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      in Movies

      Kris Kristofferson’s Stories Were Wonderfully Larger Than Life

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      The singer, songwriter and actor, who died on Saturday at 88, found his way into situations and tales that underscored his role as a conscience for country music.Kris Kristofferson was a man to whom myth attached easily.Did he once take control of a National Guard helicopter so he could land it at Johnny Cash’s house to present him with some songs to consider recording? (He sure did, though Johnny apparently wasn’t home.) Did he not know that Janis Joplin, whom he’d been dating, had recorded his song “Me and Bobby McGee” just a few days before her death? (He didn’t; the track, released posthumously, became her lone No. 1 hit.) Did he once confront Toby Keith, country music’s jingoist in chief, about his performative bluster and ask him, “Have you ever taken another man’s life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not.” (Depends whose account you believe.)Beginning in the mid-1960s, when he arrived in Nashville as an aspiring songwriter, Kristofferson, who died Saturday at 88, evolved into something of a communal conscience for the town, and the country music business, while also helping to usher it into conversation with the rest of popular music.He was best known as a songwriter, with compositions that bridged folky earthiness with a jolt of literary flair. When sung by some of the biggest country stars of the era — Cash, Ray Price, Roger Miller, Ray Stevens, Bobby Bare — they inexorably moved the genre away from polished and poised singers in sports coats toward thornier territory closer to the folk revival of the 1960s.The protagonists of Kristofferson’s best songs were downtrodden victims of their own poor decisions — “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” the best-known version of which was sung by Cash, finds the singer struggling to find “my cleanest dirty shirt” the morning after a Saturday night bender. “Once More With Feeling,” written with Shel Silverstein and sung by Jerry Lee Lewis, tells the story of a relationship that’s run out of gas through the pleas of a man desperate to be deceived, even for a moment: “Darling, make believe you’re making me/Believe each word you say.”“Me and Bobby McGee” — initially recorded by Miller, but rendered indelible by Joplin — was the tale of two drifters who drift away from each other, anchored in the oft-repeated secular proverb, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Gavin Creel, Tony-Winning Musical Theater Actor, Dies at 48

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      He won the award playing a Yonkers feed store clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” and was also nominated for roles in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Hair.”Gavin Creel, a sly and charming musical theater actor who won a Tony Award as a wide-eyed adventure seeker in “Hello, Dolly!” and an Olivier Award as a preening missionary in “The Book of Mormon,” died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 48.His death was confirmed by his partner, Alex Temple Ward, via a publicist, Matt Polk. The cause was metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, which Mr. Creel learned he had in July.Mr. Creel was a well-liked member of the New York theater community whose death comes as a shock, given his age. He had been performing on Broadway for two decades, mostly in starring roles, and just last winter his physical and vocal agility, as well as his charisma and curiosity, were on display in a memoiristic show he wrote and performed Off Broadway called “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” about learning to love the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Mr. Creel during his Broadway debut in 2002 when he played Jimmy Smith in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” opposite Sutton Foster as Millie Dillmount.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA superior singer with a sunny tenor, Mr. Creel made his Broadway debut and received his first Tony nomination in 2002 as the suave salesman Jimmy Smith in the original production of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” starring opposite Sutton Foster, who played the title character, a spunky social climber named Millie Dillmount.He went on to find success in a string of Broadway revivals, playing the straight son of a gay couple in “La Cage aux Folles” (which opened in 2004); the leader of a tribe of hippies in “Hair” (2009); a womanizing clerk in “She Loves Me” (2016); a callow clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” (2017); and both a prince and a wolf in “Into the Woods” (2022).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      ‘Days of Our Lives’ Actor, Drake Hogestyn, Dies at 70

