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      Stream Maggie Smith’s Greatest Performances

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      In “Downton Abbey,” “A Room With a View” and dozens of other films and television series, she delighted audiences with her portrayal of sharp, tart-tongued and often wryly funny Englishwomen.Maggie Smith, who was 89 when she died on Friday, made her professional stage debut on Broadway in the 1950s, when she was still in her early 20s. In the decades that followed, she worked steadily in movies and television, while regularly returning to the theater.Smith won her first Oscar for the title role in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), a charismatic and manipulative teacher who has a profound and, at times, destructive effect on the lives of the teenage girls in her charge. She went on to win another Oscar, a Tony and four Emmys, and became known in her later years for playing a particular type of Englishwoman: sturdy, smart, sharp-tongued and rooted sometimes stubbornly in the traditions of the past.Audiences in the 21st century came to love Smith in two recurring roles: as the heroic Professor Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies and as the coolly disapproving dowager countess Violet Crawley in the period TV drama “Downton Abbey.” But her career was long and eclectic, with a mix of serious and comic characters, in both supporting and leading roles. Here are 10 of Smith’s best performances that are available to stream:1972‘Travels With My Aunt’Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.Though she was only in her late 30s at the time, Smith took an early step toward her most familiar screen persona — the dynamic and unforgettable older relative — in this adaptation of Graham Greene’s offbeat adventure novel. Filling in for Katharine Hepburn (who differed with the studio and with her old friend, the director George Cukor, on how best to tell her character’s story), Smith ended up nabbing her third Oscar nomination, playing the eccentric globe-trotter Augusta Bertram, who enlists a stuffy, middle-aged Londoner in one of her illicit moneymaking schemes while hiding her true connection to him. Smith builds an outsize yet complex character via flashbacks that show how she learned to eschew conventional mores and to enjoy life on her own terms.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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      ‘Titaníque’ Was Her Big Hit. Is ‘Big Gay Jamboree’ Really Her Swan Song?

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      Two years after debuting the “Titanic” parody, Marla Mindelle says her new show, with Margot Robbie as a producer, may be her last as an actor.There is a trail of trash cans plastered with Marla Mindelle’s face along the 10-minute walk from the Daryl Roth Theater in Union Square, where her musical “Titaníque” has been playing since 2022, to the Orpheum in the East Village, where her latest, “The Big Gay Jamboree,” is in previews.Her face on the poster advertises both shows, and she sees that advertising placement strategy as God (and the shows’ marketing teams) doing some light trolling: retribution for her style of satire. Mindelle, a writer and performer who struck gold with the Céline Dion jukebox parody, “Titaníque,” years after calling it quits on her small Broadway roles, slings the type of vulgar, musical-theater in-jokes only someone with a deep love of (and knowing frustration with) the industry can get away with.It’s that same sense of humor that lifted “Titaníque” from a basement theater in Chelsea into a commercial Off Broadway hit, and is now at work in “The Big Gay Jamboree,” Mindelle’s first musical with an original score.Unlike “Titaníque,” a purposely unpretentious spoof of the James Cameron blockbuster film, “Jamboree” is an elaborately staged show about wanting to leave the world of musicals and is being produced in part by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap company.Mindelle, 40, sees it as her performing swan song.At a cafe across from the theater where the new production will open on Sept. 30, she detailed what she views as a life of being comically at odds with her chosen profession.The cast of “The Big Gay Jamboree” at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village.James Estrin/The New York TimesWe 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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      ‘SNL’ Debut Cast and Crew Look Back on 50 Seasons

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      As the historic 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” gets underway, its very first episode has become a piece of show-business mythology: the story of how a group of misfit writers and performers, led by a 30-year-old Canadian upstart named Lorne Michaels, put together a counterculture comedy-variety show in Manhattan amid interpersonal conflict, last-minute changes and substance abuse, and somehow established a television institution.It’s a legend so revered that it has inspired a new film, “Saturday Night,” directed by Jason Reitman, in which a cast of young actors portraying the Not Ready for Prime Time Players (as well as the show’s producers and crew members) act out a version of events as they might have unfolded on that fateful evening of Oct. 11, 1975.For the people actually involved in the debut broadcast of what was then called “Saturday Night” — the writers, cast members, comedians and musicians — that excitement and energy is only one part of the tale. They remember the creation of the NBC show — the long buildup to its premiere, the performance itself and the aftermath — as sometimes hectic, sometimes carefully organized. It was a period full of head-butting, but one that also fostered camaraderie and lifelong friendships. And it never would have happened without some crucial, 11th-hour discoveries, or the right people in place to make those realizations.But at no point did they wonder if they were about to make history. “I don’t think it concerned us one way or the other,” said Chevy Chase, a founding cast member and writer. “We were going to do what we do, and if you laugh, great, you laugh. You’ll tell somebody else about it, and they’ll laugh the next time.”Here, some of those participants share their memories of how “Saturday Night” came to life.Jane CurtinJane Curtin said that she realized the show was catching on when she left 30 Rock and on the street “you’d pass by people and they would shake.”NBCU Photo Bank/Getty ImagesCurtin had acted in theater, commercials and a Boston-area improv group, the Proposition, when she auditioned for “Saturday Night” in summer 1975. At her callback, Curtin expected a conversation with producers: “I walked in the door,” she recalled, “and they said, ‘OK, what have you prepared?’ The classic anxiety dream.” Fortunately, she had some old material in her purse. “It was a big purse,” Curtin said.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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      Holy Hollywood! Batman Is the First Superhero With a Walk of Fame Star.

