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      Mark York, Actor on ‘The Office,’ Dies at 55

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      The Ohio native, who advocated greater visibility onscreen for people with disabilities, appeared in early seasons of the NBC sitcom as Billy Merchant.Mark York, the actor best known for playing Billy Merchant on the NBC sitcom “The Office,” died last week in Dayton, Ohio. He was 55.His death was confirmed by the Montgomery County coroner’s office, which said on Tuesday that he had died in a hospital of natural causes. Mr. York’s family said in an obituary that he had died after “a brief and unexpected illness.”Mr. York appeared in four episodes of “The Office” from 2006 to 2009 as the property manager of the office park where Dunder Mifflin, the fictional paper company at the center of the series, made its home. His character, Billy Merchant, who like Mr. York was a paraplegic, was introduced in the second season when Michael Scott, the bumbling branch manager played by Steve Carell, brought him to the office for a cringe-inducing meeting on disability awareness.In the scene, Mr. York’s character gamely answers Michael’s clueless questions about his wheelchair use. But when Michael tries to equate it with burning his foot on a George Foreman grill, Billy interrupts: “You know what, Michael? Let me stop you right there … and leave.”“The letters I get about the character are great,” Mr. York told People magazine in 2010, saying one fan had written that he “shed light on how crazy office politics can be” for workers with disabilities who are just trying to do their jobs.Making wheelchair users more visible onscreen was only one of Mr. York’s goals. He also supported efforts to find a cure for spinal cord injuries, serving as the Southern California representative for SCI Research Advancement, a nonprofit foundation that works to expedite research.“He would constantly come up with ideas for us, and ultimately he came up with an idea to contact the White House,” Will Ambler, the founder of the group, said in an interview.In January 2010, Mr. York, Mr. Ambler and one of the foundation’s board members met in Washington with Kareem Dale, President Barack Obama’s special assistant for disability policy, and other government officials. Mr. York, an avid traveler, drove there from Ohio in his car, a red Dodge Magnum with hand controls that he called Roxanne and had more than 300,000 miles on it.For wheelchair users, driving is a way of regaining freedom, and Mr. York “just took it to the highest level he could,” Mr. Ambler said, adding, “He was liberated, he was free and he could go anywhere he wanted.”Although they didn’t get the changes that they proposed, the group has pressed on and Mr. York had recently suggested approaching the White House again.“He was working on it until the very end,” Mr. Ambler said.Cast members from “The Office” shared their condolences on Twitter.“He was a terrific human, a positive force and a dynamic actor,” said Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute.Marcus A. York was born on Nov. 27, 1965, in Arcanum, Ohio, and graduated from Arcanum High School. In 1988, a car accident left him disabled. The accident gave him “a new lease on life,” according to a biography on his website, and he graduated from Anderson University in Indiana with majors in psychology, sociology and social work. While he was in college, friends encouraged Mr. York to pursue modeling and acting, and he later moved to California.In addition to television commercials, Mr. York appeared in the shows “8 Simple Rules” and “CSI: NY.” He also had an uncredited role in the 2001 film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”According to his obituary, he had been working in recent years as an inventor and had obtained two patents.Mr. York is survived by his parents, Glenn and Becky York, and three brothers, Brian, Jeff and David. More

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      A ‘Hamilton’ Star Discovers Lunatic Comedy With ‘Girls5eva’

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      Renée Elise Goldsberry plays a delusional diva reuniting a girl group in a music biz satire executive produced by Tina Fey. It’s her midcareer moment.It could have happened in her early 20s, fresh from college, with a face like a cherub and lungs like a hurricane, when she booked an understudy role in a Broadway-bound show that never arrived. Or 10 years later, when she moved to Los Angeles and sang with a jazz ensemble. Or five years after that, back in New York for a run on “One Life to Live,” or in the decade following, spent bounding between plays and short TV stints. More

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      Kevin Spacey Cast in Italian Film After Being Sidelined in the U.S.

