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      in Television

      Dustin Diamond, Actor on ‘Saved by the Bell,’ Dies at 44

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDustin Diamond, Actor on ‘Saved by the Bell,’ Dies at 44Mr. Diamond played Screech on the NBC high school sitcom, but struggled to find work and reconcile with cast members in the decades after the show ended.Dustin Diamond as Samuel “Screech” Powers on “Saved by the Bell,” a Saturday morning staple on NBC from 1989 to 1992.Credit…Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesFeb. 1, 2021Updated 6:17 p.m. ETDustin Diamond, the former child actor who found fame on the enduring NBC Saturday morning sitcom “Saved by the Bell” but struggled to find work in later years, died on Monday in Florida. He was 44.A representative for Mr. Diamond, Roger Paul, confirmed the death. He said that the cause was carcinoma and that Mr. Diamond died in a hospital.After Mr. Diamond went “through some medical testing,” in January, his representatives said in a statement that he had cancer.From 1989 to 1992, Mr. Diamond played Samuel “Screech” Powers on “Saved by the Bell,” which developed a cult following among millennials and members of Generation X and grew into an internet obsession for some fans.The show followed the day-to-day adventures of a group of loudly dressed friends at the fictional Bayside High School in California.Saturday morning viewers watched Mr. Diamond grow up on the show as he played Screech, the sweet-natured, geeky underdog and the dunce among his friends. An ongoing plotline was the character’s unrequited crush on Lisa Turtle, who was played by Lark Voorhies.Screech was also the comedic sidekick to Zack Morris, the popular student who was played Mark-Paul Gosselaar. The show’s cast also included Mario Lopez as Slater, Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie and Tiffani Thiessen as Kelly, who rounded out the circle of friends.The show also starred Dennis Haskins as the school principal who mentored and disciplined the group. Mr. Diamond appeared in all 86 episodes.Memorable plot lines included a caffeine pill addiction by Ms. Berkley’s character, the friends competing in a dance competition hosted by the radio disc jockey Casey Kasem and when “Screech” is asked to make fake IDs so the guys could go to a club.Mr. Diamond was born on Jan. 7, 1977, in San Jose, Calif., according to IMDB.com, and he said he began acting when he was 8. He also appeared in other series, including “The Wonder Years.”He originated the role of Screech in 1988 when he was cast in “Good Morning, Miss Bliss,” the Disney Channel series that was the forerunner to “Saved by the Bell” and introduced many of its characters.After “Saved by the Bell” ended in 1992, a prime-time spinoff show called “Saved by the Bell: The College Years” followed the gang in college. That show ran for one season, ending in 1994. From 1994 to 2000, he reprised the role of Screech in another spinoff series, “Saved by the Bell: The New Class.”After the series ended, Mr. Diamond became known for his post-stardom troubles, and spoke openly about his struggles finding work.“The hardest thing about being a child star is giving up your childhood,” Mr. Diamond said in 2013 on “Oprah: Where Are They Now?” While he was working on “Saved by the Bell,” he said, he feared being replaced, saying, “You don’t get a childhood, really.”After the series ended, he said: “I didn’t really know what I was going to do. It was hard to get work that wasn’t Screech-cloned stuff.”He added: “I had been working for the last 10 years, every single week, and I felt lost. As I mature I realize, wow, I was kind of going through my rebellious teens in my 20s.”Seeking a payout in the mid-2000s, Mr. Diamond found tabloid fame with the release of a sex tape that he later spoke of with regret.“The sex tape is the thing that I’m most embarrassed about,” Mr. Diamond said on Ms. Winfrey’s documentary show. Although he made some money from the tape, he said, “it wasn’t worth what the fallout was.”He was also featured on reality shows including “Celebrity Boxing 2” in 2002 and “Celebrity Fit Club,” on VH1, in 2007.In 2009, he released a tell-all book called “Behind the Bell” that claimed that members of the show’s cast were using drugs and having sex. Years later, Mr. Diamond expressed regret about the book as well, saying it was written by a ghostwriter.“The book was another disappointment of mine,” he said in Ms. Winfrey’s documentary. “I was a first-time author, so they had a ghostwriter. I talked to a guy a few times, so the book has some truth in it, and a lot of the stories were just kind of throwaways.”Mr. Diamond’s problems also extended to court. In 2015, he was accused of stabbing a man during a fight in a Wisconsin bar. Mr. Diamond said he had pulled a knife to defend himself; he was convicted on two misdemeanors, sentenced to four months in jail and ordered to pay more than $1,000 to the man who was stabbed.In a 2016 interview on “Extra,” Mr. Diamond told Mr. Lopez that were he to meet his other former “Saved by the Bell” castmates, he would “ask for forgiveness for any kind of misunderstandings that may have come about by the book.” He said he had not seen some of his co-stars for decades.Mr. Diamond was repeatedly omitted from reunions. In 2015, he was left out of a skit that reunited the cast on “The Tonight Show,” and in 2020, when “Saved by the Bell” was rebooted on NBC’s Peacock streaming service, Mr. Diamond was not part of the new series.Information about Mr. Diamond’s survivors was not immediately available.Christopher Mele contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Music

      Evan Rachel Wood Accuses Marilyn Manson of Abuse

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEvan Rachel Wood Accuses Marilyn Manson of Abuse“He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years,” Ms. Wood, said on Instagram. Hours later Mr. Manson’s label dropped him.The rock musician Marilyn Manson last year. Mr. Manson and the actress Evan Rachel Wood publicly became a couple in 2007, when she was 19 and he was 38.Credit…Randy Shropshire/Getty Images for The Art of ElysiumJenny Gross and Feb. 1, 2021Updated 6:09 p.m. ETThe actor and singer Evan Rachel Wood, who has spoken publicly for years about being a survivor of sexual and physical violence, said on Monday that she had been abused by the rock musician Marilyn Manson.“The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson,” Ms. Wood wrote in an Instagram post. “He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission. I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander, or blackmail. I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives. I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent.”Ms. Wood, 33, was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2017 for her role in “Westworld” and voiced Queen Iduna in “Frozen 2.” She began acting as a child, receiving her first Golden Globe nomination early in her career for her portrayal of a volatile adolescent in the 2003 drama “Thirteen.”Her relationship with Mr. Manson became public in 2007, when she was 19 and he was 38. The two were briefly engaged.Representatives for Mr. Manson did not respond to several requests for comment on Monday. Last year, Mr. Manson’s representatives issued a statement to Metal Hammer, a music magazine, in response to questions about his relationship with Ms. Wood and her testimony before Congress about being a victim of domestic violence.