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      Solo Shows in Theater This Fall: Patrick Page, Isabelle Adjani and More

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      For theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, the coming months bring a range of works, from musical comedies to Shakespearean dramas.Solo shows have been around as long as there has been theater — longer, actually, if we count storytelling by a campfire. There is an elemental intimacy about the format and, let’s face it, an economic appeal at a time of belt-tightening.Despite their seemingly restrictive approach, one-person productions come in many shapes and forms: tales told by a single narrator and ones in which the performer embodies many characters, for example; dramatic yarns; and comic efforts that can flirt with stand-up. The last hybrid seems to be enjoying a kind of golden age, illustrated by the successes of Mike Birbiglia (“The Old Man and the Pool”) and Alex Edelman, whose recent Broadway hit, “Just for Us,” will be at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, Oct. 26-28.The coming months are a boon for theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, starting with the fall iteration of the cornucopia known as the United Solo Theater Festival (through Nov. 19 at Theater Row). Here is a selection of notable shows.Interrogating biographySometimes, it takes one icon to take measure of to another. The French actress Isabelle Adjani (“The Story of Adèle H.,” “Camille Claudel”) engages with Marilyn Monroe, myth and woman, in “Marilyn’s Vertigo.” The show, presented in French with supertitles as part of the Crossing the Line Festival, is framed as a dialogue with the Hollywood star, and was written by Adjani and Olivier Steiner. Oct. 12-13; FIAF Florence Gould Hall, Manhattan.John Rubinstein in Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” adapted from Eisenhower’s memoirs, speeches and letters.Maria BaranovaIn a different register, John Rubinstein returns for an encore of Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” a dive into the life of the military leader-turned-president that has proved quite popular. Through Oct. 27; Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan.One’s a crowdThe formidable Patrick Page is a versatile actor, but let’s face it: He is best known for portraying antagonists, including the Green Goblin in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” and Hades in “Hadestown.” Maybe it’s his basso profundo voice? In “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” directed by Simon Godwin, Page — whose command of his craft our critic described as “stupefying, effortless” — scrutinizes those classic characters. This might be the only time we ever see his take on Lady Macbeth. Through Jan. 7; DR2 Theater, Manhattan.Following his acclaimed solos “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” (2015) and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (2018), the Irish writer and actor Mikel Murfi is bringing to New York the trilogy’s conclusion, “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey.” Murfi portrays a range of characters from County Sligo, and performs all three pieces in repertory. Audiences can see any of the shows, or all of them. Oct. 24-Nov. 18; Irish Arts Center, Manhattan.Lameece Issaq has written for ensembles in works like “Food and Fadwa,” but her new piece, “A Good Day to Me, Not to You,” is a solo. In the show, presented by the Waterwell company and directed by Lee Sunday Evans (“Oratorio for Living Things”), Issaq plays a 40-something former dental lab technician reconsidering her life as she moves into a rooming house run by nuns on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nov. 8-Dec. 9; Connelly Theater, Manhattan.Stand-up or theater?The comedian Caitlin Cook returns to SoHo Playhouse with her show “The Writing on the Stall.”Mindy TuckerGabe Mollica and Caitlin Cook are usually called comedians, but their work blurs the line with theater. Both performers are returning to the stage with encore runs of pieces that have been building a buzz. In “Solo: A Show About Friendship,” Mollica explores his realization that he has buddies but no close friends, and tries to dig into the reasons for that. Our ideas and hangups about masculinity may well play a part. Oct. 10-28, Connelly Theater Upstairs, Manhattan.Cook’s “The Writing on the Stall” is inspired by the gold mine of comic material found on the walls of bar bathrooms. She has turned graffiti spotted over the years into a show integrating songs (a nice micro-trend among comedians; see also Catherine Cohen), bits of anthropology and autobiographical sharing. Oct. 16-17, SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan.Birth of a performerEdgar Oliver, a longtime fixture of the downtown New York theater scene, revisits his days at the Pyramid Club in his new work, “Rip Tide.