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      in Theater

      Helen Gallagher, Winner of Two Tonys and Three Emmys, Dies at 98

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      She was honored on Broadway for roles in “Pal Joey” and “No, No, Nanette” and then turned to TV, where she won three Daytime Emmys for her work on “Ryan’s Hope.”Helen Gallagher, who parlayed her song-and-dance skills into Tony Award-winning performances in revivals of the musicals “Pal Joey” and “No, No, Nanette,” and who turned to television to play the matriarch on the long-running soap opera “Ryan’s Hope” when theater no longer provided her a living, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 98.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Patti Specht, a friend and the executor of her will.Ms. Gallagher was 18 when she made her Broadway debut in 1944, in the chorus of a Cole Porter revue, “Seven Lively Arts.” Over the next several decades, she worked with an A-list group of choreographers, including Jerome Robbins (“High Button Shoes”), Agnes de Mille (“Brigadoon”), Bob Fosse (“Sweet Charity”) and Donald Saddler (“No, No, Nanette”).Ms. de Mille nearly fired her from “Brigadoon” in 1947. “Agnes wanted very lyrical work, and I’d just done ‘Billion Dollar Baby’ and everything came out bumps and grinds,” Ms. Gallagher told The New York Times in 1971.But in 1958, when she played Ado Annie, her favorite role, in a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” at New York City Center, she unexpectedly earned Ms. de Mille’s praise.“She came in and restaged ‘All Er Nuthin’ for me, and she made it a little dance beside the song,” Ms. Gallagher said on the Behind the Curtain theater podcast in 2017.“She sent me an orchid on opening night,” she added, with a note saying, “‘You are truly a star.’”By then, Ms. Gallagher had been a Tony Award winner for six years. In 1952, she had portrayed the bitter chorus girl Gladys Bumps in a revival of “Pal Joey,” the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical about a notorious, womanizing nightclub owner, Joey Evans (Harold Lang), who is targeted by Ms. Gallagher’s character and a mobster in a revenge scheme.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 Movies

      Danielle Deadwyler Goes Deep in “The Piano Lesson”

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      On a recent Sunday morning in West Hollywood, the actress Danielle Deadwyler wore all white, clad in a pristine Tory Burch dress.“You know what white represents?” she said. “Spiritually, it’s rebirth: You get baptized, you put on a white robe, and you allow yourself to be witnessed in a certain way and to be changed. I think I’m in the midst of all of that.”Did she have a sense of where that change would take her?“Hell no,” Deadwyler said. “But I’m open.”Certainly, she appears headed in the right direction. After supporting roles in “The Harder They Fall” and “Station Eleven” established her as an actress to watch, Deadwyler’s career breakthrough came two years ago with the film “Till,” about the 1955 Mississippi murder that helped catalyze the civil-rights movement. For her deeply felt performance as Mamie Till, whose 14-year-old son Emmett was slain by white supremacists, Deadwyler won leading honors from the NAACP Awards, Gotham Awards and National Board of Review.She’s every bit as powerful in Netflix’s “The Piano Lesson,” which premiered on the streamer last week and is once again earning the 42-year-old actress awards buzz. Based on the play by August Wilson, “The Piano Lesson” casts Deadwyler as Berniece, a widowed mother at odds with her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), in post-Depression-era Pittsburgh. Both siblings must contend with generational trauma that’s wrapped up in the fate of their family piano: Though Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy land, Berniece insists the piano should stay put, since it serves as a totemic reminder of what their enslaved ancestors have been through.Danielle Deadwyler stars as Berniece in “The Piano Lesson,” an adaptation of August Wilson’s play.As Berniece deals with Boy Willie, rebuffs the preacher Avery (Corey Hawkins), who seeks to court her, and shares a surprising, erotically charged moment with her brother’s friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), Deadwyler feels compellingly real in the role. “I’ve never felt like I was watching Danielle in this, I never thought of her outside the role,” said Denzel Washington, who produced the film. Unlike other actors who are determined to show their work, Deadwyler simply embodies the character, Washington said: “If you can dissect it, then they’re probably not very good, right? It’s what you get from it that’s proof of what they’re doing — it’s what you feel.”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