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      He will play a detective in the movie, directed by Franco Nero, in what is believed to be his first film since sexual assault allegations started surfacing in 2017.Kevin Spacey has been cast in a film in what is believed to be the first time since accusations of sexual assault against the actor started surfacing more than three years ago, prompting several court cases and unraveling his onscreen career. More

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      Charles Grodin, Star of ‘Beethoven’ and ‘Heartbreak Kid,’ Dies at 86

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      A familiar face who was especially adept at deadpan comedy, he also appeared on Broadway in “Same Time, Next Year,” wrote books and had his own talk show.Charles Grodin, the versatile actor familiar from “Same Time, Next Year” on Broadway, popular movies like “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Midnight Run” and “Beethoven” and numerous television appearances, died on Tuesday at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 86.His son, Nicholas, said the cause was bone marrow cancer.With a great sense of deadpan comedy and the kind of Everyman good looks that lend themselves to playing businessmen or curmudgeonly fathers, Mr. Grodin found plenty of work as a supporting player and the occasional lead. He also had his own talk show for a time in the 1990s and was a frequent guest on the talk shows of others, making 36 appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and more than 40 on David Letterman’s NBC and CBS shows combined.Mr. Grodin with his co-star, Ellen Burstyn, and his director, Gene Saks, in 1975 at the first rehearsal for the Broadway comedy “Same Time, Next Year.” The play was a hit and a turning point in Mr. Grodin’s career.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesMr. Grodin was a writer as well, with a number of plays and books to his credit. Though he never won a prestige acting award, he did win a writing Emmy for a 1977 Paul Simon television special, sharing it with Mr. Simon and six others.Mr. Grodin, who dropped out of the University of Miami to pursue acting, had managed to land a smattering of stage and television roles when, in 1962, he received his first big break, landing a part in a Broadway comedy called “Tchin-Tchin,” which starred Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton.“Walter Kerr called me impeccable,” Mr. Grodin wrote years later, recalling a review of the show that appeared in The New York Times. “It took a trip to the dictionary to understand he meant more than clean.”Another Broadway appearance came in 1964 in “Absence of a Cello.” Mr. Grodin’s next two Broadway credits were as a director, of “Lovers and Other Strangers” in 1968 and “Thieves” in 1974. Then, in 1975, came a breakthrough Broadway role opposite Ellen Burstyn in Bernard Slade’s “Same Time, Next Year,” a durable two-hander about a man and woman, each married to someone else, who meet once a year in the same inn room.“The play needs actors of grace, depth and accomplishment, and has found them in Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin,” Clive Barnes wrote in a rave in The Times. “Miss Burstyn is so real, so lovely and so womanly that a man wants to hug her, and you hardly notice the exquisite finesse of her acting. It is underplaying of sheer virtuosity. Mr. Grodin is every bit her equal — a monument to male insecurity, gorgeously inept, and the kind of masculine dunderhead that every decent man aspires to be.”The show ran for three and a half years, with an ever-changing cast; the two original stars left after seven months. Mr. Grodin by that point was in demand in Hollywood. (Ms. Burstyn reprised the role in a 1978 film adaptation, but this time opposite Alan Alda in the Grodin role.)Mr. Grodin with Eddie Albert and Cybill Shepherd in the comic romance “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972), one of his best-known films.20th Century-FoxMr. Grodin had already appeared in Mike Nichols’s “Catch-22” in 1970 and had turned in one of his better-known film performances in the 1972 comic romance “The Heartbreak Kid,” in which he played a self-absorbed sporting goods salesman who marries in haste, immediately loses interest in his bride (Jeannie Berlin), and falls in love with another woman (Cybill Shepherd) on his honeymoon. (Elaine May, Mr. Nichols’s longtime comedy partner and Ms. Berlin’s mother, directed.)In 1978 he had a supporting role in the Warren Beatty vehicle “Heaven Can Wait.” Another signature role was in the action comedy “Midnight Run” in 1988, in which Mr. Grodin played an accountant who has embezzled a fortune from the mob and is being pursued by a bounty hunter, played by Robert De Niro.Though Mr. Grodin acted opposite stars like Mr. De Niro and Mr. Beatty, what may have been his best-known role found him working with a dog. The film was “Beethoven,” a family-friendly hit in 1992, and the dog was a St. Bernard. Mr. Grodin played a cranky father who did not exactly warm to the new household pet. In one memorable scene, he crawls into bed with what he thinks is his wife and is enjoying having the back of his neck licked until he realizes that the dog, not the wife, is his bedmate.