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      in Movies

      Donald Sutherland Didn’t Disappear Into Roles, and That Was a Good Thing

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      The actor understood the range of human feeling, but he came of age when movies distrusted institutions, and that suspicion was part of his arsenal.In a 2014 interview in GQ, the actor Donald Sutherland recalled that a movie producer told him he wasn’t getting a role he’d auditioned for because “we’ve always thought of this as a guy-next-door sort of character, and we don’t think you look like you’ve ever lived next door to anybody.”It’s true: In film and TV roles that stretched over 60 years, Sutherland, who died Thursday at 88, never radiated the sense that he was some random guy you might cross paths with at the grocery store. If you did, you’d remember him, maybe a little uneasily. With a long face, piercing blue eyes, perpetually curled upper lip and arched, wary eyebrows, he had the look of someone who knew something important — a useful characteristic in a career that often involved movies about paranoia and dark secrets. His voice could clear a range from excitedly high to a menacing bass that would make you feel like ducking for cover.As an actor, he could do it all. His turn as the titular private detective opposite Jane Fonda in Alan Pakula’s 1971 “Klute” rides a tricky knife’s edge — is he a good guy? Does that term have a meaning in this case? There’s his role as a slowly more horrified scientist in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and his movie-stealing monologue as Mr. X in Oliver Stone’s 1991 “J.F.K.,” loaded with the urgency of obsession. Even when playing a goofball — the womanizing prankster surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman’s 1970 “M*A*S*H,” for instance, or Vernon L. Pinkley in Robert Aldrich’s 1967 “The Dirty Dozen” — his loping, laconic figure stood out against the background, someone who knew a little better than he let on.Sutherland worked constantly and, unlike some actors of his generation, never really seemed like he belonged to a single era. He’d already been at it for more than 40 years when he showed up in Joe Wright’s 2005 “Pride and Prejudice,” in what seemed like a minor part: Mr. Bennet, put-upon father to five daughters in yet another adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. In the book, he’s sardonic and contemptuous of all but his oldest two daughters, Jane and Lizzy; the reader doesn’t walk away with particularly warm feelings about him.But Sutherland’s version of Mr. Bennet was a revelation, without being a deviation. In a scene granting Lizzy (Keira Knightley) his blessing to marry her beloved Mr. Darcy, tears sparkle in his eyes, which radiate both love and, crucially, respect for his headstrong daughter. Suddenly this father was not just a character, but a person — a man who can see his daughter’s future in a moment and is almost as overcome as she is.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      The Careful Crafting of Austin Butler

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      There’s a scene early on in the new film “The Bikeriders” that functions like a stress test for stardom.While drinking at a 1960s pool hall, a woman named Kathy (Jodie Comer) is unnerved by the menacing bikers in the room and grabs her purse to go. She’s only stopped dead in her tracks when she catches sight of Benny, another biker, alone. The young man’s muscles are rippling, his hair artfully mussed, his gaze troubled but beguiling. As Kathy stares at him from across the crowded room, the jukebox music and biker chatter fade away, and all you can hear is her stunned gasp as she realizes she’s fallen in love.No visual effects are required for this scene, just a man who can hold the screen and make a woman hold her breath. It’s the sort of role you might have filled in past decades with the likes of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman or Brad Pitt. But who from today’s cohort of young stars has their presence?That’s what worried the director Jeff Nichols two years ago as he embarked on casting the character. He had written Benny as someone who feels mythic even to his fellow bikers, but no contemporary actor was even close to coming to mind. So Nichols wasn’t expecting much when he met with Austin Butler, whose breakthrough film “Elvis” was, at that point, still months from release.What he found, even as Butler walked up, was someone who looked and felt exactly like the character he had written, someone with beauty, gravitas and easy masculinity.Or, as Nichols put it, “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m talking to a movie star.’”Jodie Comer and Austin Butler in “The Bikeriders.”Kyle Kaplan/Focus FeaturesWe 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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      Anouk Aimée’s Subtle Seductiveness in ‘A Man and a Woman’ and ‘La Dolce Vita’