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFour years ago, Ben Brantley described Edgar Oliver’s body of work as a “singular series of elegiac performance pieces,” which essentially amount to an oral history narrated by one person. Oliver’s new piece, “Rip Tide,” revisits his days performing at the Pyramid Club, the East Village boîte where renegade drag, rock, spoken word and performance art thrived in the 1980s and ’90s. Through Oct. 28; Axis Theater, Manhattan.In her review for The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes pointed out how Melissa Etheridge turns Circle in the Square into an intimate music club for her concert-cum-memoir show, “My Window,” now on Broadway. Some of the rocker’s most fun anecdotes cover her early years playing lesbian spaces from her native Kansas to California. Through Nov. 19, Circle in the Square, Manhattan.Table for how many?Geoff Sobelle most recently performed his dinner party as theater spectacle at the Edinburgh Festival.Iain MastertonTechnically speaking, Geoff Sobelle’s “Food,” which is part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, involves a lot of people. Sobelle (“The Object Lesson”) is the host of a dinner party at which audience members sit at a very large table for what is described as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” Since “Food” was created with the magician Steve Cuiffo (“A Simulacrum”), it is no spoiler to mention it involves entertaining trickery. Nov. 2-18, Brooklyn Academy of Music.Repertory of onesPlaywrights Horizons is making smart use of its space by presenting three solos in repertory. Drawing from years as a tutor, Milo Cramer wrote and performs in “School Pictures,” a play with music that looks at our education system via a range of New York students. The comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu, who opened for Catherine Cohen at Joe’s Pub this summer, brings more of his surreal musings in “Amusements.” And Alexandra Tatarsky’s “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” which involves clowning and nudity, looks to be the wild card of this bunch — emphasis on wild. Nov. 2-Dec. 3, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan. More

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      Introducing Nathan Lane, the Hip New Face of A24

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      When you’re pondering actors associated with the indie-film company A24, your thoughts may run to the young, hot and impossibly tousled.In years past, this stable of dewy ingénues has included the likes of Robert Pattinson (“Good Time,” “The Lighthouse”), Riley Keough (“American Honey,” “Zola”) and Lucas Hedges (“Lady Bird,” “Waves”). But it’s time to make way for the studio’s newest muse, a three-time Tony winner whose key roles this year in a pair of A24 films — Ari Aster’s trippy “Beau Is Afraid” and the gleefully silly “Dicks: The Musical” (opening Friday) — offer the delightful opportunity to turn to your cool nephew and exclaim, “Oh, he’s in this?”Rest assured, the he in question is just as surprised. “I’m now the poster boy for A24,” said Nathan Lane, 67, over a recent morning coffee date in Los Angeles. “Who would have guessed?”One of Broadway’s most beloved actors, Lane had his breakout moment on the big screen in 1990s studio fare like “The Lion King” and “The Birdcage,” which mined his musical-theater talents and expansive comic sensibility for all they were worth. But though Lane has worked continually in the theater and on TV ever since, the film industry hasn’t always known what to do with him, which makes his current renaissance all the sweeter: He was the first choice for his roles in both of those A24 envelope-pushers, even though they’re utterly unlike anything he’s done before.Take “Beau Is Afraid,” released in April, a three-hour mind-bender about filial anxiety that had Lane come in for a midmovie face-off with an intense Joaquin Phoenix. (SAG-AFTRA strike rules prohibit Lane from talking about it, but the guild gave him a waiver for the new film.) Or sample “Dicks,” a proudly filthy queer musical that asks Lane to spit deli meat at puppets and ensures that for the rest of his life, he will share an IMDb page with the rapper Megan Thee Stallion.“Don’t you love show business, when these things can happen to a little boy from Jersey City?” Lane quipped.Lane’s co-star Aaron Jackson said, “Now that people like us are coming of age and getting to write stuff, it’s like, what about casting one of the most brilliant actors we’ve ever had?”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesThe Lane-aissance could either be a feat of timing or the beginning of a trend. But it’s also a reminder, not long after Michelle Yeoh found Oscar-winning acclaim in A24’s “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” that the studio’s coolness can come from more than the minting of new stars: It can be just as rewarding to pluck well-known veterans and toss them into a world that’s unexpected and wild.