“You’ve ruined my life,” he growls at the beast. “You’ve ruined my furniture. You’ve ruined my clothes. My family likes you more than they like me. Why? All you do is drool and shed and eat.”The next year he reprised the role in “Beethoven’s 2nd.” If he was frequently upstaged by the title character in these films, he took it in stride.“I don’t complain when the editor chooses my worst take because it’s the dog’s best take,” he told The Kansas City Star when the sequel came out.Charles Sidney Grodin was born on April 21, 1935, in Pittsburgh. His father, Ted, was a merchant who dealt in sewing notions, and his mother, Lena (Singer) Grodin, was a homemaker.He grew up in Pittsburgh and tried the University of Pittsburgh, thinking he might want to be a journalist. But he soon rejected that idea.“I imagined that someday an editor might tell me to ask someone who had lost a loved one how they felt,” he wrote in a 2011 essay for Backstage magazine. “I see that all the time on the news now. Not for me.”He often said that the 1951 movie “A Place in the Sun,” which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, caused him to shift his focus to acting.“It was two things,” he told the Television Academy Foundation in an oral history. “One is I think I developed an overwhelming crush on Elizabeth Taylor. And two, Montgomery Clift made acting look like, ‘Gee, well that looks pretty easy — just a guy talking.’”Mr. Grodin had a signature role in “Midnight Run” (1988), in which he played an accountant who has embezzled a fortune from the mob and Robert De Niro played the bounty hunter who pursued him.City Light FilmsAfter six months at the University of Miami, he worked at the Pittsburgh Playhouse for a year and a half, then found his way to New York. From 1956 to 1959 he studied with Uta Hagen, though he often found himself questioning her methods, which he said annoyed her.Mr. Grodin made guest appearances on “Shane,” “The Virginian” and other 1960s TV series before landing his first significant film role, as an obstetrician, in the 1968 horror hit “Rosemary’s Baby.”In 1976 he played an unlikable oilman in a remake of “King Kong,” with some reluctance.“I wanted to play the love interest with Jessica Lange,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the guy responsible for the death of the most beloved animal outside of Bambi. But they wanted me for the bad guy.”By popular demand, his character meets a gruesome end.“The only thing they changed after the first screening, I was told, is when Kong got loose and tried to step on me and kill me and missed,” he said. “The audience was so disappointed that they had to recut it.”Mr. Grodin in 2000, not long after his CNBC talk show ended its run. “They brought me in there to be a humorist,” he said, “but pretty quickly I got caught up in social issues.”Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesMr. Grodin showed a different side in the mid-1990s when he hosted “The Charles Grodin Show” on the cable channel CNBC.“They brought me in there to be a humorist,” he said in the oral history, “but pretty quickly I got caught up in social issues, and the show became just as much that, if not dominantly that. Some people like it better when you’re funny, and some people prefer that you’re taking cameras up to prisons and trying to help people who shouldn’t be in prison.”Nicholas Grodin said his father had particularly been proud of his work for the Innocence Project, the prison justice organization, and related causes, and his work for groups that help homeless people.After his talk show ended in 1998, Mr. Grodin largely stepped away from show business for a dozen years. Then he began to take roles again, including a recurring one on “Louie,” the comedian Louis C.K.’s series.Mr. Grodin wrote several memoirs full of anecdotes from his career, including “It Would Be So Nice if You Weren’t Here: My Journey Through Show Business” (1989) and “We’re Ready for You, Mr. Grodin: Behind the Scenes at Talk Shows, Movies and Elsewhere” (1994).His first marriage, to Julie Ferguson, ended in divorce. In 1983 he married Elissa Durwood, who survives him, along with his son, who is from his second marriage; a daughter from his first marriage, the comedian Marion Grodin; and a granddaughter.After more than a decade away from show business, Mr. Grodin began to take roles again. He’s seen here in his recurring role as a doctor in a 2014 episode of the comedian Louis C.K.’s series “Louie.”K.C. Bailey/FXA 1985 anecdote Mr. Grodin related on Mr. Letterman’s show was typical of the breath of fresh, if offbeat, air he brought to those appearances. He told Mr. Letterman that he had been gratified when, walking through the lobby on his way to the studio, the crowd that had lined up to get into the show burst into applause.“I turned around to smile,” he said, “and they weren’t applauding me. There was a duck in a tuxedo walking by, and they were applauding the duck.“But,” he added, “for the moment that I thought they were applauding me, it was a lovely, lovely moment.”He offered no explanation for the presence of the duck. More