“Personal testimony is just that, and we think it’s inappropriate to comment on that,” Mr. Manson’s representatives told Metal Hammer. “You then go on to talk about Manson being accused of ‘terrible things’ by unnamed ‘critics’ but offer no guidance on who these critics are and what these things are, so it’s not possible to comment.”Evan Rachel Wood at her home in Los Angeles last year.Credit…Rozette Rago for The New York TimesSeveral other women have also accused Mr. Manson of having abused them. In 2018, the actress Charlyne Yi accused Mr. Manson of harassment in a series of tweets that have since been deleted. In September 2020, Dan Cleary, who said that he had worked as an assistant to Mr. Manson for several years, wrote on Twitter that he had witnessed the singer being abusive.Loma Vista, the label that released Marilyn Manson’s latest recording, said Monday it would stop promoting it and would not work with him in the future.“In light of today’s disturbing allegations by Evan Rachel Wood and other women naming Marilyn Manson as their abuser, Loma Vista will cease to further promote his current album, effective immediately,” it said in a statement posted on Twitter. “Due to these concerning developments, we have also decided not to work with Marilyn Manson on any future projects.”Ms. Wood, who supported a California law that extended the statute of limitations on domestic abuse, testified before the State Senate in 2019 that a man whom she did not identify by name had groomed her when she was 18.“He cut me off from my close friends and family one by one, by exhibiting rage in some form or another when I was in contact with them,” she said in her testimony. “He had bouts of extreme jealousy, which would often result in him wrecking our home, cornering me in a room and threatening me.”She said that she felt terrified for her life, and that he broke her down through starvation and sleep deprivation, and by threatening to kill her. In one instance, he forced her to kneel in their bedroom, tied up her hands and feet, beat her and shocked sensitive parts of her body with a device called a violet wand.When she tried to leave him, he would call her house incessantly, she said.Mr. Manson told Spin magazine in 2009 that he had called Ms. Wood 158 times one day after a breakup. “I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer,” he said.His representatives said last year, in response to questions by Metal Hammer, that Mr. Manson’s comment in Spin was “obviously a theatrical rock star interview promoting a new record.”Mr. Manson described his views on women in a 2015 interview with Dazed, a style magazine.“Girls should always present themselves to you when you come home,” he said. “‘Hi honey, I’m home,’ and she’s wearing lingerie, legs akimbo. ‘Come and get it, honey.’”Ms. Wood told Rolling Stone magazine in 2016 that she had been raped: “By a significant other while we were together. And on a separate occasion, by the owner of a bar.”In recent years, especially after the birth of her son in 2013 and the start of the #MeToo movement, she was galvanized to become an advocate for survivors of domestic abuse, she told The New York Times in a 2018 interview. “If you’re going to be famous, for me it has to mean something, or be used for something, because otherwise it just freaks me out,” she said in the interview.That February, she testified before Congress about what she had endured.“So often we speak of these assaults as no more than a few minutes of awfulness, but the scars last a lifetime,” she said in her testimony, in which she detailed an episode in which she thought she might die at the hands of her abuser. “Not just because my abuser said to me, ‘I could kill you right now.’ But because in that moment, I felt like I left my body. I was too afraid to run, he would find me.”For years afterward, she said, she “struggled with depression, addiction, agoraphobia, night terrors,” and made two suicide attempts; she said she was eventually diagnosed with long-term post-traumatic stress disorder.Before her Congressional hearing about the Survivor’s Bill of Rights, which expanded access to medical care and more for survivors of sexual assault, Ms. Wood said she had hardly uttered the full scope of her trauma to anyone. She had barely processed it herself, she said in the 2018 interview, until she was cast in “Westworld,” the sci-fi drama in which she plays an innocent who slowly awakens to the darkness around her.Ms. Wood has said that she did not report her abuser to authorities because the statute of limitations had long since passed, and that she chose not to name him because she felt she had to come to terms with her own story first. “It took me so long to process everything and to get to a place where I felt even safe enough to speak about the abuse. And it’s scary,” she said in Harper’s Bazaar in 2019.Giving survivors more time was part of her motivation in working on the Phoenix Act, the California bill for which she testified. It passed in 2019, and took effect last year. It lengthens the statute of limitations for domestic abuse felonies to five years, and expands training for officers working on domestic violence cases.In response to Ms. Wood’s allegations on Monday, Susan Rubio, the California state senator who proposed the legislation, and who is herself a survivor of domestic abuse, called for Mr. Manson to be investigated.She said Ms. Wood had been “instrumental” in getting California’s laws changed. “When survivors speak up, they help victims realize they are not alone and empower them to come out of the shadows,” she said. “The more stories we share, the less power we give our abusers.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Keegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a Laugh

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKeegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a LaughHis new 10-part podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” is a surprising and earnest defense of a relatively unsung art form.Keegan-Michael Key in 2018. His new podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” involved a lot of research. “I loved school,” he said, so delving into a subject “kind of lights my fire.”Credit…Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021Updated 4:33 p.m. ETThere are people who enjoy comedy, people who are nerdy about comedy and then there is Keegan-Michael Key, an actor and producer whose deep and affectionate connoisseurship of jokes puts him closer to the realm of a jurist or sommelier.On Key’s new Audible-exclusive podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” he plays resident historian, taking listeners on a laugh-laden and discursive journey — from ancient Sumer to 16th-century Rome to Abbott and Costello — in a lighthearted but earnest attempt to demonstrate the enduring power and understated complexity of the art form.For Key, who has spent the half-decade since the end of his award-winning TV show “Key & Peele” zigzagging between interesting projects onscreen and off, the podcast was a labor of love. It was directed by and co-written with his wife, Elle Key, last year. On a recent phone call, he discussed the impetus for the show, performing without a true audience and the role his adoption played in his love of comedy.