“To me, he’s the foundation,” said Aaron Jackson, who co-wrote and co-stars in Lane’s new film musical with his comedy partner, Josh Sharp. As a child, Jackson would do an impression of Lane as the “Lion King” meerkat Timon to make his grandfather laugh; when he was older, he got a DVD of Lane in a filmed version of the 2000 play “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and watched it on a near loop. “Now that people like us are coming of age and getting to write stuff, it’s like, what about casting one of the most brilliant actors we’ve ever had?”Though Jackson, Sharp and the director Larry Charles were eager to get Lane into their movie, the actor wasn’t initially sure what to make of the project. A hard-R spin on “The Parent Trap” that Jackson and Sharp based on a play they used to perform in the basement of a Gristedes, their film casts the New York comedians as long-lost twins who conspire to reunite their daffy parents. Hayley Mills never had it so hard, though: Here, dear old Mom (Megan Mullally) is an eccentric shut-in with a detached vagina, while Dad (Lane) is a newly out bon vivant who’s uncomfortably devoted to the two disgusting sewer creatures he keeps caged in his living room.“When I read it, I said to my agent and manager, ‘Are you serious with this?’” Lane recalled. The script had made him laugh, but he worried the comic situations were too outrageous, even for him. To assuage his fears, Lane met Sharp and Jackson at an Indian restaurant near his house, where their comic sensibilities clicked and cosmopolitans were served until the house lights came on.“It went on for four hours, and I fell in love with them and wanted to adopt them,” said Lane, who was ultimately won over by the eagerness of Jackson and Sharp to fly in the face of decorum at a time when “Don’t Say Gay” bills were being written into law. “We’re going to say whatever we want,” Lane said, channeling the duo’s brio. “And you’ll have to live with it.”Still, it’s one thing to read those out-there scenes and quite another to actually perform them, as Lane found when he showed up on set. Many of his big moments revolve around those unnerving sewer creatures, a pair of diapered reptilians that his character dotes on like an attentive mama bird. (Hence the regurgitated deli meats.) Though the filmmakers considered hiring Cirque du Soleil gymnasts to play the sewer boys, they ultimately settled on two puppets, which may be an even creepier touch.Lane, left, with Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Ryan in “Beau Is Afraid.”Takashi Seida/A24Lane with, clockwise from top right, Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson and Megan Mullally in the new film. “When I read it, I said to my agent and manager, ‘Are you serious with this?’” Lane said.Justin Lubin/A24“I’m not crazy about puppets — I’ve worked with them in the past, it’s nothing but trouble,” Lane said, adding under his breath, “I’ll be getting hostile letters from Basil Twist.” In order to play the scenes with true affection despite the twisted context, Lane endeavored to think about the sewer creatures as though they were his character’s pet corgis.“It has to be very grounded and it has to be subtle,” Lane explained, “even when you’re spitting cold cuts at two ugly puppets in a cage.”The closing-credits blooper reel suggests that was a tough task: In more than a few blown takes, Lane wonders aloud how the hell he ended up in such a surreal situation. (Asked by the director to spit more deli meats into the puppets’ mouths, Lane playfully pronounces it the worst of “all the humiliations I’ve experienced in my years of show business, and they are legion.”) Even during our coffee, Lane was unable to describe an emotional clinch with the sewer creatures without bursting into laughter.“You can’t even explain it!” he said. “I was crying and holding these puppets and kissing them goodbye, thinking, I can’t believe this is happening.”Sharp praised Lane’s ability to still dial into those scenes and commit to something real. “There’s two or three sneaky little heart moments in the movie and Nathan drives all of them,” he said. “He’s a fabulous actor.”Lane just hopes people will notice. “I mean, this may have killed it,” he joked, “but if it led to other things in film, interesting stuff, that would be great.” A more robust movie career is something Lane wants but has always been wary of: Wouldn’t you feel skittish if you gave one of the most finely calibrated comic performances of the ’90s in “The Birdcage” and the only two film scripts you received afterward were for “Mouse Hunt” and “Mr. Magoo”?Though Lane felt the stage could offer him a more expansive suite of roles, including his most famous part, as Max Bialystock in “The Producers,” even there, the appearance of typecasting could make him bristle. In 2010, while playing Gomez Addams in a Broadway musical version of “The Addams Family,” Lane read an article in this paper by Charles Isherwood that deemed him the greatest entertainer to appear on Broadway over the past decade. While it was meant as high praise, the description rankled him.