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      Stereotypes Are Rife Among Asian and Pacific Islander Film Roles, Study Finds

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      Two-thirds of characters reflect stereotypes, and just 3.4 percent of movies had leads or coleads who were Asians or Pacific Islanders, the study of 1,300 movies found.Of the 1,300 top-grossing films released from 2007 through 2019, just 44 featured an Asian or Pacific Islander character in a leading role — and one-third of the roles went to a single actor, Dwayne Johnson, a study has found. More

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      Evan Peters on That Explosive End of This Week’s ‘Mare of Easttown’

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      The actor talked about the shocking events of Sunday’s episode, about working alongside Kate Winslet and about those delicious Wawa hoagies.This interview contains major spoilers for Episode 5 of “Mare of Easttown.”When Detective Colin Zabel (Evan Peters) breezes into the grim, insular, working-class Pennsylvania community of Easttown, he’s the young hot shot from county, sent to babysit the troubled detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) as she investigates the murder of a teenage mother. More

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      Billie Hayes, Memorable Witch on ‘H.R. Pufnstuf,’ Dies at 96

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      Ms. Hayes had quite a cackle, and it served her well in a number of witchy roles, beginning in 1969 on a short-lived but much remembered TV series.Billie Hayes, who rode a memorable cackle to kiddie-TV fame, playing a witch named Witchiepoo in the short-lived but much remembered 1969 series “H.R. Pufnstuf,” died on April 29 in Los Angeles. She was 96.News of her death was posted on her website.Ms. Hayes had built a moderately successful stage career and had portrayed Mammy Yokum in the 1959 film version of “Li’l Abner” (reprising a role she had played on Broadway) when she was cast as Witchiepoo.“H.R. Pufnstuf” was the first of a string of children’s shows made by the brothers Sid and Marty Krofft in the 1970s — trippy, slapdash-looking affairs that contrasted noticeably with the carefully pitched messages of “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which were born in the same era. Krofft shows tended toward the bizarre: “Lidsville,” for instance, which also starred Ms. Hayes (as well as Charles Nelson Reilly), involved a land of living hats.Few of the shows lasted long — “Pufnstuf” survived only 17 episodes — but they made an impression.“The Kroffts dished up a swirl of psychedelia, vaudeville and cheesy production values that might be described as brown acid for the toddler soul,” Emily Nussbaum wrote in The New York Times in 2004, when TV Land broadcast a marathon of Krofft creations.“Pufnstuf” was a sort of comic sendup of “The Wizard of Oz,” with Witchiepoo pursuing a talking flute possessed by a boy named Jimmy (Jack Wild) in much the way Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West craves Dorothy’s ruby slippers.The red wig and elaborate makeup Ms. Hayes wore made her a striking figure, but witchy ineptitude kept Witchiepoo from being too scary. In 1970 she played the character in a film version, called simply “Pufnstuf,” in a cast that also included Martha Raye as a character named Boss Witch and Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas as one named Witch Hazel.For years afterward the role made Ms. Hayes popular among casting directors in search of a witch. In 1971 she played one in an episode of the sitcom “Bewitched” in which she was ultimately bested by Samantha, the series’ star witch, played by Elizabeth Montgomery. In 1985 she was the voice of the witch Orgoch in the animated Disney film “The Black Cauldron.” She was the voice of a cackling witch in “Shrek Forever After” in 2010.Perhaps most memorably, in 1976 the comedian Paul Lynde, with whom she had first worked decades earlier, managed to pair her and Ms. Hamilton in a running sketch on “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special,” which also featured appearances by Betty White, Donny and Marie Osmond and the rock group Kiss, and which has taken on a sort of kitschy fame.