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When you hear about a celebrity starting a podcast, you generally think of something personality driven, or an interview show with other famous people. You don’t think of an in-depth, 10-part history lesson. What made you want to do this project as a podcast?KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY Well, one of the things that brought me and my wife, Elle, together is our love of humor and of comedy, even the science of it: What makes a good turn? What makes the joke work? I’m an academically minded person — I loved school. So being able to do research and delve into a subject and turn that around and share with other people is something that kind of lights my fire. For years, Elle has been suggesting that with all of the combined knowledge and passion for this art form that we have, we should figure out a way to share it with others. And when the pandemic started, we used all of our time in quarantine to put it together. Her pitch to Audible was: “If Keegan-Michael Key was a guest lecturer at N.Y.U. doing a 10-week course called ‘The History of Sketch Comedy,’ it would be a very popular class.”Have you always been a student of the history of sketch comedy?KEY That’s something that started in my 20s probably, when I was an undergrad fine arts and acting major [at the University of Detroit Mercy]. I never gave much thought to the history of comedy until I started studying commedia dell’arte. I was like, “Wait a second, you mean there are archetypes? Warner Brothers didn’t just invent the phenomenon of Bugs Bunny? The primary characteristics [of Bugs] have existed for hundreds of years?” When my professor said that, my mind got peeled back. I wrote a paper [in graduate school, at Pennsylvania State University] making a comparison between vaudevillian poster advertisements from the late 19th century and the images that you would see on Greek and Roman friezes from the comedies of Plautus and Terence and Aristophanes, just because that kind of stuff fascinated me.Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key, who directed the podcast, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party last year.Credit…Danny Moloshok/ReutersHad you done much comedy of your own at that point?KEY Yeah, I think comedy afforded me social currency. You don’t have to be particularly athletic, you don’t have to be super strong and you don’t have to be on the dean’s list to be able to execute a pratfall or tell a funny joke or do a dead-on impression. That was the route that I went as a painfully shy, very skinny kid. That was the only power I knew how to wield. I remember once, when I was a kid, seeing my father, who was this very large, stoic, soft-spoken guy, guffawing at this impression. It was revelatory to me that a person could have that kind of power over somebody who was a thousand miles away, or 10,000 miles away.Did you try and make him laugh yourself?KEY I would try to impress him. If I had gone to see a movie, I would go home to my mom and my dad and act out the movie. Or, if they hadn’t seen a trailer for a movie, I would act out the trailer. Sometimes I would also use that as a kind of pre-Power Point presentation, trying to convince them to let me go see the movie if it was rated R. They were thoroughly entertained, but alas, it did not work.That’s really funny given what you ended up doing for a living, especially all the movie-inspired sketches of the “Key & Peele” show.KEY Exactly. It’s not a surprise at all. Also, I’m adopted; so to say that I spent a lot of time trying to get my parents’ approval is kind of an understatement. I’ve been acting since I was born, you know what I mean? I’ve been putting my tap shoes on for people’s approval for a long time.You chose an interesting starting point for the show, going all the way back to a Sumerian fart joke from 1900 B.C., which I couldn’t believe was real. How did you decide how far back to go?KEY It started with the joke from the film “Airplane.” Lloyd Bridges storms in and he goes: “All right, everybody. I need this piece of information. I need that to happen over there, this to happen over here, and we have to start at the beginning.” And then the guy says to him: “OK. Well, first, there was dinosaurs, and then …” So we actually decided to use that joke as the basis for the beginning. Like, “What would it look like if we start at the beginning? Let’s talk about hieroglyphics.” And then the hieroglyphics brought us to the Sumerians. I think, at our most basic level, the way we captivate each other as human beings is through explaining the journey or the ordeal that one goes through. Literature, cinema, theater — they’re all basically the same at the core, but we express them in a different way.The series begs the question of just what is a sketch. I’m curious how you define it.KEY I think one of the biggest components of sketch is brevity. The modern definition is: premise plus escalation equals sketch, or premise plus escalation equals comedy, which means that a sketch is just kind of an elongated joke that builds on itself. So I was trying to affix that measuring stick to these other pieces of art throughout history. There are lots of scenes in movies and plays where you could move it surgically out of the larger piece, and it could stand as its own piece of comedy. To me, that’s sketch.How did you approach doing all the research for the show? Did you have to brush up on your William Dunlap or your Mathurine de Vallois?KEY Well, a lot of what Elle did is that, as we were putting the structure together, we started to go through history and just say, “What do we know about comedy and where there were comedic performers in history?” Then we just started putting them on the timeline. I discovered through our research about female jesters — was not aware that they existed. There are a lot of wonderful things that I discovered, like the “rural purge” and Beyond the Fringe.Putting all that on a timeline and then being able to kind of zoom out, did it make you see comedy in a different way? Or affirm things you already knew?KEY I think that it probably affirmed things. One of those affirmations was the basics: that people figured out tens of thousands of years ago that it was satisfying to watch someone overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. That is somehow inherent in our programming, to excite us and bring us meaning.Yours is the only voice we hear in the series, and you act out a lot of the sketches you discuss. Was it strange to perform without an audience?KEY Technically speaking, I wasn’t alone: I had Elle in the booth, the engineer and a production assistant. I’d be in the booth looking at them [while performing], and I’d see them start to smile. To me, if I start improvising and I see people start to grin, that’s chum in the water and I’m a great white shark. I’m going to go right the [expletive] off script and do everything in my power to make them burst out in laughter. In certain episodes, you actually hear me talking to Cameron [Perry], the engineer. I go, “Right, Cameron? I mean, it’s a pretty filthy joke, but you’re laughing. Everybody, Cameron’s laughing.”What have you liked most about working in audio?KEY One thing I like is the fact that sometimes it allows you to go bigger. It allows you to be broader, more energetic, because you have to convey something through a microphone. Especially when you’re doing animation work — the figure of what you’re performing with your voice is often so exaggerated that it gives you license to be peculiar or over the top. You can say to the director, “What if I just was like [yodels loudly and cartoonishly]?” And the director will go: “That might work.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Cicely Tyson Kept It Together So We Didn’t Fall Apart

