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      in Theater

      James Earl Jones: A Life in Pictures

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      If it seemed at times that James Earl Jones was everywhere, it was perhaps because he really was. Over a 50-year career, Jones — who died on Monday at the age of 93 — acted prolifically on television, in movies and under the spotlight of Broadway stages, one of which is now named after him.An imposing man who stood taller than six feet, Jones was hard to miss. But it was his voice — deep, authoritative, powerful and sometimes menacing — that some fans may most remember. His voice work as Darth Vader in the original “Star Wars” trilogy and as Mufasa in “The Lion King” conveyed his presence to millions without audiences ever seeing him.Here are some snapshots from his life and career.Jones was a guest star on “Sesame Street” in 1970.Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty ImagesJones, with Lauren Bacall, won the Tony for best actor in a play in 1969 for “The Great White Hope.”Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesJones with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson at a Broadway opening in 1978.Sonia Moskowitz/Getty ImagesJones and his wife, the actor Cecilia Hart, at the Tony Awards in 1989.Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesJones in his dressing room in 1983.Steve Ringman/San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty ImagesJones with his son, Flynn, and his father, Robert, in 1987.Michael Tighe/Donaldson Collection, via Getty ImagesJones in a Hollywood recording studio in 1991.Edmund Eckstein/Getty ImagesJones and Cicely Tyson in 1991.Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesThe actors would star in a revival of Donald L. Coburn’s “The Gin Game” in 2015.Bruce Glikas/FilmMagicA Broadway theater was named after Jones in 2022.Todd Heisler/The New York Times More

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      in Television

      The Life-Changing Journey of ‘My Brilliant Friend’

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      The four actresses who played Lenù and Lila from adolescence to middle age discuss the end of the HBO series.In the fourth season of “My Brilliant Friend,” premiering Monday on HBO, the childhood friends and fierce rivals Lila and Lenù navigate marriage and divorce, motherhood, loss and middle age.This is the final chapter, catapulting the protagonists from the 1970s to the 21st century against the background of Italy’s upheavals, and is based on “The Story of the Lost Child,” the fourth book in Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan series.Writing in The Times, James Poniewozik called the show “one of the most incisive portraits of a lifelong relationship ever made for TV.” But this final season also ends a production project that started in 2016 and which all of its lead actresses agreed was the most important of their careers.Margherita Mazzucco, 21, played Elena “Lenù” Greco, and Gaia Girace, 20, played Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, through three seasons — from the characters’ adolescence to their 30s. Neither had acted before they were cast in 2017, but they are both now stopped on the street at home and abroad.For the seasoned actress Irene Maiorino, 39, who plays Lila in Season 4, the show offered a chance to become better known outside Italy. And the already internationally acclaimed Alba Rohrwacher, 45, who narrated the series before being cast as the grown Lenù. Rohrwacher described the role as an “incredible journey” that “can only happen once in a lifetime.”The four women met together for the first time on a recent muggy afternoon in Rome, to discuss passing the baton from one pair of Lenùs and Lilas to the next and whether there were heightened expectations now that Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” had been named the best book of the 21st century in a recent New York Times survey. (They all laughed: They’d heard.)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