“Amy Sedaris likes to call herself an entertainer, but for some reason it really bothered me,” Lane said. “It’s not like I spent 48 years in Ringling Bros. — I had done plenty of plays, the work of Terrence McNally or Jon Robin Baitz or Simon Gray. I felt like I had shown a lot of different colors along the way, but you become known for a handful of things.”Determined to shake things up, Lane emailed his friend, the actor Brian Dennehy, who was mulling a new adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” Though that shattering drama wasn’t the sort of production he would immediately come to mind for, Lane pitched himself for the tricky role of Hickey, the salesman who forces his fellow bar mates to confront dreams long deferred.Despite acclaimed performances in the ’90s in “The Birdcage” and “The Lion King,” Lane had trouble getting traction in Hollywood films.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesDennehy was intrigued, and the two men signed on for a production that played at BAM in 2015. “It changed the way I approach everything now,” Lane said. “I wanted to be scared again. I wanted to think, I don’t know if I can do this.” From Isherwood, Lane earned a “lusty bravo,” though the review that mattered most was the kind one he received from Dennehy, who died in 2020. “He was a very loving and supportive mentor, and I miss him very much,” Lane said, tearing up.He hopes more roles akin to Hickey are in his theatrical future, though he noted, “I don’t think they would be handing me that part in a film.” So why is it that Lane can be widely recognized as an unparalleled multitalent and yet good movie offers can be so hard to come by? I asked his new co-star Jackson, who replied with a mordant chuckle.“Well, Hollywood does hate gay people, even still,” he said. “I mean, they pretend that they don’t, but they do.”Still, he hoped that Lane’s A24 hot streak indicates that a younger generation of people, raised on Lane’s performances, have more exciting ideas of what do with him than the old guard Lane initially encountered: “He’s so good at acting that now they’re like, ‘Maybe we should let a gay person be a star.’”In the meantime, there’s “Dicks.” “Our little baby is going out to the real world where people can’t wait to be offended,” Lane said. “When I saw it, I just said, ‘Well, either it’s going to be this cult hit, or we’ll all be deported.’”Though he isn’t sure how the film will be received — “I’d like to show this to Mitch McConnell, then he’d really freeze” — Lane still offered some marketing suggestions. He told Sharp and Jackson they should record a video to warn that watching the film in a theater could make the audience gay, then ask a few willing football players to serve as the guinea pigs: “You send in Aaron Rodgers and a couple of others, and then they come out of there in caftans.”The idea was vetoed when they heard that the recent comedy “Bottoms” might also be planning a turn-you-gay marketing angle, but Lane was just happy to have the company. “If you can get away with ‘Bottoms’ — if you can have a high-school comedy about teenage lesbians starting a fight club — you certainly can have ‘Dicks: The Musical,’” he said.With that remark, our coffee date was over. And though we had met in the early morning, at an hour when some party-hearty A24 stars might finally be crawling into bed, Lane assured me it was no trouble at all.“This was like therapy,” he said. “I cried, I laughed, I talked about ‘Dicks.’” More

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      SAG-AFTRA Negotiator a Key Player as Talks Set to Resume in Actors Strike

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      Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the lead negotiator for SAG-AFTRA, will be a key player as the guild begins talks with the studios again on Monday.Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the executive director and chief negotiator for the actors’ union, has spent the past two decades toiling behind the scenes during contract talks. The spotlight, he knows, is for the SAG-AFTRA president, usually a well-known performer like the current office holder, Fran Drescher.But ever since the guild went on strike on July 14 for the first time in 40 years, things have been different.In the past three months, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland, 51, has stepped out from behind the negotiating table and made fiery speeches, walked film festival red carpets and reached out to the union’s younger members via Instagram reels. His more frequent appearances have given people ample opportunity to see the tattoos on his forearms, a visual clue to how much the professional and the personal are intertwined for him. On the right are five symbols — a record, a play button, a film reel, a megaphone and a radio antenna — representing the contracts he’s negotiated for union members in the music, film/TV, radio, commercial, video and broadcast industries. On his left arm is a coil with five loops that represent the five children he has adopted with his husband, John.