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      The caped crusader, who debuted in 1939, joins other illustrious figures — including Adam West, the actor who played him on TV.It is hard to imagine something new happening to Batman after 85 years of adventures in comic books, television and film. But he has a new notch on his utility belt: He has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Batman is the first superhero honored on the Walk of Fame, which is administered by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. (Mickey Mouse was the first fictional character to receive a star, in 1978.) Batman’s recognition is the 2,790th since the first eight stars were unveiled in 1958.Comic book readers met the Bat-Man (the hyphen was soon dropped) in 1939, when they opened the March 30 issue of Detective Comics. Out of the costume the superhero is the socialite Bruce Wayne. They were also introduced to Police Commissioner Gordon, who would become the hero’s trusted ally and later gained the first name James.Burt Ward, who played Robin on the “Batman” television show of the 1960s, at the Batman ceremony on Thursday.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesBatman himself may not have been honored on the Walk of Fame before now, but he’s had ties there. Adam West, who starred in “Batman” on TV from 1966-68, has a star, as does Burt Ward, who played Robin, Batman’s trusted partner. (West received a star in 2012; Ward in 2020.) One of his creators, Bob Kane, was also awarded a star in 2015.Absolute Batman No. 1, which reimagines Batman’s origins, will be out on Oct. 9.DCBatman is also getting a whole new beginning in a new comic book series with Absolute Batman No. 1, from DC. The series, by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta, presents a bigger, beefier and more menacing Batman: His chest emblem, for example, detaches to become the top of a battle ax. Holy anger management, Batman! The issue arrives in stores on Oct. 9.There is also currently a “Batman: Caped Crusader” animated series on Amazon, and his most recent live action film, starring Robert Pattinson in 2022, led to the new spinoff series “The Penguin,” on HBO. More

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      What to See on the West End This Fall

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      Some recommendations for visitors and residents who want to get the most from the city’s varied theater scene.This fall’s London theater season promises star vehicles aplenty alongside robust reimaginings of the classics and even a notable song or two. What follows is just a sampling of the city’s abundance of new openings, anticipated revivals and Off West End discoveries — something to keep everyone cozy as the nights draw in.Time-honored classicsBen Whishaw, left, and Lucian Msamati in “Waiting for Godot.”Marc BrennerWaiting For GodotSamuel Beckett’s epoch-defining tragicomedy returns with some frequency to London stages. But I’ve rarely seen it better served than by the dream double-act of Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati as those engaging existentialists, Vladimir and Estragon, alongside the no less memorable Jonathan Slinger and Tom Edden as the itinerant Pozzo and Lucky. The director James Macdonald brings the same gift for textual illumination to the production that has distinguished his career over several decades. Runs through Dec. 14 at the Theater Royal, Haymarket.Roots / Look Back in AngerThe Almeida Theater is reviving two English classics, running concurrently, whose kitchen-sink realism ushered in a more urgent, socially conscious school of theater in the 1950s. Billed as the “Angry and Young” season, Arnold Wesker’s “Roots” and John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” both feature outspoken firebrands trying to make sense of the world. The two productions share a single cast, led by Billy Howle and Morfydd Clark; Diyan Zora and Atri Banerjee direct. Both shows run through Nov. 23 at the Almeida Theater.A scene from “Roots” at the Almeida Theater.Marc Brenner More

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      Kathryn Crosby, Actress and Bing Crosby’s Widow, Dies at 90

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      She was a Texas-born starlet when she married the beloved crooner, but put aside her career at his urging.Kathryn Crosby, a Texas-born beauty queen and aspiring actress who put aside her movie career when she married Bing Crosby, the movie star and honey-voiced baritone, died on Friday at her home in Hillsborough, Calif. She was 90.Harlan Boll, a publicist speaking for her family, announced her death. The pair met cute on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles in 1953. Kathryn Grant, as she was then known, was a new contract player rushing to deliver a load of petticoats to the wardrobe department while on her way to a tennis game. Mr. Crosby, the laconic, blue-eyed heart throb, was already an American institution.“What’s your rush, Tex?” Mr. Crosby asked, standing in the door of his dressing room. She stopped short, and down went the petticoats and her tennis racket.They kept colliding, though less dramatically, in the days that followed — Ms. Crosby even tried out for a part in one of Mr. Crosby’s big hits, “White Christmas.” When she asked to interview the star for her column, “Texas Girl in Hollywood,” which was running in several Texas newspapers, he finagled the appointment into a dinner date at Chasen’s, the Hollywood canteen. On the drive home, he took her hand and sang “You’d Be So Easy to Love.” She was 19; he was 49.Kathryn Grant, as she was then known, with Mr. Crosby at the 27th Academy Awards in 1955.Bettmann/Getty ImagesTheir courtship was far from easy, though Mr. Crosby proposed that year. The star, beloved for his public image as a laid-back everyman, was diffident and mercurial. He disappeared for months at a time, set wedding dates and broke them — once because, as he joked, he’d left his toupee at home, and once because another romantic entanglement had threatened suicide. He was also involved with Grace Kelly, his co-star in “The Country Girl” and “High Society.” The couple finally married in a Las Vegas courthouse in 1957.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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      Natasha Lyonne’s Success Is Driven by a Sense of Mortality