      Emma Corrin and Maggie Nelson on the Strength in Vulnerability

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      Admiration Society brings together two creative people from two different fields for one wide-ranging conversation.Emma Corrin first encountered Maggie Nelson’s work three summers ago, when the actor was in Brighton, England, filming 2022’s “My Policeman,” a British drama about postwar sexual repression. At the time, Corrin, now 28, was grappling with their gender identity, and a friend recommended “The Argonauts” (2015), Nelson’s memoir about queer desire and making a family with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge. The book appealed so deeply to Corrin that, when that production ended, they decided to remain at the flat they’d rented during filming to finish reading it.Nelson, 51, was born in Northern California and moved in the 1990s to New York, where she worked as a waitress, trained as a dancer and took workshops with the poet Eileen Myles before getting her Ph.D. in English at the City University of New York. In addition to “The Argonauts,” Nelson, who’s now based in Los Angeles, is the author of “Bluets” (2009), a meditation on love and loss in the form of a treatise on the color blue; “Like Love” (2024), her latest collection of essays and conversations; and eight other books that include scholarly criticism, autobiography, true crime and poetry.Corrin’s career has also spanned genres. After earning a degree in education, English and drama at the University of Cambridge, the London-based actor gained sudden acclaim as Princess Diana on “The Crown” in 2020, and then went on to star in the historical romance “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (2022), the psychological thriller “A Murder at the End of the World” (2023) and in the 2022 stage adaptation of “Orlando: A Biography,” Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel. Once billed as an ingénue, Corrin brings a fierce physicality to their roles, the next of which will be in Robert Eggers’s gothic horror film “Nosferatu,” an update of the vampire classic that will be released next month.For Corrin, who recently wrote a screenplay with a friend, Nelson’s work remains a touchstone. After wrapping “A Murder at the End of the World,” the co-creator Zal Batmanglij presented the actor with a copy of “The Red Parts,” Nelson’s 2007 memoir of following a murder trial. Earlier this year, Corrin saw the playwright Margaret Perry’s adaptation of “Bluets,” starring Emma D’Arcy, Kayla Meikle and Ben Whishaw, in London. It was the first time that Nelson’s work had been performed onstage.This past summer, Corrin, who was in Los Angeles to promote their turn in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” met Nelson for the first time in a Hollywood photography studio, where the actor and the writer discussed vulnerability, the dangers of self-editing for social media and the pleasure of bringing a sense of play to their work.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 Movies

      Why the Year’s Best Performances Are From Actresses Who Say Very Little

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      Films like “Conclave” and “Bird” provide a stark contrast to the recent succession of films about women finding their voices.IN A TENSE moment midway through Edward Berger’s recent movie “Conclave,” a pulpy thriller about the process of selecting a new pope, Isabella Rossellini, playing a nun named Sister Agnes, enters a room full of cardinals from around the world. A series of uncovered secrets and shifting alliances have turned this initially serene council into a rat’s nest of backstabbing, grandstanding, explaining, interrupting men. After asking permission to speak, Sister Agnes discreetly delivers a piece of information that will upend the papal election and expose some of the most powerful figures in the Roman Catholic Church to public, career-ending humiliation. Her short speech concluded, she bobs at the waist ever so slightly, giving a tiny curtsy whose performance of feminine deference is a put-down in itself. For the rest of the film, Sister Agnes never says another word.Her sly protest recalls another time when a quietly rebellious woman confounded a council of would-be holy men: Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 classic “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” long considered one of the towering performances of cinema history. Shot almost entirely in tight close-up, Falconetti’s Joan is doubly mute: first, of course, because the film itself is silent but, more pointedly, because the sparse script, based on records of Joan’s 1431 trial, puts nearly all the words in the mouths of her captors. As her male inquisitors grill her about the angelic visions that she claims have told her to dress in men’s clothing and lead the French army into battle, it’s Joan’s refusal to answer or even acknowledge their questions that most enrages them. When one questioner quizzes her about the length of the Archangel Michael’s hair, Joan’s wry response — “Why would he have cut it?” — is a forerunner of Sister Agnes’s ironic bob: a gesture of malicious compliance that serves to expose the hypocrisy of her inquisitors.For much of film history, women spoke less than men simply because their characters were seldom the story’s focus. The “strong, silent type” of westerns and detective stories was made strong by his silence, while female characters were typically weakened by theirs. When women in classic Hollywood films stepped outside the role of helpmeet, it was to personify the so-called mouthy dame (a type that, at its best, includes Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea in 1941’s “Ball of Fire” and Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in 1950’s “All About Eve”). But however sparkling, brash or bitchy their banter, for decades dialogue written for female characters — often by male screenwriters — existed mainly to establish the fact that a woman was, for some reason, talking.“Women Talking,” the 2022 film by the writer-director Sarah Polley, won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, a category befitting both its title and its subject: A movie about a Mennonite community of horrifically abused women claiming the right to speak, whose every frame overflows with expressive, persuasive, angry and anguished language, was recognized specifically for its words. That acknowledgment provided some catharsis in the wake of countless #MeToo scandals. But in the years since, along with a spate of acclaimed movies about women finding their voices (2022’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; last year’s “Poor Things” and “Barbie”), a new space has opened up onscreen for women pointedly not talking. Several films released this year — including Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” and Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” — have featured performances by female protagonists whose silence is neither a mark of trauma nor a state of oppression to be overcome but a deliberate strategy, whether for the purposes of introspection, self-preservation or self-discovery.Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Erotos” (1993).© Nobuyoshi Araki, courtesy of Taka Ishii GalleryWe 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 Movies