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      The French star created characters who could be fantasies or enigmas, but they always intrigued, even when she was miscast in Hollywood.These days it’s dicey to refer to a female performer as “a thinking man’s sex symbol,” but back in the ’60s and ’70s, when such phrases were dispensed profligately, the French actress Anouk Aimée, who died on Tuesday in Paris at 92, fit the category most beautifully. A willowy brunette with high sculpted cheekbones and penetrating eyes that seemed capable of looking right through you, she was a screen goddess who wielded a thoughtfulness that held the world at arm’s length, or farther.“I didn’t want to be an actress, I wanted to be a dancer,” an effusive Aimée, then 80 and looking back on a career that began when she was a teen, told the interviewer Charlie Rose in 2012. Born in 1932, she studied both dance and theater in England during World War II, and by the time she met the Italian director Federico Fellini in the late 1950s, she had worked with old-school French cinema luminaries like Alexandre Astruc and Julien Duvivier. At that stage in her life, she was more reconciled to acting than in love with it. It was Fellini, she told Rose, whose attitude made her understand that one could be serious in one’s work while still enjoying life.The two characters she created for him were not infused with joie du vivre, however. In “La Dolce Vita” (1960, streaming on Plex), she plays the ennui-besieged socialite Maddalena, who makes a sexual plaything of her ostensible friend and confidante Marcello, the tabloid journalist played by Marcello Mastroianni and based on Fellini’s days as a magazine writer. Contemplating escaping Rome, she talks of buying an island; Marcello chides her: “Your problem is you have too much money.”“And yours is you don’t have enough,” she replies flatly. Then she looks up and gives him a sly, closed-mouth smile. You can see why Marcello might swallow the insult.Three years later, in “8½” (streaming on Max, Criterion and Kanopy), Fellini once again cast Mastroianni as his stand-in, this time in director mode. In the role of Guido, Mastroianni is vexed not just by a crisis of creativity but also by the galaxy of women in his life. Sandra Milo is the indolent seductress, Claudia Cardinale is Guido’s ideal voluptuous virgin, Barbara Steele is a mod muse. Aimée plays Guido’s estranged wife, Luisa, the good thing he can’t hang onto. And while her place in his life is such that she doesn’t even show up until an hour into the movie, she’s the most luminous star in his cosmos — even if Fellini often hides her light under the bushel of what seem to be a deliberately clunky pair of black-rimmed glasses.Her performance in the title role of 1961’s “Lola” (Criterion), the first feature by the French master of fanciful and melancholy romance, Jacques Demy, is perhaps her most extroverted. As a cabaret chanteuse in a quayside bar, she smiles when she sees a familiar face in her first scene — an American sailor who’s more than happy to give her cigarettes and vino upon their reunion — and lights up the saloon. She later attracts the attention of a beleaguered young salaryman out of her past. She’s glad to see him, too, but as is so often the case with cabaret chanteuses in quayside bars, she awaits her true love, the father of her young boy. Lola is a relative free spirit with an open heart but a sense of limits; Aimée’s performance emphasizes the essential innocence, or maybe insignificance, of her flirtations. The character is a male fantasy in her work, a devoted mother in her home and ultimately maybe a mystery even to herself.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

      Elinor Fuchs, Leading Scholar of Experimental Theater, Dies at 91

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      First as a journalist and later as a professor at Yale, she provided the intellectual tools to help actors, directors and audiences understand challenging work.Elinor Fuchs, whose impassioned insights into contemporary theater — first as a critic prowling the avant-garde scene in New York, and later as a professor at Yale — made her one of the leading scholars of the modern American stage, died on May 28 at her home in the West Village of Manhattan. She was 91.Her daughter Katherine Eban said the cause was complications of Lewy body dementia.Professor Fuchs specialized in dramaturgy, or the construction of a play, including its dramatic structure, its characters’ motivations and technical issues about set design and lighting.In conventional times, dramaturgy can seem to be an arcane, even slightly stuffy field. But in Professor Fuchs’s hands, it became a vital tool for examining the revolutionary new forms of theater emerging in the 1960s and ’70s, forms that complicated — or dismissed entirely — conventional notions about character, dramatic arc and authorial intention.Unlike many other theater scholars, Professor Fuchs first came at these questions from a journalistic point of view. After attempting a career as an actor and writing a play, she turned to freelance theater criticism for what was then a bountiful crop of alternative weeklies around Manhattan, including The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News.She found herself drawn to challenging works like “Leave It to Beaver Is Dead,” a 1979 play at the Public Theater that included a full-length rock concert as a third act. The New York Times panned it, and it soon closed.But Professor Fuchs loved it, recognizing the play and other experimental fare as not just a new take on theater but also a whole new, postmodern cultural sensibility — even though at first she struggled to explain it.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

      Ian McKellen Is in ‘Good Spirits’ After Falling Off the Stage During a Play

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      The English actor was injured during a performance of “Player Kings,” and the show was abruptly canceled. He is expected to perform again on Wednesday.The actor Ian McKellen was hospitalized but expected to recover quickly after falling off the stage during a performance of “Player Kings” at a theater in the West End in London on Monday night, the producers of the play said.After a scan, doctors at Britain’s National Health Service said that McKellen would “make a speedy and full recovery, and Ian is in good spirits,” according to a statement by the producers.In a statement provided by his publicist on Tuesday, McKellen thanked the N.H.S. professionals who treated him. “To them, of course, I am hugely indebted. They have assured me that my recovery will be complete and speedy and I am looking forward to returning to work,” he said.McKellen, 85, who has been nominated for two Academy Awards and has won a Tony, a Golden Globe and multiple Olivier Awards, is starring in the play, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s two “Henry IV” plays, directed by Robert Icke. McKellen plays John Falstaff, a fictional character who appears in three Shakespeare plays. The fall took place during a battle scene, according to Aleks Phillips, a BBC journalist who was in the audience on Monday night and described what he saw in an article. “It happened so quickly that at first it appeared to be part of the performance,” Phillips wrote. “But the actor cried out and staff rushed to help.”After the fall, the performance was canceled and the audience left the theater. Tuesday night’s show was also canceled, the producers said, but McKellen was expected to return to the stage for a matinee performance on Wednesday. McKellen has often returned to the stage for Shakespeare plays throughout his six-decade career, including in recent years as King Lear and as an octogenarian Hamlet. He is also a fixture of the silver screen, including his roles as Gandalf in the “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” movies, as well as Magneto in the “X-Men” series.“Player Kings” is in its final week and runs at the Noël Coward Theater through Sunday. More