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      Mr. Hogestyn was best known for playing John Black on the daytime soap opera and appeared in more than 4,200 episodes over 38 years.Drake Hogestyn, who played John Black, the sturdy and fiercely loyal character who by turns was a spy, private investigator and mercenary, for nearly 40 years on the long-running soap opera “Days of Our Lives,” died on Saturday, a day shy of his 71st birthday.Mr. Hogestyn had pancreatic cancer, according to a statement from his family shared by the show. He died in Los Angeles, according to a publicist for the show, Andrea McKinnon.In 1986, Mr. Hogestyn first appeared on “Days of Our Lives,” which premiered in 1965 on NBC and follows various characters in the fictional Midwestern town of Salem. For a few years, he played another character, Roman Brady, but came to be known best for his role as John Black.Mr. Hogestyn appeared in more than 4,200 episodes of the soap opera and became a fan favorite for his portrayal as the rugged, raspy-voiced and often heroic character who had the skills of an intelligence agent, a police officer and a private investigator.The character was also known for being married to Dr. Marlena Evans, a psychiatrist and the town’s de facto matriarch, played by Deidre Hall. In 2005, the actors won a Soap Opera Digest Award for Favorite Couple.“It’s, like, I’ll always love her,” Mr. Hogestyn said, at a gathering for the show’s fans in 2004, of the characters’ enduring romance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Aubrey Plaza Goes for Broke in ‘Megalopolis’ and ‘Agatha All Along’

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      “I bleed for movies,” Aubrey Plaza told me on an August morning, just seconds before the ground began to tremble.We had met for brunch at Little Dom’s, a hip Italian restaurant in Los Angeles that was unusually quiet until that low rumble began. Frozen, we stared at each other as the windows rattled — bum-bum-BAM — and then quieted. It was quick and violent, as though someone had seized the place and given it a brisk, get-yourself-together shake.Plaza’s eyes, already open and avid, got even wider. “I think that was an earthquake,” she said. A Google search revealed it to have been a 4.7 temblor out of nearby Pasadena, which prompted us to wonder: If something more severe were to occur, would we know what to do instead of just sitting there blankly?“What if it’s the small one before the big one?” she asked.These days, only a natural disaster could force Plaza to pause. She has spent the last decade working at a nearly nonstop pace, determined to show there’s more to her than April Ludgate, the disaffected intern she played on six seasons of the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation.” Though Plaza’s point has by now been proved — in particular, the 2022 double-header of “The White Lotus” and “Emily the Criminal” amply demonstrated her range — that drive has not yet abated.In fact, Plaza has stayed so prolific that her three newest projects have all come out within days of each other. The first was the charming time-travel comedy “My Old Ass” on Sept. 13, followed by the Marvel series “Agatha All Along,” in which she plays the romantic antagonist to Kathryn Hahn’s “WandaVision” witch. Friday saw the long-awaited release of “Megalopolis,” from the 85-year-old director Francis Ford Coppola (“The Godfather”), which features Plaza in a grabby role unlike anything she’s played before.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      On ‘Downton Abbey,’ Maggie Smith Made an Icy Aristocrat Irresistible

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      The hit melodrama brought Smith the kind of fame she never wanted, but it is easy to understand why it happened.In retrospect, Maggie Smith’s brilliant, high-wire career can be seen as a protest against celebrity.As an actor, Smith, who died on Friday at 89, favored characters into which she could disappear, and the rare interviews she agreed to were awkward, unrevealing, sometimes deliberately uningratiating. In a 2013 “60 Minutes” profile, she seems almost physically racked by the journalist’s curiosity. There was one personal detail, though, that she had no problem sharing in her final years: how much she despised the fame that her most recognized part had brought down on her.“It’s ridiculous,” she told one reporter. “I was able to live a somewhat normal life until I started doing ‘Downton Abbey.’ I know that sounds funny, but I am serious. Before that I could go to all the places I wanted and see all of the things that I like, but now I can’t, which I find incredibly awful.”“Flattering,” she added, “but awful.”Did she protest too much? Or was it the peculiar nature of the attention that afflicted her? As someone who began following her from my first viewing of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), her Oscar-winning drama, I can say I would have recognized Maggie Smith on any street anywhere. (Among other mass-cultural acts, she guest-starred on “The Carol Burnett Show.”) But would I have hailed her? What was it about “Downton Abbey” that inspired perfect strangers to lay claim to her?We can start with the show itself. From the beginning, “Downton Abbey” was conceived as a Tory fantasy — a make-believe past in which aristocrats take a searching interest in their servants’ personal lives and subsidize their eye surgery — but it came to us through the democratic medium of broadcast television. To watch it in the United States, you had only to fire up your local PBS station, where it played every Sunday night at the same time, leaving you instantly positioned to spill tea the second it was over. (As The New York Times’s “Downton” recapper, I can attest to this.)Few TV shows achieve that kind of instant saturation, so we might all be excused for thinking that these characters were ours. But how exactly did we warm to Violet Crawley, the wary and imperious dowager who despises any intrusion of democracy (America, Ireland) or modernity (telephones, swivel chairs) and who sincerely wants to know what a weekend is?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Maggie Smith, Grande Dame of Stage and Screen, Dies at 89