      Demi Moore and the Subversive Politics of the Naked Body

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      By the end of the 1990s, after years of giving her all to Hollywood and baring most of her all, too, Demi Moore began her fade-out. She had been a major film star that decade, complete with huge hits, humbling flops, famous friends, a celebrity marriage and headline-making magazine covers. Like all stars, she put in the work and sold the merch, herself included. And, like a lot of female stars, she made movies with male filmmakers who turned her into a spectacle of desire, a spectacle that she partly sought ownership of via her body.You see a lot of her body in Moore’s latest movie, “The Substance,” from the French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. (It opens Sept. 20.) It’s a body-horror freakout that satirically takes aim at the commodification of women, and Moore is ferociously memorable in it as an actress who’s fired when she hits 50. It’s a performance that’s strong enough that you stop thinking about the fact that she’s naked in a lot of the scenes, strong enough to make you stop wondering what her exercise regime is or what work, if any, she’s had done. By the end, I admired how she had risen above the material; I also hoped she has better movies in her future.She deserves them. Her performance in “The Substance” is a gaudy, physically demonstrative role that requires her to convey a range of outsize states that dovetail with the movie’s excesses, from her character’s plasticky on-camera smiles to her private despair and boiling rage. Like some of Moore’s best-known movies, “The Substance” also requires her to shed her clothing. Even after decades of watching her perform in states of undress, it is startling to see Moore, now 61, stand naked before a mirror as the camera slowly travels across her body. There’s a near-clinical quality to how she looks at herself and, I think, a touch of defiance.Demi Moore as an actress coping with issues of aging in Hollywood in “The Substance.”MubiThe 1980s weren’t a welcoming period for women in the mainstream movie industry, yet Moore gradually succeeded in making a name for herself in between hanging with her pals in the Brat Pack and appearing in mediocre films (“St. Elmo’s Fire”) and flat-out rotten ones (“About Last Night,” ugh). Her big break came with “Ghost” (1990), a dreamy, sad romance in which she plays a dewy-eyed artist whose lover (Patrick Swayze) is murdered. Moore looked “terminally wistful much of the time” in the film, as Janet Maslin observed in The New York Times. Yet Moore also “combines toughness and delicacy most attractively,” which nicely expresses her gift for characters who often seem compelled to safeguard their vulnerabilities.“Ghost” was the top-grossing movie of the year, racked up more than a half a billion dollars at the global box office and catapulted Moore into true stardom. She followed this by starring in, as well as producing, “Mortal Thoughts” (1991), a deliciously nasty noirish drama about two working-class Jersey friends (Moore and Glenne Headly) who cover up the murder of one of their husbands, played with relish and persuasive vulgarity by Moore’s husband at the time, Bruce Willis. One of her finest movies, it gave her a chance to express her range partly because she was working with a real filmmaker, Alan Rudolph. In contrast to many of her earlier directors, he didn’t treat Moore like a sex puppet but instead helped her create a nuanced, teasingly elusive woman.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

      Julianna Margulies on ‘Left on Tenth’: ‘This Is the Play I’ve Been Waiting For’

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      It was a meet-cute right out of a New York City rom-com.The actress Julianna Margulies was walking her dog near Fifth Avenue and 10th Street when a woman with her own dog stopped to ask if she was who she thought she was.“I love your book,” she said of Margulies’s 2021 memoir, “Sunshine Girl,” which follows her rather strange childhood and beyond, up through her time on “ER” and “The Good Wife.”The woman pulled down her face mask: “I’m Delia Ephron.” She, too, had written a memoir, “Left on Tenth,” about life, death and taking a chance on love for a second time, and it was coming out soon. Could she drop off an advance copy?“I plotzed because I’ve just always loved her writing,” Margulies said.While taking refuge from the heat last month, Margulies recounted this scene with Ephron, which happened a few years ago, over an iced cappuccino in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village.Then in January, Margulies went on, she received an email out of the blue from Ephron, saying she had turned “Left on Tenth” into a play — and she wanted Margulies for the lead.“So she emailed it,” Margulies said, “and I sat down, read it cover-to-cover within an hour, just raced through it, sobbed, laughed, emailed her right back, and I said, ‘This is the play I’ve been waiting for.’”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

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      In ‘Matlock,’ Kathy Bates Takes One Last Case

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      Kathy Bates was ready to quit. A movie shoot had soured (no, she won’t specify the movie) and she found herself alone, on her sofa in Los Angeles, sobbing. Bates, who won an Oscar for “Misery” and Emmys for “American Horror Story” and “Two and a Half Men,” has always taken her work to heart in an all-consuming way.“It becomes my life,” she said. “Sometimes I get jealous of having this talent. Because I can’t hold it back, and I just want my life.” She had given herself over to this part, and the gift had been ignored. The next day, she called her agents and told them she wanted to retire.A few weeks later, in January of this year, her agents sent her a script. It was for a procedural, which she hadn’t been looking for, and it was a reboot of a series that hadn’t especially moved her the first time: “Matlock,” a drama about a folksy attorney with a virtuosic legal mind and a wardrobe of seersucker suits. It endures in the cultural memory mostly as a punchline about shows old people like to watch.Still she began to read the script. And she kept reading. The protagonist, a woman who feels that age had rendered her invisible, was brilliant, canny, out for justice, and Bates has always had a strong sense of fairness. She feels the injustices of her career and her early life acutely, and the idea of playing a woman out to right wrongs called to her.So she paused her retirement. And “Matlock,” which debuts on CBS on Sept. 22 and will stream on Paramount+, became the unlikely vessel into which Bates, 76, can pour her talent, her vigor and surprisingly, given the shallowness of a typical procedural, all of her pain.“Everything I’ve prayed for, worked for, clawed my way up for, I am suddenly able to be asked to use all of it,” she said. “And it’s exhausting.”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