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      in Theater

      How to Make Thrilling Theater About Climate Change Negotiations

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      A new play from the writers of “The Jungle” dramatizes the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a landmark climate agreement preceded by years of arguments over its wording.When the playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson were looking for ideas for a new production, they stumbled upon a radio show about the negotiations that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.Some parts of the show, Robertson recalled in a recent interview, made the culmination of those discussions about lowering global carbon emissions sound “like a thriller,” with politicians holding talks in locked rooms and exhausted negotiators falling asleep beneath their desks.The pair thought that the landmark climate agreement could be the basis for another impactful stage production, similar to “The Jungle,” their hit about a refugee encampment in northern France. The problem was that the negotiations had dragged on for years before the agreement was reached in Kyoto in December 1997 — and that process was at times far from exciting. Most of the action involved representatives from different countries arguing over the language, and even punctuation, they wanted in the protocol.Climate negotiations “are so bloody boring in one sense,” Robertson said. “The challenge,” he added, “was, ‘How do we do take them, put it onstage and make it dramatic?’”Raul Estrada-Oyuela, left, the negotiations’ chairman, and Hiroshi Oki of Japan’s Environmental Agency shook hands as the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997.The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty ImagesThe playwrights’ answer to that question is “Kyoto,” directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, and running at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, from Tuesday through July 13.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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      Tonys Red Carpet Looks: Angelina Jolie, Brooke Shields and More

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      Broadway’s biggest stars descended on Lincoln Center in Manhattan on Sunday for the Tony Awards, an annual celebration of all the people — casts, crews and creatives — who make live theater the spectacle that it is. Since many attendees spend most of the week in costumes, the Tonys was also a chance to get dressed up and showcase personal style.The red carpet — technically a shade of blue — was packed with A-listers, a reflection of the star-studded productions that have recently overtaken Broadway. Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Sarah Paulson, Billy Porter and Nicole Scherzinger were among the celebrities who graced the awards show this year.Purple might have been the color of the evening, with several attendees incorporating shades of it into their ensembles. Men and women alike embraced bows, which appeared around some people’s necks and at the shoulders or waists of others. Of all the outfits, the following 17 stood out the most — for better or worse.Elle Fanning: Most Femme Fatale!Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesInstead of a shirt, the actress, a star of the play “Appropriate,” wore a silver necklace beneath her sleek Saint Laurent tuxedo jacket.Brooke Shields: Most Sunny and Sensible!Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesWe 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

      Sarah Paulson Wins Her First Tony for Best Actress in a Play

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      Sarah Paulson won the Tony Award for best actress in a play for her performance in the family drama “Appropriate.” This is Paulson’s first Tony.An Emmy winner who made her name in television, Paulson, in her first stage role in a decade, appears in the Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play as a sharp-tongued elder sister who is reunited with her siblings to deal with their deceased father’s estate.“Appropriate,” which won best revival of a play on Sunday, became one of the buzziest shows of the year, partly because of Paulson’s star power.The role takes endurance. Set at the family’s home in Arkansas, the play is largely propelled by the reactionary anger of Paulson’s character, Toni Lafayette, who is seeking to protect her father’s legacy from mounting evidence that he harbored racist convictions. Her approach involves searing insults aimed at her siblings, played by Michael Esper and Corey Stoll.Thanking Jacobs-Jenkins in her acceptance speech, Paulson said: “I will never be able to convey my gratitude to you for trusting me, for letting me hold the hand of Toni Lafayette, a woman you have written who makes no apology, who isn’t begging to be liked or approved of but does hope to be seen.”Though Paulson has found fame in television series like “American Horror Story” and “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” — winning an Emmy for her performance as the prosecutor Marcia Clark — her career has roots in theater. And she was exposed to Broadway early on. After she moved to New York City as a child, her mother worked as a waitress at Sardi’s, a Broadway haunt that just so happens to be next door to the theater where “Appropriate” opened in December.Paulson’s first job out of high school was as an understudy on Broadway for Amy Ryan in “The Sisters Rosensweig.” (Ryan, who starred in the play “Doubt,” was also nominated in the leading actress category this year.)The nominees also included two movie stars: Jessica Lange for “Mother Play” and Rachel McAdams for “Mary Jane.” Betsy Aidem was nominated for “Prayer for the French Republic.”Paulson’s win carried echoes of the Tony Awards in 2005, when her girlfriend at the time, the actress Cherry Jones, won the award for her performance in the original production of “Doubt.” Paulson, who was seated beside her, kissed Jones ahead of her acceptance speech, coming out publicly for the first time as being in a relationship with a woman.On Sunday, when she won the award, Paulson kissed her longtime partner, the actress Holland Taylor. More