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAn AppraisalCicely Tyson Kept It Together So We Didn’t Fall ApartA wonder of poise and punch, the actress dared to declare herself a moral progenitor, taking on roles that reflected the dignity of Black women.In “Sounder,” from 1972, Cicely Tyson is often transfixing in her stillness.Credit…20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesJan. 29, 2021Updated 4:44 p.m. ETHow odd to celebrate someone for not being who we’ve been programmed to expect. But American entertainment worked hard on the mold that Cicely Tyson refused to fit. So, really, what we’ve been saluting all these decades was historic defiance. She died on Thursday, at 96, just after the release of “Just as I Am,” a juicy, honest, passionately Cicely memoir. (“Well, child, I’ll tell you: my mouth fell open like a broken pocketbook.”) And on the opening pages resides the truth about why, as a performer, she was the way she was.“My art had to both mirror the times and propel them forward,” she writes. “I was determined to do all I could to alter the narrative about Black people — to change the way Black women in particular were perceived, by reflecting our dignity.” Tyson made this vow in 1972, a few years after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at the dawn of the so-called Blaxploitation filmmaking boom that didn’t fulfill her. No hookers, no servants, no big bad mamas. Which meant that, for a woman dependent on an industry that trained its patrons to overlook a beauty as singular and angular and walnut-brown as hers, she’d essentially declared a hunger strike.Alas, she would not be playing the most daring, out-there characters. And let’s face it: the great parts were always headed to someone whiter anyway. The more audacious move was to declare herself a moral progenitor, to walk with her head high so that Denzel Washington might become a man on fire and Viola Davis could learn how to get away with murder.Tyson had a remarkable physical presence, someone sculpted as much as born. Her body was dancer lithe. She seemed delicate. But only “seemed.” She was delicate the way a ribbon of steel holds up its part of a bridge. The deceptive nature of her fineness was right there in the name. Cicely Tyson. Poise and punch.Her mouth comprised an overbite, protruding front teeth and two full lips. The words she spoke brought with them a little extra breath, which, in turn, gave her an everlasting lightness that made us lean toward her so we wouldn’t miss whatever truth she was about to tell. She didn’t write the scripts, yet she never seemed to waste a word. How? And the way she spoke: with the erudite diction fragrant of both old showbiz and old Harlem. No Black woman had ever performed this reliably with this much elegance and surety. Of course, the mold being what it was, nobody had ever asked a Black woman to do any such thing. (Diahann Carroll appeared to be her sister in dignity.)In a scene from “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” the title character, played by Tyson, fights segregation by drinking from a fountain reserved for white people.Credit…CBS, via Getty ImagesTyson was a peculiar kind of famous. I was never told of her importance. I just knew. Everybody knew. This woman was somebody. She looked sainted, venerated — at 29, 36, 49 and 60. Even in anguish. It’s possible that happens once you’ve played a 110-year-old formerly enslaved woman in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and after you’ve played Kunta Kinte’s mother. Or maybe those roles happen because you radiate venerability.She could act with her entire head yet scarcely move it at all. That’s her in most of “Sounder,” transfixing in her stillness. “Sounder” itself is a quiet, Depression-era movie, from 1972, built around Louisiana sharecroppers named Nathan and Rebecca Morgan, their three children and the family dog, Sounder. It’s foolishly lit. The night scenes are brightened by lanterns, which wouldn’t be my first choice for a movie with this much brown skin. Tyson spends a few scenes under a big straw hat that hides half her face.For lots of actors this would be death, because they’re too vain to stand for it or lack what it takes to overcome that kind of obscurity. For that sort of actor it’s all in the eyes. Over four decades of watching this woman work, I discovered that her technique rarely relied on her eyes, although they could glitter and dance. Tyson was another sort of actor: a life force. She emanated and exuded: hurt, warmth, joy, suspicion, fear, hauteur, love — an ocean of love.“Sounder” is a quiet movie set in Louisiana; from left, Paul Winfield, Yvonne Jarrell, Cicely Tyson, Kevin Hooks and Taj Mahal. Credit…20th Century Fox, via Everett CollectionCICELY TYSON WAS known to all people. But in Black homes, Tyson epitomized “household name.” A fixture even more than a star, either way an illuminant. A natural resource, a wonder, a font, a dream, a beacon. What other actor worked with such clear purpose, vocation and seriousness on the one hand and with a devastating smile on the other? Tyson knew what she represented. An honorary Oscar, three Emmys, a pile of Emmy nominations and a Tony all came her way. Just as fittingly for a woman who willed herself to matter, so did eight N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards.One of those was for playing Marva Collins in “The Marva Collins Story,” a pat yet ultimately astonishing Hallmark Hall of Fame production that CBS aired in 1981. Collins taught at a Chicago public school that the movie turns into a zoo everywhere but inside her classroom. It’s quintessential Tyson. The school system’s bureaucracy and low expectations inspire Collins to open a private school in the upstairs unit of her house. When a white teacher all but calls her uppity, Marva treats her to a death stare and says, “I dress the way I do, Miss Denny, because I happen to believe my children deserve a positive image.” Tyson is loose and charming and sharp; married to a carpenter played by Morgan Freeman; romantic, funny, unflappable and — thank the lord — well lit, the teacher of parents’ dreams, the actor this country needed in more slam-dunk roles just like this.Tyson plays a Chicago public school teacher married to Morgan Freeman’s character in “The Marva Collins Story,” from 1981.Credit…CBS, via Getty ImagesConsider the parts she could have played if the movies were fairer. Consider what we’d be saying now if her standards were lower. How’s that for fairness?I often got the sense that Tyson was hanging on to a little something, perhaps for herself, which, in turn, compelled us to hang on more tightly to her. In “Sounder,” after a judge sentences Nathan to a year of hard labor, the film cuts to Rebecca, seated in the rear of the court surrounded by her children and two friends. Rather than wail, she just looks on in solemn comprehension, a hand supporting her head. Of course, she’s devastated; the marriage is strong. But in that moment, what you see Tyson performing is resolve, strategy. She knows that she now has to do the farming — the sharecropping — on her own. The moment hits you harder for all that Tyson doesn’t do. Poise, punch.She rarely broke down. She never cracked up. She held it together, lest the rest of us fall apart. “Marva Collins” was as close as Tyson ever got to her wits’ end. And even then: she was losing it for her people. There were other exceptions. The scene in “Sounder,” say, in which Nathan, freshly sprung from that labor camp, hobbles up to the road as she runs a 100-yard dash toward him, tears flying from her face, her arms flung open. This is no way to run a dash. Instead, she invented a run powered not by muscles at all but entirely by heart. That sprint goes in the national registry of great American movie shots. And how about when ancient Miss Jane takes that drink at the “white only” fountain? You can show that to a Martian and he’d wipe the water from his mouth.Tyson knew her place. It was in our movie palaces and living rooms, but also at Black families’ kitchen and dining room tables, an emblem of her race, a vessel through whom an entire grotesque entertainment history ceased to pass because she dammed it off; so that — in her loveliness, grace, rectitude and resolve — she could dare to forge an alternative. She walked with her head high, her chest out, her shoulders back as if she were carrying quite a load that never seemed to trouble her because she knew she was carrying us.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Cicely Tyson, an Actress Who Shattered Stereotypes, Dies at 96