      Aaron Pierre: From Action Prince to Lion King

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      The British actor stars as an ex-Marine in the new Netflix thriller “Rebel Ridge” and as the titular cat in the upcoming “Mufasa: The Lion King.”Aaron Pierre was an unsure British teenager when he took his first acting gig: a narrator in a secondary-school production of “Moby Dick.” The school didn’t have a dedicated drama program and produced a play once every three years; Pierre had focused on athletics before giving the stage a try.As he recalled during a recent video call from his apartment in Los Angeles, his adolescent mind was thinking, “What’s going to happen to me walking through the halls if I do this play?”The show turned out to be painless. He went out, hit his mark at the corner of stage left and looked at the audience as he said his few lines. “I remember getting backstage and just being like, ‘That was amazing,’” Pierre said.The roles have grown a bit larger. Pierre, 30, played the hard-luck soldier Cassio in a 2018 production of “Othello” at the Globe Theater. The film and TV director Barry Jenkins saw him and was impressed enough to reach out to the actor on Twitter. That led to Pierre’s role as the yearning and enslaved Caesar in Jenkins’s mini-series “The Underground Railroad.”Since then, Pierre has played an ill-fated rapper in M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller “Old” (2021) and Malcolm X in the anthology series “Genius: MLK/X.” He currently has another major role, in “Rebel Ridge” (streaming on Netflix), directed by Jeremy Saulnier (“Green Room”); Pierre plays Terry Richmond, an ex-Marine who faces off against civil forfeiture and a corrupt police force. In December, he voices the digitally animated lead of “Mufasa: The Lion King,” reuniting with both Jenkins and the actor Kelvin Harrison Jr., who played the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in “Genius.”Pierre didn’t appear to be too caught up in the anticipation. “I don’t take myself seriously, but I do take my craft extremely seriously,” he 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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Venice Film Festival Looks: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt And More

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      No amount of star power can truly outshine the beauty of La Serenissima, the ancient republic better known as the city of Venice. But the Venice Film Festival, with its parade of A-listers arriving for movie premieres in water taxis, comes close.Typically held not long after the fall couture shows in Paris, the Venice Film Festival benefits, in pure fashion terms, from being a showcase of the newest garments from some designers. How these elaborate, often form-fitting, confections are transferred so rapidly from Parisian runways to Venetian red carpets hardly matters to looky-loos with their eyes perennially pressed to the glass of fashion.This year’s festival, running from Aug. 28 until Saturday, has not just been an exhibition for new designs, but also of vintage pieces. Some looked as fresh as ever. Garments old and new are among these 15 looks, which will be hard to forget for reasons good and bad (but mostly good).Taylor Russell: Most Modern Retro!Louisa Gouliamaki/ReutersThe actress radiated an icy elegance in a Loewe gown reminiscent of the creations of Jean Louis, a designer who had the lock on high glamour during the golden age of Hollywood studios.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

      Michael Keaton Michael Keaton Michael Keaton

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      There’s a scene in the upcoming indie dramedy “Goodrich” where Michael Keaton’s character, a Los Angeles art dealer lost in the weeds of a late-midlife crisis, agrees to attend a breath workshop to win over a New Age-y prospective client. As setups go, it’s something of a soft target: a fish-out-of-water Boomer, drowning in California woo-woo.But the actor, his face a small hurricane of hope and anxiety, does more than find his “higher vibration.” He bobs and weaves and tries some kind of freestyle tai chi; he bats at a swarm of invisible bees and unleashes a primal scream (more like a strangled yelp, really). This is the Keaton that the “Goodrich” writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer envisioned when she conceived the screenplay.“I wrote it 100 percent with him in mind,” she said, “to the point where if he had said no, I would have buried it and myself in the backyard.”And it’s the same sense of unpredictability, a certain wild-card gleam, that has compelled the filmmaker Tim Burton to cast Keaton in five movies over nearly four decades, including, most recently, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” “When you just look at Michael in ‘Beetlejuice’ or even ‘Batman,’ he has this sort of look in his eye,” Burton said. “That’s why I wanted him to be Batman, because you just look at him and go, ‘This is a guy who would dress up like a bat.’ You know what I mean? There’s something behind the eyes that’s just very intelligent, funny and dangerous and kind of crazy.”Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton, who both starred in the original “Beetlejuice” movie, return for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”Warner Bros.The Keaton who settled into the corner booth of a hushed midtown Manhattan hotel lounge on a late-August morning didn’t seem like much of a maniac. Dressed in the dapper cool-dad uniform of fine-gauge knitwear and fitted slacks, he was still whippet-slim at 72 (he turned 73 on Thursday), and so soft-spoken in person that it was sometimes a strain to hear him over the cappuccino machine.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