my pool and not move anymore. People would say, “He’s so good! Look at how long he can hold his breath!”The problem would be if I was 85 and I had no more hair. I would find somebody to polish the top of my head. More

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      Arthur French, Negro Ensemble Company Pioneer, Dies at 89

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      He more or less stumbled into a career as an actor, but it proved to be a long and prolific one, on film, on television and especially on the stage.Arthur French, a prolific and acclaimed (if relatively unsung) actor who was a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company, died on July 24 in Manhattan. He was 89.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his son, the playwright Arthur W. French III, in a post on Facebook.Mr. French more or less stumbled into his theatrical career. After abandoning early plans to become a preacher, he aspired to be a disc jockey, but when he showed up at the D.J. school he had hoped to attend, he found that it had closed after bribery investigations began into the radio payola scandal of the late 1950s.Fortunately, the Dramatic Workshop, where Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler taught, was located in the same building, and Mr. French signed up for classes. He was coached by the actress Peggy Feury; he caught the attention of Maxwell Glanville’s American Negro Theater; and his career as a supporting actor was born.Mr. French made his professional debut Off Broadway in “Raisin’ Hell in the Son,” a spoof of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1962. Three years later he appeared in Douglas Turner Ward’s “Day of Absence,” which spawned the Negro Ensemble Company. He first appeared on Broadway in Melvin Van Peebles’s musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” in 1971.“That’s when I decided to quit my Social Service job,” he said in a recent interview with the arts journal Gallery & Studio. He had been working days as a clerk with New York City’s welfare department.Mr. French appeared in Broadway revivals of “The Iceman Cometh” (1973), “Death of a Salesman” (1975) and “You Can’t Take It With You” (1983). His films included Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” (1992) and “Crooklyn” (1994). Among his many television appearances were three episodes of “Law & Order,” two of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and one of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”Reviewers often called attention to his sonorous voice and the civility of his performances; his notices in The New York Times were consistently positive. Reviewing his portrayal of Bynum, a “conjure man,” in a 1996 revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Henry Street Settlement, Vincent Canby called it “a variation on the seer, sometimes the idiot savant, who turns up with regularity in Mr. Wilson’s work but never as fully realized as the character is here.”When Mr. French was seen in “Checkmates” at the same theater that year, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in The Times, “The real treats are Ruby Dee and Arthur French as the Coopers, gifted old pros who tickle the funny bone and touch the heart.”He occasionally directed, most recently a 2010 production of Steve Carter’s 1990 play “Pecong,” a retelling of the Medea story set in the Caribbean, at the Off Off Broadway National Black Theater.Mr. French taught at the HB Studio in New York. He received an Obie Award for sustained excellence of performance in 1997 and a Lucille Lortel Award for his supporting role in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” in 2007. In 2015, he was awarded a Paul Robeson Citation from the Actors’ Equity Association and the Actor’s Equity Foundation for his “dedication to freedom of expression and respect for human dignity.”Mr. French, right, with Frankie Faison in the Signature Theater Company’s 2006 production of August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running.” Mr. French won a Lucille Lortel Award for his performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesArthur Wellesley French Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1931, in Harlem to immigrants from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. His father, a former seaman, died young; Arthur himself survived a bout with asthma. His mother, Ursilla Idonia (Ollivierre) French, was a garment workers’ union organizer, and Arthur helped her earn extra money by embroidering material she took home.His mother encouraged him to take music lessons, which led to a piano recital at Carnegie Hall. He attended Morris High School in the Bronx before transferring to the Bronx High School of Science; after graduating, he attended Brooklyn College.In 1961, he married the singer Antoinette Williams. She died before him. In addition to their son, he is survived by a daughter, Antonia Willow French, and two grandchildren.In the Gallery & Studio interview, Mr. French was asked what he had learned about himself during his 50-year career.“I like the world of fantasy,” he replied. “And my father told me, ‘Learn something so well that you won’t have to lift up anything heavier than a pencil.’” More