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCicely Tyson, an Actress Who Shattered Stereotypes, Dies at 96In a remarkable career of many decades, she refused to take parts that demeaned Black people and won a Tony, Emmys and an honorary Oscar.Cicely Tyson in London in 1973. She was critical of films and television programs that cast Black characters as criminal, servile or immoral.Credit…Dennis Oulds/Central Press, via Getty ImagesJan. 28, 2021, 7:30 p.m. ETCicely Tyson, the stage, screen and television actress whose vivid portrayals of strong African-American women shattered racial stereotypes in the dramatic arts of the 1970s, propelling her to stardom and fame as an exemplar for civil rights, died Thursday. She was 96. Her death was announced by her longtime manager, Larry Thompson.In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious Black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned Black people. She urged Black colleagues to do the same, and often went without work. She was critical of films and television programs that cast Black characters as criminal, servile or immoral, and insisted that African-Americans, even if poor or downtrodden, should be portrayed with dignity.Her chiseled face and willowy frame, striking even in her 90s, became familiar to millions in more than 100 film, television and stage roles, including some that had traditionally been given only to white actors. She won three Emmys and many awards from civil rights and women’s groups, and at 88 became the oldest person to win a Tony, for her 2013 Broadway role in a revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.”At 93, she won an honorary Oscar, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2018 and into the Television Hall of Fame in 2020. She also won a career achievement Peabody Award in 2020.Despite the gathering force of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, there were few substantial roles for talented, relatively unknown Black actresses like Ms. Tyson. She appeared in Broadway plays, television episodes and minor movie roles before playing Portia, a supporting but notable part in the 1968 film version of Carson McCullers’s “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”Ms. Tyson and Yvonne Jarrell in  “Sounder” (1972).  Credit…20th Century FoxBut in 1972, in a film called “Sounder,” she found what she was looking for: a leading role with dignity. It was as Rebecca, the wife of a Louisiana sharecropper (Paul Winfield) who is imprisoned in 1933 for stealing food for his children. She rises to the challenge — cleaning houses, tilling fields, sweltering under the sun in a worn dress and braided cornrows — a Black woman whose excruciating beauty lies in toil and poverty.“The story in ‘Sounder’ is a part of our history, a testimony to the strength of humankind,” Ms. Tyson told The New York Times after receiving rave reviews and an Oscar nomination for best actress. “Our whole Black heritage is that of struggle, pride and dignity. The black woman has never been shown on the screen this way before.”In 1974, Ms. Tyson stunned a national television audience with her Emmy Award-winning portrayal of a former slave in the CBS special “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” adapted from the novel by Ernest J. Gaines. Born into slavery before the Civil War, Miss Pittman survives for more than a century to see the civil rights movement of the 1960s. At 110, she tells her story, the searing experience of a Black woman in the South. Then, in her only gesture of protest, she sips from a whites-only drinking fountain.Preparing for her metamorphosis, Ms. Tyson visited nursing homes to study the manifestations of old age: the frail shoulders and shaking hands, the unfocused sparkling eyes and slurred speech, the struggle for names and important thoughts just beyond reach.“Cicely Tyson transforms that role into the kind of event for which awards are made,” John J. O’Connor wrote in The Times, citing her passage from young innocence through cycles of age and maturity to shriveled, knowing antiquity. “She absorbs herself completely into Miss Jane, in the process creating a marvelous blend of sly humor, shrewd perceptions and innate dignity.”Maya Angelou and Ms. Tyson in the 1977 mini-series “Roots”Credit…Warner BrothersMs. Tyson later found other suitable television roles: as Kunta Kinte’s mother in a mini-series based on Alex Haley’s “Roots” in 1977; as Coretta Scott King in the 1978 NBC mini-series “King,” about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final years; as Harriet Tubman, whose Underground Railroad spirited slaves to freedom, in “A Woman Called Moses” (1978); and as a Chicago teacher devoted to poor children in “The Marva Collins Story” (1981). In 1994, she won a supporting actress Emmy for her portrayal of Castalia in the mini-series “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.”For many Americans, Ms. Tyson was an idol of the Black Is Beautiful movement, regal in an African turban and caftan, her face gracing the covers of Ebony, Essence and Jet magazines. She was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a runner, a meditator and, from 1981 to 1989, the wife of the jazz trumpeter and composer Miles Davis. Since the ’60s she had inspired Black American women to embrace their own standards of beauty — including helping to popularize the Afro.“She’s our Meryl Streep,” Vanessa Williams told Essence in 2013. “She was the person you wanted to be like in terms of an actress, in terms of the roles she got and how serious she took her craft. She still is.”Ms. Tyson eventually appeared in 29 films; at least 68 television series, mini-series and single episodes; and 15 productions on and off Broadway, including “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright” (1962) and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” (1969).In “The Corn Is Green” (1983), an Emlyn Williams play set in Wales, Ms. Tyson received mixed reviews as Miss Moffat, an English schoolteacher in a coal-mining town who awakens the minds of impoverished youngsters. Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn played the part in earlier film and television adaptations.Since the 1960s, Ms. Tyson had inspired Black American women to embrace their own standards of beauty.Credit…Ben Sklar for The New York TimesAfter a three-decade absence from Broadway, Ms. Tyson returned in 2013 in a production of “The Trip to Bountiful,” playing Carrie Watts, an old woman, also conceived as a white character, who yearns to see her hometown before dying. Her performance won the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards.“It’s been 30 years since I stood onstage; I really didn’t think it would happen again in my lifetime, and I was pretty comfortable with that” Ms. Tyson said at the Tonys ceremony. “Except that I had this burning desire to do just one more. ‘One more great role,’ I said. I didn’t want to be greedy. I just wanted one more.” And she appeared with James Earl Jones for nearly four months in 2015-16 in a Broadway revival of “The Gin Game,” D.L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1976 play about two elderly residents of a retirement home drawn together over a card table.Mr. Jones, then 84, and Ms. Tyson, 90, were onstage for virtually all of its two-hour running time, as Charles Isherwood noted in a review for The Times. “These two superlative performers establish beyond doubt, if we needed any reminding, that great talent is ageless and ever-rewarding,” he said.James Earl Jones and Ms. Tyson in the Broadway revival of “The Gin Game.” Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn January 2021, when she was 96, her memoir, “Just as I Am,” appeared, and in a pre-publication interview with The New York Times Magazine, she was asked if she had any advice for the young.“It’s simple,” she said. “I try always to be true to myself. I learned from my mom: ‘Don’t lie ever, no matter how bad it is. Don’t lie to me ever, OK? You will be happier that you told the truth.’ That has stayed with me, and it will stay with me for as long as I’m lucky enough to be here.”Cicely Tyson was born in East Harlem on Dec. 19, 1924, the youngest of three children of William and Theodosia (also known as Frederica) Tyson, immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Her father was a carpenter and painter, and her mother was a domestic worker. Her parents separated when she was 10, and the children were raised by a strict Christian mother who did not permit movies or dates.After graduating from Charles Evans Hughes High School, Cicely became a model, appearing in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and elsewhere. In the 1940s, she studied at the Actors Studio. Her first role was on NBC’s “Frontiers of Faith” in 1951. Her disapproving mother kicked her out.After small film and television parts in the 1950s, she joined James Earl Jones and Louis Gossett Jr. in the original New York cast of Jean Genet’s “The Blacks” in 1961. It was the longest-running Off Broadway drama of the decade, running for 1,408 performances. Ms. Tyson played Stephanie Virtue, a prostitute, for two years, and won a Vernon Rice Award in 1962, igniting her career.She helped found the Dance Theater of Harlem after the 1968 assassination of Dr. King. In 1994, an East Harlem building where she lived as a child was named for her; it and three others were rehabilitated for 58 poor families. In 1995, a magnet school she supported in East Orange, N.J., was renamed the Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts.Her later television roles included that of Ophelia Harkness in a half dozen episodes of the long-running ABC legal drama “How to Get Away With Murder,” for which she was nominated repeatedly for Emmys and other awards for outstanding guest or supporting actress (2015-19), and in the role of Doris Jones in three episodes of “House of Cards” (2016).Ms. Tyson accepting her honorary Oscar in 2018. “This is the culmination of all those years of have and have-not,” she said.Credit…Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesIn 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.She was always reticent about her age, charity work and other personal details, like being a good-will ambassador for Unicef in 1985-86 and her 1981 marriage to Miles Davis, which ended in divorce in 1989. But she was adamant about dramatic roles. “We Black actresses have played so many prostitutes and drug addicts and housemaids, always negative,” she told Parade magazine in 1972. “I won’t play that kind of characterless role any more, even if I have to go back to starving.”And in November 2018, a month before she turned 94, Ms. Tyson received an honorary Oscar, a Governors Award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In an emotional acceptance speech in Los Angeles, Ms. Tyson, whose highest accolade from the film industry had been her Oscar nomination in 1972, paid tribute to her mother, who had opposed her plan for a career as an entertainer.“Mom, I know you didn’t want me to do this,” she said, “but I did, and here it is. I don’t know that I would cherish a better gift than this,” she told the audience. “This is the culmination of all those years of have and have-not.”Azi Paybarah contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Losing Control With Riz Ahmed

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on Netflix“The thing that doesn’t exist in culture is someone like me,” said Riz Ahmed, a British actor-rapper. “But that’s how you stretch culture, by bringing yourself to it.”Credit…Ryan Lowry for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexThe Great ReadThe ProjectionistLosing Control With Riz AhmedThe actor’s process is so intense, his “Sound of Metal” director refused to share dailies with him. But after all that overthinking, formidable instincts kicked in.“The thing that doesn’t exist in culture is someone like me,” said Riz Ahmed, a British actor-rapper. “But that’s how you stretch culture, by bringing yourself to it.”Credit…Ryan Lowry for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 28, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETTo call it the worst night of sleep Riz Ahmed ever had would imply that any sleep was had at all. It was the night before Ahmed began shooting “Sound of Metal” — an intense, critically acclaimed Amazon drama that has vaulted the 38-year-old into the best-actor Oscar race — and he could do little but stare at the ceiling as adrenaline coursed through his body, robbing it of rest.This wasn’t the first time Ahmed had dealt with preshoot paranoia: Before the British actor embarked on “The Night Of,” “Four Lions” and “Nightcrawler,” he found himself similarly sleepless, with an uneasy mind that could not be soothed. Still, every time he makes a new movie, Ahmed convinces himself that it’ll be different — maybe meditation will help, or even a glass of hot milk before bed.It’s never different. “Nothing’s going to put that animal to rest when it’s growling,” he said. “So I just don’t sleep.”Several restless nights into shooting “Sound of Metal,” Ahmed began to overthink things. Maybe it wasn’t the nerves that were keeping him awake, or the thrilling, terrifying challenge of embodying Ruben, a punk-metal drummer in recovery from heroin addiction who struggles with the onset of hearing loss.Maybe it was the mattress.The more Ahmed fixated on it, the more certain he became. He ran it by his director, Darius Marder, who seemed skeptical, but during a break from shooting Ahmed still peeled off to make a purchase. “I went and I bought a new mattress, man,” he said, laughing about it now.“We bought him two new mattresses,” Marder would tell me later.Did things get any better? Sort of yes, sort of no. The new mattresses hardly helped, but all that sleeplessness actually paid off. “When you’re too tired to think,” Ahmed explained, “you just have to let other things take over.”And that feeling of being so overwhelmed by a project that you’ve got to give in and allow yourself to be guided by pure instinct — well, as much as Ahmed may overthink the path that gets him there, he also knows that state is the exact thing he’s so often seeking.“It’s when you release control that the interesting things happen,” he said. “That’s when your subconscious will start speaking in tongues, when you can’t articulate the words yourself, when your body has an intelligence and wisdom that you hand the reins over to. Creativity is more physical than we realize.”Ahmed in a scene from the movie. He plays a punk-metal drummer facing both addiction issues and hearing loss.Credit…Amazon StudiosThis is the way Ahmed talks, in torrents of passionate philosophy. He offers a raft of ideas for every question he’s asked, then undergirds those answers by quoting from Tolstoy, Rumi and Pixar. When Ahmed’s big brown eyes widen and he really gets going, as he did early this month while we spoke via video, he can sound like a terrifically engaging podcast played at 1.5-x speed.“He’s a bit of a savant, like a supercomputer,” Marder said of his Oxford-educated star. When he met with Ahmed for “Sound of Metal,” Marder regarded that fearsome intellect as both an asset to the film and a challenge to be overcome.“I felt if he were to build such a solid foundation for this character that he could let go of that incredibly adept frontal lobe of his and just trust in his instincts,” Marder said, “then there was a performance in him that could be really transcendent.”After a series of supporting roles in “Venom,” “The Sisters Brothers” and other movies, Ahmed was eager for an all-consuming challenge, and he recognized a kindred spirit in Marder, who had spent 13 years searching for stars who could match his full-throttle commitment to the movie.