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      She earned an extraordinary array of awards, from Oscars to Emmys to a Tony, but she could still go almost everywhere unrecognized. Then came “Downton Abbey.”Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, whose award-winning roles ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” to the acid-tongued dowager countess on “Downton Abbey,” died on Friday in London. She was 89.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her family in a statement issued by a publicist. It did not specify the cause of death.American moviegoers barely knew Ms. Smith (now Dame Maggie to her countrymen) when she starred in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), about a teacher at a girls’ school in the 1930s who dared to have provocative views — and a love life. Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times described her performance as “a staggering amalgam of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions, all of which are precisely right.” It brought her the Academy Award for best actress.She won a second Oscar, for best supporting actress, for “California Suite” (1978), based on Neil Simon’s stage comedy. Her character, a British actress attending the Oscars with her bisexual husband (Michael Caine), has a disappointing evening at the ceremony and a bittersweet night in bed.In real life, prizes had begun coming Ms. Smith’s way in 1962, when she won her first Evening Standard Theater Award. By the turn of the millennium, she had the two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, half a dozen BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) and scores of nominations. Yet she could go almost anywhere unrecognized.Until “Downton Abbey.”Ms. Smith on the set of the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” She won an Academy Award for best actress for the performance.Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

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      in Theater

      Maggie Smith Was Imperious in the Most Delightful Way

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      Throughout her career and on “Downton Abbey,” she perfected the role of the commanding Englishwoman with an arrow-sharp wit.“Oh for heaven’s sake!” Maggie Smith said in a 2015 interview, waving her hands vigorously in front of her face at the suggestion that she was a “national treasure.”But Smith, who died on Friday at 89, was that very thing, an actor who embodied a quintessentially British character: the imperious, commanding woman, be it an aristocrat or a schoolteacher, who smites the less certain or socially secure with her arrow-sharp wit and finely honed disdain, though delivered in suitably plummy tones.While she worked steadily in theater from the start of her acting career in the 1950s, Smith didn’t become famous until she won an Oscar for her performance in the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Early on, she later recalled, she had signed a contract with a film company and received a message from the studio publicity department: “Your fan mail total for this month is nil.”Smith didn’t become famous until she won an Oscar for her performance in the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” 20th Century Fox/Getty ImagesEven after her breakout performance, her fame was mostly among theater and film cognoscenti, who adored her expressive physicality, brilliant comic timing and subtly moving revelations of character. In 1990, Smith was made a dame of the British Empire. But it wasn’t until Smith was in her 60s, cast as Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies, then in 2010 as Violet Crawley, dowager countess of Grantham, in the “Downton Abbey” television series, that she achieved global fame.“What is a … weekend?” the countess asked in a tone that exquisitely mixed contempt with a soupçon of interest, in one of the first episodes of the show. The line (all credit to the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes) and her delivery summed up her appeal to the enormous “Downton” audience, who couldn’t get enough of Smith’s witty, acerbic character.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Maggie Smith: A Life in Pictures

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      Maggie Smith, who died on Friday at 89, was among the most venerable British actors of her era, embarking in the 1950s on a decades-long career and a run of memorable, award-winning performances. She won two Oscars, a Tony, three Golden Globes, four Emmys and several British Academy of Film and Television Awards.But incredibly, she did not reach mainstream stardom until later in her career, first as Minerva McGonagall, the Hogwarts School’s stern and fearless transfiguration teacher, in seven of the eight “Harry Potter” films, and then as Violet Crawley, the acid-tongued dowager countess on the British historical drama “Downton Abbey.”“It’s not even that you particularly want to be an actor,” Smith once said. “You have to be. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”Here are some snapshots from her life and career.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMaggie Smith in 1957, the year she made her London stage debut in the musical revue “Share My Lettuce.”Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesSmith in 1963, when she appeared in “The V.I.P.s,” a melodrama whose all-star cast also included Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.Bob Dear/Associated PressSmith behind the scenes of the 1968 MGM British comedy caper “Hot Millions.” Vincent Canby, in his review for The New York Times, described her performance as “marvelously funny.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More