      Lucy Liu Thinks It’s Important to Make a Mess Sometimes

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      “That’s how creative things happen,” said the actress, one of the stars of the holiday film “Red One.”Lucy Liu’s 9-year-old son, Rockwell, hasn’t seen his mother draw blood in “Charlie’s Angels” or “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and certainly not in “Kill Bill, Vol. 1.”But the only splash of crimson in her latest film, “Red One,” is the suit of Santa Claus, who has been kidnapped from the North Pole. Liu is one of the Christmas movie’s stars, alongside Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, and plays the head of security for the world’s mythological creatures.“This is the only live-action movie that my son has been able to watch, and he wanted to see it again right afterward,” Liu said on a video call. “I think he forgot that I was actually in it at one point.”When she isn’t shooting or producing (she will next appear in “Presence,” a Steven Soderbergh thriller slated for release in January), Liu can most often be found in her art studio. She tends to lose track of time there — “the whole point of art,” she said. “You just get lost in that world.”Liu, who lives in Manhattan, elaborated on why her library card, spur-of-the-moment theatergoing and riding her bicycle are essential to her well-being. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Transcendental MeditationI put together an art book years ago, and I asked Deepak Chopra if he would write a forward. He did, but he also asked me to come into his office. He wanted to teach me about meditation. And so he gave me a mantra, and it was an important moment for me because I didn’t know that it would make such a big difference.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 Movies

      The Fleeting Comforts of the Celebrity Look-Alike Contest

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      It may be a coincidence that the celebrity look-alike competition returned to prominence just as American citizens were voting in what some called “the most significant presidential election in our lifetimes.” But once it happened, the appeal was obvious. Here was a different kind of democratic event: a totally insignificant one, in which attractive men with slightly off-kilter features were lined up in public and ranked by the roaring crowd.At the first contest, which convened a flock of Timothée Chalamet doubles in Manhattan last month, the New York Police Department showed up, deemed it an “unscheduled demonstration” and arrested four people. It was, in fact, only the police presence that made the event feel anything like a protest — as if the crowd were truly fighting for the right to be meaningless and absurd.In the coming weeks, as President-elect Trump revved up for his second term, doppelgängers were crowned of Jeremy Allen White in Chicago, Paul Mescal in Dublin, Dev Patel in San Francisco and Harry Styles in London. It was as if each city were electing its boyfriend. It all provided a populist diversion, though one with diminishing returns.These events have been comforting in their modesty. They are typically publicized with posters on lampposts, staged in public parks and accompanied by meager prizes. The Mescal double won 20 euro “or three pints”; the White winner received $50 and a pack of Marlboro Reds.Despite the stingy rewards, the contestants are frequently impressive — men seizing a long-awaited opportunity to put a useless talent to work. Each contest unfolds like a human scavenger hunt. The winner is a kind of modern Cinderella, the one unsung city boy who happens to slip perfectly into a fuzzy Willy Wonka hat or the blue chef’s apron worn by the star of “The Bear.”Part of what makes the searches feel pleasantly trivial is that they center on male celebrities (though not all of the contestants have been men). A Zendaya look-alike contest held in Oakland, Calif., this week is the rare exception. The public ranking of women risks activating an ugly history; it makes the apolitical political again. But also: Mimicking Hollywood femininity may require a degree of effort that intensifies the proceedings. The contest could inspire feats of makeup application, hairstyling, boob tape. The masculine look-alike, on the other hand, must simply exist. He’s just waiting to be discovered.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 Television

      Pamela Hayden, the Voice of Bart’s Friend Milhouse, Retires From ‘The Simpsons’