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      Gotham Award

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      The Gothams will replace the best actress and best actor categories with a single category for “outstanding lead performance.”Should acting prizes be gender neutral? The question has been percolating for years, with zealous arguments for and against.But the biggest ceremonies that honor acting, aware that change would kick a cultural hornet’s nest, have adhered to tradition. Best actor. Best actress.On Thursday, a significant stop on the annual road to the Oscars broke ranks. The Gotham Awards said that, beginning with its November ceremony, prizes for acting would no longer be broken out by gender. The Gothams will replace its best actress and best actor categories with a single category for outstanding lead performance. For the first time, there will be a category for supporting roles: outstanding supporting performance.Each category can have up to 10 nominees, with the field chosen, per custom, by committees of film critics, festival programmers and film curators. Separate juries made up of writers, directors, actors, producers and other film professionals will determine the final recipients, the same as always. The acting categories at the Gothams previously had five nominees.“There are so many talented nonbinary individuals, and it’s not fair to force them into male and female boxes,” said Jeffrey Sharp, the executive director of the Gotham Film and Media Institute in New York. “We have a really proud history of inclusivity. It’s part of our DNA. But it was time for us to evolve, too.”Will other significant ceremonies follow?“We can only speak for ourselves, but we do have a history of leading the conversation,” Mr. Sharp said, referring to the position the Gotham Awards has as the first significant ceremony of Hollywood’s prize-collecting season.The influential Berlin Film Festival went gender neutral with its performance awards in the spring. Although not taken seriously as markers of artistic achievement, the MTV Movie & TV Awards stopped separating acting prizes by gender in 2017, along with MTV’s Video Music Awards. The Grammys did away with the division in 2012.But none of the organizations behind the most prestigious acting awards — Oscars, BAFTAs, Tonys and Emmys — have indicated that they will take the same action. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which manages the Oscars, has perhaps gone the furthest, telling The New York Times in 2019 that, while it planned to keep its current structure in place, it would “continue to be sensitive to the evolving conversation.” The Academy Awards for best actress and best actor were first presented in 1929.The Screen Actors Guild Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globes also have male and female acting categories.The debate has roots in older conversations about whether carving out places in a male-dominated field for one group, in this case women, comes at the cost of excluding others.Those seeking change contend that, in addition to forcing nonbinary performers into boxes, gendered categories give the false appearance that prime roles for women are far more prevalent than they actually are.“We should be more afraid of upholding a discriminatory, sexist policy than we are of abolishing it,” the nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon, known for their role on Showtime’s “Billions,” wrote in an essay last year. They added, “There are ultimately, two tangible obstacles to abolishing the actress category at awards shows, and they are — to be blunt — money and feelings.”Supporters of gendered categories say that absent such distinctions, men would dominate the nominees and winners. There are also those who swat away potential change as an example of progressive ideology run amok.Mr. Sharp said that the concern about maintaining an equitable mix of nominees when doing away with gendered categories was “valid.”“In terms of the danger of being skewed one way or another, we have great faith in the individuals who make our nominations decisions,” he said, referring to the Gotham Awards’ committee system. (The New York Times is a corporate sponsor of the awards and had no role in the decision about the new categories.)Mr. Sharp noted that his organization’s longtime “breakthrough actor” award, which will be renamed “breakthrough performer,” has always been gender neutral, having been given to stars like Amy Adams (“Junebug”), Elliot Page (“Juno”), Michael B. Jordan (“Fruitvale Station”) and Mya Taylor (“Tangerine”).The most-recent Gotham Awards ceremony took place in January and was staged virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Nicole Beharie was named best actress for her performance in “Miss Juneteenth” and Riz Ahmed won the best actor prize for “Sound of Metal.”The Gotham Film and Media Institute (formerly the Independent Filmmaker Project) also said on Thursday that it had created two new television categories: breakthrough nonfiction series and outstanding performance in a new series.Cara Buckley More

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      Ian McKellen Returns as Hamlet in U.K. Production