“I basically was trying to scare actors and see if they were up for it,” Marder said. “I told one actress she had to shave her head, because I knew it was the thing she wouldn’t do.” (Though the female lead in “Sound of Metal” is played by Olivia Cooke, actors like Matthias Schoenaerts and Dakota Johnson were previously attached to the project.)Marder would dare actors to drop out, and most of them obliged. But Ahmed wanted a director who could push him out of his comfort zone. “I think we both like the intoxication of feeling overwhelmed by a creative obsession,” Ahmed said. “We like not being able to feel the bottom of the swimming pool.”Before filming, the director said, “Riz’s process was very intense. It was not a chill time.”Credit…Ryan Lowry for The New York TimesSo the London-based Ahmed uprooted himself to New York in 2018 to spend eight months preparing for “Sound of Metal.” Each day, he would spend two hours learning American Sign Language, two hours on drum practice, two hours sculpting his body with a personal trainer, and the rest of the day with his acting coach.“You prepare like an obsessive psychopath,” Ahmed said, “and then you turn up like someone who doesn’t know how to tie their shoelaces and you see what happens.”Still, his eagerness often ran up against his tendency to overthink things. “I have to tell you, the time leading up to this shoot was so thick with fear,” Marder said. “Riz’s process was very intense. It was not a chill time.”Marder would often refuse Ahmed’s requests for further script analysis, and the day before the shoot, as Ahmed began steeling himself for a sleepless night, Marder came to visit and said he wouldn’t allow the actor to watch dailies of his performance.“He absolutely lost it,” Marder said. “He said, ‘This is part of my process, I have to look at dailies, I have to analyze.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re not going to.’”The standoff was broken only when Marder said, “Riz, I’m not going to be your enabler.’” After having spent months immersed in the language of recovery, that idea made Ahmed laugh. They parted with a hug, and a tired but game Ahmed showed up on set the next day, ready to trust his instincts and give himself over to the character.The result is a career-best performance, intimate, persuasive and heartbreaking. And for all of Ahmed’s well-practiced physical verisimilitude — you’ll believe every drum solo and signed exclamation — it’s a performance he ultimately sells with those striking, vulnerable eyes. As an actor, he doesn’t need much more.“To Riz’s credit, he trusted me,” Marder said. “It was impulse. It was non-analytical. It was scary. But it was alive.”I asked Marder if he had come to any conclusions about the essential tension at the heart of his leading man. What does it mean when a self-described control freak like Ahmed feels such a strong gravitational pull to projects that he hopes will overwhelm him?Marder laughed, because something was occurring to him for the first time. “Well, I think that might actually be the definition of an artist,” he said.He took on so much in 2016, he started to lose his center: “I was willing to diligently train for the validation of others.”Credit…Ryan Lowry for The New York TimesHERE IS A PARTIAL INVENTORY of Riz Ahmed’s projects from his breakthrough year of 2016:— Two television shows, “The Night Of” and “The OA”;— Four feature films, including the blockbusters “Star Wars: Rogue One” and “Jason Bourne”;— One essay contributed to the best-selling book “The Good Immigrant”;— And two major musical moments, a guest appearance on the “Hamilton” mixtape and the album “Cashmere,” released by Ahmed and the rapper Heems as part of their hip-hop duo Swet Shop Boys.It was a lot, for good and for ill. In December of that year, Ahmed took to Instagram for a celebratory look back that sounded more than a little exhausted. “Only a year ago, for various reasons, I wasn’t sure I could carry on doing this,” he wrote. “I had a realisation through some really tough moments that we have no control in this life. And it got me down, but then, seeing no other way forwards, I had to embrace this helplessness.”Over Zoom four years later, I read the caption to Ahmed, who blinked twice. “When did I write that?” he said. “I have no memory of that. Wow. Wow. I had a bit of a burnout.”Ahmed has always been eager to pile his plate high. “Like Ruben, I rely heavily on being obsessively busy,” he said. A successful career as an actor practically demands an itinerant lifestyle and that came naturally to Ahmed, who grew up in Wembley, London, with a father who worked for the Pakistani merchant navy: “He was away from home a lot, so maybe I’ve internalized this idea that what you’re meant to do as a working man is go out of the house and cover as much ground as possible in the world.”Or maybe, Ahmed mused, a child of immigrants will always feel an innate sense of wanderlust. “There’s a constant narrative of home being somewhere else, home’s the next place you’re going to get to,” he said. “But if home is always the next place, then you’re building a tent on quicksand. The work itself is the place you can live, maybe.”So live there he did, working steadily then heavily, and in the process becoming the first Muslim and the first South Asian man to win an acting Emmy for his transformative role as an accused murderer in “The Night Of.” But around that time, after having been pulled in so many different directions, Ahmed began to lose his center. Worse, the creative spirit that animates him had come to feel less like a wild creature and more like a circus animal.Darius Marder and Ahmed on set. The director said of his star: “He’s a bit of a savant, like a supercomputer.”Credit…Amazon Studios“It was something I was willing to diligently train for the validation of others,” Ahmed said, “whether that’s the ‘bravo’ of an audience or the ‘well done’ of a director or the retweets of music fans or thinking about what the people in my community need from me.” Taking on too much had left him alienated from the things he loved doing, and guilty for even feeling that way.“I think that’s a byproduct of a lot of things,” he said, “like feeling a bit of a burden of representation on your shoulders, and realizing that you might occupy space that many others don’t.”In his essay for “The Good Immigrant,” Ahmed wrote about the toll of being racially profiled in airports and auditions, and the implicit instructions he felt to leave a part of himself at the door if he wanted to be waved through. “It’s being told you are not enough,” he said. “You are not the right shape, size, color, you’re not what people expect, you don’t fit into any of these archetypes.’”But why shouldn’t he have the opportunity to give all of himself to something, instead of contorting to fit into ready-made boxes? “The thing that doesn’t exist in culture is someone like me,” Ahmed said, growing animated. “Characters like Dev Patel don’t exist, bro! Dev Patel’s a 6-foot-5 black-belt Indian dude from northwest London, and I don’t see that character on the screen.”That’s why Ahmed found the overwhelming specificity of his “Sound of Metal” role so attractive. He knows that a man like Ruben — a deaf, heroin-addicted American with bleach-blond hair and a buff body covered in tattoos — might seem worlds away from a garrulous actor-rapper who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford.“You prepare like an obsessive psychopath,” Ahmed said, “and then you turn up like someone who doesn’t know how to tie their shoelaces and you see what happens.”Credit…Ryan Lowry for The New York Times“But that’s how you stretch culture, by bringing yourself to it,” Ahmed said. And the chance to pour every part of himself into this role paid personal dividends, too: “I feel more connected to me now than I’ve ever felt by going on a journey through space and time and inhabiting another body. You leave home to return home.”There were lessons learned from playing Ruben, as well as lessons he’ll keep having to relearn, Ahmed admitted. “Ruben is on a journey to try and learn the value of stillness and that’s something that I think I can get better at,” he said. His past year, though tempered by the pandemic, was still an eventful one: Ahmed put out a hip-hop concept album, “The Long Goodbye,” shot the film “Invasion” alongside Octavia Spencer, and married the novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza.There’s always going to be a lot going on with Riz Ahmed — that’s just the kind of person he is. Still, Marder sensed a change in his actor on the other side of making “Sound of Metal.”“I do think it marked this kind of crossroads in his life as an artist and as a person,” Marder said. “Maybe it’s not a mistake that he’s married now. He’s taking these big moments in life, these big changes, and giving himself to something else that is also out of his control.”Ahmed agreed. That desire to overwhelm himself, he said, is a reminder to live less in his head and more in the moment.“If we don’t control anything, then maybe every single thing in your life is a gift,” Ahmed said. “Wow! That’s amazing, you know?” And he wasn’t talking about the sort of gifts that awards season can bring, like the Gotham Award for best actor his “Sound of Metal” performance earned in early January.“I mean the bird on the windowsill, dude,” Ahmed said. “Or a tree. Or this breath.” He closed his eyes and sucked in all the air he could, then smiled. “Or the way it cools my insides when it comes in,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Gunnel Lindblom, Familiar Face in Bergman Films, Dies at 89

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGunnel Lindblom, Familiar Face in Bergman Films, Dies at 89She appeared in early classics like “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Virgin Spring” and devoted much of her long career to the stage.Gunnel Lindblom and Gunnar Björnstrand in Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1957 film “The Seventh Seal.” She appeared in several of his early films. Credit…Svensk Filmindustri, via PhotofestJan. 27, 2021, 5:04 p.m. ETGunnel Lindblom, a Swedish actress who worked with Ingmar Bergman in his early classic films and on decades of stage productions, died on Sunday in Brottby, Sweden, a small community north of Stockholm. She was 89.The death was announced by her family.In “The Seventh Seal” (1957), Bergman’s portrait of a knight (played by Max von Sydow) returning from the Crusades to find his village devastated by plague, Ms. Lindblom was an unnamed mute girl. At the film’s end, her character finally speaks, announcing biblically, “It is finished.”In “Wild Strawberries” (1957), about an elderly professor reflecting on life and loneliness, she was the man’s beautiful and kind sister in turn-of-the-century flashbacks.In “The Virgin Spring” (1960), Bergman’s tale of Christianity and revenge in medieval Sweden, Ms. Lindblom was a young, sullen, accidentally pregnant, Odin-worshiping servant girl of a wealthy landowner (also played by Mr. von Sydow). She witnesses the rape and brutal murder of his daughter, her spoiled but naïve teenage mistress.Ms. Lindblom’s professional relationship with Bergman, who died in 2007, continued and evolved. After “The Virgin Spring,” she appeared in two parts of his film trilogy about religion and faith: In “Winter Light” (1963), her character was a depressed fisherman’s wife; in “The Silence” (1964) she was a woman isolated with her dying sister in an unfamiliar foreign country.A decade later she had a supporting role in “Scenes From a Marriage,” Bergman’s Scandinavian mini-series, which starred Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson and was released internationally as a feature film in 1974. Her character, Eva, is an attractive work colleague of the leading man.One of Ms. Lindblom’s seven screen directing credits was “Paradistorg,” a drama about a family getaway. When it was released in the United States in 1978 as “Summer Paradise,” Janet Maslin’s review in The New York Times summed up the characters’ middle-class crises: “The women are lonely, the men are weaklings, and the children are growing up without proper supervision.”When Bergman directed “Ghost Sonata,” August Strindberg’s 1908 modernist play, at Dramaten in Stockholm at the turn of the millennium, Ms. Lindblom was cast as the Captain’s Wife, a beautiful woman who becomes a mummy.Strindberg, although he died in 1912, was perhaps the second most influential Swedish artist in her career; in recapping it, in fact, the first credit that some European obituaries mentioned was her title performance in a 1965 BBC production of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” his story of a wealthy young woman’s attraction to a servant. Ms. Lindblom received an honorary Guldbagge, Sweden’s Oscar equivalent, for lifetime achievement in 2002.Ms. Lindblom in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the 2009 Swedish film version of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel. It was her last high-profile movie role.Credit…AlamyGunnel Martha Ingegard Lindblom was born on Dec. 18, 1931, in Gothenburg (Goteborg), Sweden, and studied acting at the Gothenburg City Theater in the early 1950s.She made her film debut in Gustaf Molander’s “Karlek” (the English title was “Love”), a 1952 drama about a young priest, and collaborated frequently with Bergman at Malmo City Theater, where he had become artistic director.She had a busy six-decade theater career, most notably with the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, and played close to 60 screen roles — including Aunt Julie in “Hedda Gabler” (1993), the professor’s wife in “Uncle Vanya” (1967) and the ex-wife of a guilty choreographer in Susan Sontag’s “Brother Carl” (1971).She appeared in three recent film shorts (the last, “Bergman’s Reliquarium,” in 2018) and made a guest appearance on “The Inspector and the Sea,” a Swedish crime-drama series, in 2011. But her last high-profile screen role was in the Swedish film version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2009), based on Stieg Larsson’s best seller. (Two years later, an American version, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, was released.)In the Swedish film “Millennium” and in the 2010 American mini-series inspired by it, Ms. Lindblom played Isabella Vanger, the mother of the serial-killer antagonist. Isabella knew for years that her children were being sexually abused and said nothing.Ms. Lindblom and Sture Helander, a Swedish physician, married in 1960, had three children and divorced in 1970. In 1981, she married Frederik Dessau, the Danish film director and writer, and they divorced in 1986.No information on survivors was immediately available, but Ms. Lindblom had two sons, Thomas Helander and Jan Helander, and a daughter, Jessica Helander.Much of Ms. Lindblom’s career was devoted to theater, but she gladly acknowledged her love of filmmaking — sometimes just for the joy of shooting outdoors rather than being cooped up inside a theater, she said. And she had a particular appreciation for period films, partly because some managed to convey true timelessness.Watching contemporary films of the past, “you say, ‘Oh, that was made in the ’50s,’ ” she reflected in a 21st-century video interview. “But in a period film, if it’s well done, you don’t see when it’s made.”After all, the human condition itself is timeless.“I don’t think people have changed very much,” Ms. Lindblom said in the same interview, alluding to her medieval character in “The Virgin Spring.” “The feelings are very much the same. So you have to go for the truth.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More