“The two witches bookend Mr. Lynde as they cackle their way through the hardcover editions of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘The Exorcist,’ call ‘The Sound of Music’ a real horror movie and play Witches’ Monopoly, a board game in which contestants can either buy a property or blow it up,” The New York Times wrote in 2007 when a DVD of that television rarity was released.Ms. Hayes played other roles in her somewhat sporadic career, including providing the voices for characters on “The Brothers Flub,” “Transformers: Rescue Bots” and other animated shows. But Witchiepoo was the one that stuck in people’s heads. In 2003 Inside TV ranked her No. 3 on its list of Top 10 witches in TV history, behind only Ms. Montgomery and Catherine Hicks, who played Amanda Tucker on the 1980s series “Tucker’s Witch.”Ms. Hayes at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, Calif., at a party celebrating the release of “H.R. Pufnstuf” on DVD in 2004.Stephen Shugerman/Getty ImagesBillie Armstrong Brosch was born on Aug. 5, 1924, in Du Quoin, Ill. Her father, Charles, was a coal miner, and her mother, Marie (Armstrong) Brosch, was an administrator for the Perry County General Assistance Office.She began performing as a child and continued to do so after leaving high school early, performing in Chicago and with U.S.O. shows. (An agent at the start of her professional career suggested that “Brosch” was not an ear-friendly name for a performer.)She eventually secured a role in a touring show called “What’s New” with Mr. Lynde. In 1956 Mr. Lynde wrote and directed sketches for a Broadway revue called “New Faces of 1956,” and Ms. Hayes found herself as one of those new faces — along with a young British actress named Maggie Smith.Ms. Hayes said her commitment to “New Faces,” which ran for 220 performances, kept her from accepting an offer to originate the role of Mammy Yokum in “Li’l Abner,” a musical based on Al Capp’s comic strip characters, when it opened on Broadway in November 1956, but she later stepped into the part, replacing Charlotte Rae. She won the role in the 1959 film version.Ms. Hayes was also president of Pet Hope, an animal care organization. She leaves no immediate survivors.In a 1969 interview with the Dallas-area broadcaster Bobbie Wygant, Ms. Hayes noted that, though Witchiepoo was the villain of “Pufnstuf,” she received a lot of fan mail from children seeking her help with kid-size problems.“I’m the Ann Landers of the witch world,” she said.“I don’t know why they pick the witch to write to,” she said, “unless they figure either she’s so dumb she’ll give me a funny answer or she’s so smart I’ll get out of trouble.” More

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      Hannah Einbinder: Portrait of a Young Comic on the Cusp

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      As the daughter of Laraine Newman, she has an understanding of the ups and downs of early success. Will those lessons be helpful for her first series, “Hacks”?Right before the shutdown last year, the comic Hannah Einbinder became, at 23, the youngest (and as of now last) stand-up to perform a set on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” making a splash in her network television debut. More