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      As England’s theaters welcome capacity audiences again, Ian McKellen is back in a role he first played a half-century ago.LONDON — If you’re going to fully reopen a theater in these edgy times, it helps to have an actor whose presence feels like an event. That’s absolutely the case at the elegant Theater Royal in Windsor, England, where Ian McKellen, 82, is currently playing Hamlet, of all roles, and will stay on into the fall in a new production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” (“Hamlet” runs through Sept. 25.)When the director Sean Mathias’s production started previews in June, coronavirus protocols in England required social distancing in playhouses, meaning numerous seats were left unsold. But those rules ended July 19, when the government rolled back restrictions on social contact. Theaters now have to choose for themselves whether to put their entire capacities on sale, and some smaller venues are still operating with caution by spacing seats out.At the “Hamlet” matinee I attended, this was not the case, and a full and expectant house had gathered to see McKellen return to a role he first played a half-century ago. The demographics of the Windsor playgoing public skew older, and during a post-show question-and-answer session with the cast, one man in the audience recalled seeing McKellen’s previous run as literature’s most famous Dane, in the early 1970s. (The actor tackled a more age-appropriate Shakespeare tragedy, “King Lear,” on the West End in 2018.)McKellen with Jenny Seagrove as Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude.Marc BrennerYou might wonder how an octogenarian might inhabit the angst of a perpetual student who can’t shed the memory of his father or an unusual attachment to his mother. McKellen’s achievement is to render age irrelevant, so that we seem to be peering into the soul of a character this actor understands from the inside out. And as mortality rattles Hamlet more and more, it’s doubly moving to hear those lines spoken by an actor now in his ninth decade.The production belongs to the here and now, and is presented on a multitiered, industrial-looking set with the actors in modern dress: Alis Wyn Davies’s Ophelia strums a guitar, and Jonathan Hyde’s excellent Claudius suggests a corporate apparatchik with his eye on the prize.But it’s McKellen everyone has come to see, and the Tony-winning actor who found global renown in the “Lord of the Rings” and “X-Men” movies doesn’t disappoint. As if taking a leaf from his character’s instruction to the players in Act III’s play within a play, he speaks Shakespeare’s verse “trippingly on the tongue,” so that the time-honored soliloquies become extensions of thought, rather than set pieces. I’ve rarely heard “To be, or not to be” communicated as easefully as here.Not all the cast is at McKellen’s level, and there doesn’t appear to be much of an overarching vision. But whether riding an exercise bike or scaling the skeletal set, McKellen is always the nimblest presence; the actor’s the thing, and the audience made its appreciation thunderously clear.I witnessed a comparable ovation at another full house recently, this time in the 2,300-seat London Coliseum, where the star attraction is the return of the English musical theater veteran Michael Ball, playing Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” through Sept. 29. Ball won the 2008 Olivier Award for his performance as this demure, soft-spoken laundress when the Broadway hit first came to London, and his affection for the generous-hearted show seems only to have deepened since. A heartthrob back in the day, Ball dons Edna’s apron and slippers without any sidelong winks.Lizzie Bea as Tracy Turnblad, Michael Ball as Edna Turnblad and Les Dennis as Wilbur Turnblad in “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum.Tristram KentonIt is a gift of a part. Edna is a wife and mother in 1960s Baltimore who long ago made peace with the life she never got to lead. (“I wanted to be the biggest thing in brassieres,” she says, meaning designing, not washing and folding, them.) Imagine her surprise, then, when her feisty daughter, Tracy (a spirited Lizzie Bea), turns out to be a consciousness-raising rabble-rouser, railing against racial segregation.Tracy’s transformation prompts her mother to unleash a previously unknown energy, and a dimpled Ball is a riot emerging, eyes gleaming, for the final number in a glittering pink party frock.Addressing the audience after the curtain call, Ball sounded moved to see a near-capacity crowd again. No wonder he looked ready to shake and shimmy all night, or at least until Edna’s sequins fell off.Social distancing was still the order of the day when I caught the Joseph Charlton two-hander “ANNA X,” which has just finished its run at the Harold Pinter Theater but will have five performances next week at the Lowry in Salford, near Manchester.The director Daniel Raggett’s high-octane production showcases a 25-year-old talent, Emma Corrin, who has been lauded as Princess Diana in “The Crown” and is clearly due for a major career. “ANNA X” casts Corrin in a fictionalized version of a real-life Russian, Anna Sorokin, who cut a swath through New York society before serving time in prison for fraud.Appearing alongside the engaging Nabhaan Rizwan as the ambitious techie, Ariel, whom Anna pulls into her alluring orbit, Corrin is both charismatic and inscrutable, as befits Anna’s shifting, twisted psyche. Let’s wish Corrin a return to the West End at a time when she, too, is allowed a full house.Nabhaan Rizwan and Emma Corrin in “ANNA X.”Helen MurrayHamlet. Directed by Sean Mathias. Theater Royal Windsor, through Sept. 25.Hairspray. Directed by Jack O’Brien. London Coliseum, through Sept. 29.ANNA X. Directed by Daniel Raggett. The Lowry, Salford, Aug. 11-14. More