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      Natasha Lyonne has her funeral all planned out.Not just planned, really, but choreographed, produced and directed, complete with music cues and writing prompts, to calibrate the emotion just right. “Otherwise it can run long,” she explained. So Lyonne, the downtown vivant actress, writer and director, has diligently assigned her passel of famous friends “jobs that they didn’t want.”There will be a month of commemorative screenings at Film Forum and songs by Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“I have a sworn promise that she performs; I’m very grateful”) and the “Color Purple” star Danielle Brooks, because her voice “breaks my heart.” The comedian John Mulaney will be on hand to punch up material. “I actually tasked him with writing speeches for people that wouldn’t want to get onstage,” Lyonne said, like her BFF Chloë Sevigny. “I was like: You need to give Chloë some jokes.”The plot she acquired, at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, alongside her boyfriend at the time, Fred Armisen, she has now graciously ceded to his wife, Riki Lindhome. “I probably don’t want to be buried in Los Angeles anyway, if I’m honest,” she allowed. But she’s still making him the funerary musical supervisor.That Lyonne, at 45, has thought at length about her own demise is, to anyone who knows her or her oeuvre, not surprising. All of her recent, most celebrated projects — including “Russian Doll,” the Emmy-winning Netflix series; “Poker Face,” the retro crime procedural on Peacock; and her latest role, in the Netflix drama “His Three Daughters” — find her confronting life’s end. She does it with a spectacular, bewitching buoyancy. Even in “His Three Daughters,” in which she displays an unexpected reserve (but exuberant hair) opposite Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen as estranged sisters caring for their father in his last days. It’s earning her Oscar talk.As a producer, Lyonne “likes the grind and the hustle, and the hard work that comes with it,” said Amy Poehler. “That’s not always the case.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesSo, when we found ourselves in an East Village restaurant on a drizzly Friday night, ordering a dessert made of Pop Rocks and talking about death, it felt just as the universe — or New York City, same difference — intended.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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      Hollywood Has Enough Fake Accents. Bring Back the Weird Voices.

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      David Lynch’s voice is unmistakable — and a national treasure. The world of film deserves more like it.“Something is coming along for you to see and hear,” mewled the filmmaker David Lynch in a video posted online this past spring. The clip was a teaser for a music project, and it caught the eye via the director’s old-school cool — his shades and upswept silver locks, framed in close-up. But it was another bit of business that actually held attention: the jangle and blare of Lynch’s reedy voice.Larger-than-life screen personalities are necessarily watchable. Some also prove mysteriously listenable. Lynch is among them, a member of the small pantheon of filmmakers whose mystique is partly indebted to the textures of their speech: the gorgeous intonations of Orson Welles, the reminiscing tones of Agnès Varda, the runaway-train enthusiasm of Quentin Tarantino.Over his long career, Lynch has offered his own locomotive thrills. It begins with that unmistakable voice — what the director Mel Brooks once called his “kind of crazy Midwestern accent.” In fact, Lynch’s family moved frequently, and his childhood unfurled across a wide swath of midcentury America. Along the way, his voice settled into a faintly comic register: thin and tremulous, with a hint of helium, containing both the threat of a whine and the chirpy approachability of an archetypal 1950s suburbia.Lynch is a raconteur of some renown; he has spoken of Wookiees, decaying factories and an overfed Chihuahua who resembled “a water balloon with little legs.” He enjoys folksy turns of phrase (“Golden sunshine all along the way,” he often declared in the online weather reports he used to offer) and intriguing maxims (“A washed butt never boils”). Ideas, he argues, are pre-existing “gifts” that artists can “catch.” You can sense a similar pursuit in his interviews: At times he speaks as if he were reciting the words of a dimly heard incoming transmission, wiggling his fingers and shutting his eyes. Even his mundane remarks can take on an air of profundity, ringing persistently in the mind.And sometimes, the ears. Lynch “has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal,” the actress Naomi Watts once said, describing his on-set carnival barking. “When he’s two feet away from you as well.” He’s liable to stretch out words like “beautiful,” imbuing them with the deep emotion of an explorer bringing home tales of briefly glimpsed miracles. His born-in-the-’40s diction makes matters even stranger: Lynch, a self-identified Eagle Scout, can be heard in one documentary repeatedly and earnestly exclaiming, “Oh my golly.”Lynch ‘has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal.’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