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      Ms. Hayden voiced many “Simpsons” characters since the show started in 1989. She’s most famously the voice of Bart’s awkward 10-year-old best friend.Pamela Hayden, who has voiced characters on “The Simpsons” since it began in 1989 and famously played Bart’s nerdy best friend Milhouse Van Houten, announced on Wednesday that she was retiring from the show.Ms. Hayden, 70, said on her Facebook page that after 35 years she would stop performing on “The Simpsons” and would “pursue other creative outlets.” Episode seven of season 36, scheduled to air on Nov. 24, will be her final episode.“One thing that I love about Milhouse is he’s always getting knocked down but he keeps getting up,” Ms. Hayden said in a tribute video posted on “The Simpsons” social media pages. “I love the little guy.”Credited with voicing dozens of Simpson’s characters, including one of Milhouse’s bullies, Jimbo Jones, Ms. Hayden’s most famous character is Milhouse. His blue hair and big eyes are accentuated with large, round glasses. The clumsy, shy 10-year-old is one of the most endearing characters in Springfield, thanks in part to his halting, sheepish voice and his stubborn resilience.Milhouse, named after former President Richard Milhous Nixon, often finds himself following his best friend, Bart, into trouble as a gullible sidekick. Throughout the show, Milhouse often cites his mother’s concerns for his safety as an excuse to not go on adventures. In one instance, Milhouse relayed that his mother “says solving riddles is an asthma trigger.”Hayden, left, has voiced the character of Milhouse and others for 35 years.FOXOne adventure he does agree to is playing “Fallout Boy” to Bart’s “Radioactive Man.” The band Fallout Boy took its name from the character.In addition to her role in “The Simpsons” universe — which includes parts in a movie, the television show and video games — Ms. Hayden has several credits outside the series. She voiced a character for a 2015 Lego video game and was a main voice in “Lloyd in Space,” a Disney cartoon centered on a child alien that ran for four seasons from 2001-2004. “Pamela gave us tons of laughs with Milhouse, the hapless kid with the biggest nose in Springfield,” Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons,” said in a statement. “She made Milhouse hilarious and real, and we will miss her.”A spokesman for Fox Television did not immediately respond on Wednesday to an email seeking comment.It was not immediately clear what the future holds for Milhouse or Ms. Hayden’s other characters for the rest of its 36th season. Tim Curtis, a representative for Ms. Hayden, said in an email that the network would “start exploring recasting soon.”“The Simpsons” has not yet been renewed for a 37th season, Variety Magazine reported.In the tribute video to Ms. Hayden that was posted on “The Simpsons” social media accounts, Ms. Hayden said that Milhouse provides a great life lesson in perseverance and optimism.“Everything’s coming up Milhouse!” the boy shouts with glee in one scene while water floods his room. More

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      in Movies

      The Reintroduction of Daniel Craig

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      In love, it can be terrifying to show all your cards, to make yourself vulnerable, to let your desire be fully seen. What is offered to another person without reservation can also be taken without recompense. Still, because we want to be loved, we risk it.Maybe we don’t think much about that aspect of love, preferring to dwell — as most movies do — on all the moony, swoony parts. But that dangerous feeling of exposure is the central preoccupation of the new drama “Queer,” and it can’t be explored without a lead actor who is similarly willing to offer himself up.Enter Daniel Craig, 56, our erstwhile James Bond on a bold new assignment.In “Queer,” due Nov. 27 and adapted from a William S. Burroughs novel, Craig plays Lee, an American expat in midcentury Mexico City who becomes enamored with a coolly distant younger man, Allerton (Drew Starkey). Lee is undone by a desire that is reciprocated only in fits and starts, and watching Craig pine so vulnerably packs a pop-cultural punch: Once considered the very face of masculine cool, his visage is now soaked in flop sweat.Though his performance has been earning raves and Oscar chatter since “Queer” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, it may surprise fans to see this side of Craig after watching him play a stoic secret agent for the better part of 15 years. But when I asked the director Luca Guadagnino whether “Queer” is closer to his leading man’s actual sensibility than people might have guessed, he replied, “Every movie is a documentary about the actor playing the character.”If that’s the case, maybe now is the perfect time to be reintroduced to Daniel Craig.“I’m not a method actor, but I’m a nightmare to be with when I’m working,” Daniel Craig said of his intense devotion to his work.Thea Traff for The New York Times“SOMETIMES I FIND it very laughable, the idea of maleness,” he said. It was an early morning in October, and I had met Craig for breakfast at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood to ponder the performance of masculinity. “Most men go through life with this act that they do,” he told me. “But it is an act.”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