“It’s not just a job for me,” he said in an interview. “This is where I’ve spent the vast majority of my professional career, and I really care about what happens to our members.”Now, however, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland is facing his most challenging public moment. Come Monday, when the union returns to the negotiating table with the studios in an attempt to resolve the strike that has much of Hollywood at a standstill, all eyes will be on him.(Ted Sarandos, a co-chairman of Netflix; David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery; Donna Langley, the chief content officer of Universal Pictures; and Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, will also be in attendance, along with the chief negotiator for the studios, Carol Lombardini.)When the Writers Guild of America agreed to a tentative deal for its 11,500 members last Sunday, that left SAG-AFTRA as the lone union holding out for a new deal. How this week’s negotiations go will therefore affect not just the tens of thousands of people in Mr. Crabtree-Ireland’s guild, but everyone in the entertainment industry.The dual strikes have been devastating financially, with more than 100,000 behind-the-scenes workers like location scouts, makeup artists and lighting technicians out of work. The California economy has lost an estimated $5 billion. Major studios like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global have seen their stock prices drop. Analysts have estimated that the global box office will lose as much as $1.6 billion in ticket sales because of movies whose releases were pushed back to next year.“I’m 100 percent sure that he’s a deal maker, a realist and that he understands the horse trade,” Bryan Lourd, chief executive of Creative Artists Agency, said of Mr. Crabtree-Ireland. “He has the list of what he’s got to get and what he can lose.”Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said that he was encouraged by the tentative deal reached by the writers and that he was anxious to get a deal done for the actors. But he added that he did not feel pressure because the actors were the only ones on strike. The push he feels, he said, was “because of the economic impact and the impact on our members and others.”The negotiations on Monday will be the first time that the union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, have talked since the actors went on strike. At the time SAG-AFTRA walked out, the dialogue between the sides had reached a boiling point.Mr. Iger, of Disney, elicited the ire of many writers and actors by saying that those on strike were not being “realistic” in their demands. Ms. Drescher responded by saying Disney should put Mr. Iger “behind doors and never let him talk to anybody” and compared him and the other studio chiefs to “land barons of a medieval time.”Mr. Crabtree-Ireland was traditionally seen as a voice of reason by several studio executives, but at a news conference on July 13 announcing the strike, he appeared beside Ms. Drescher and spoke passionately about the studios’ intentions to replace background actors with artificial intelligence technology in perpetuity.The studios issued a statement, arguing that A.I. agreements could only be made for a specific project — but by then, A.I. had become a rallying cry for striking actors. The actors, like the writers, have also said that the streaming era has worsened their compensation and overall working conditions.Mr. Crabtree-Ireland played down the volatile nature of the rhetoric in the interview, and said Ms. Drescher’s comments about Mr. Iger were just a response to a statement that had angered “a very wide swath of our members.”“She was elected by the members to do this job,” he added. “So I feel very confident walking into a room with Fran and the rest of our negotiating team who have had extraordinary unity throughout this entire process.”The studio alliance declined to comment for this article.While the writers’ deal would seem to give the actors and studios a blueprint for their negotiations, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland pointed out that SAG-AFTRA has different asks. For instance, he noted the new level of transparency reached between writers and the streaming companies regarding residual payments was “huge.” But the actors are looking to secure a revenue-sharing deal with the studios, a proposal the alliance has deemed a non-starter.“We really feel that the companies need to share a share of the revenue that’s coming from streaming,” Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said. “And we are not presently considering an approach that doesn’t attach in that way.”Mr. Crabtree-Ireland joined SAG-AFTRA in 2000, a Georgetown graduate with a law degree from the University of California, Davis, who spent the first two years of his career in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.He rose quickly at the union, first to general counsel, then adding chief operating officer to his title. In 2021, he was named national executive director and chief negotiator, a job that pays $989,700 annually.Outside of the office, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland raises his children ranging in age from 4 to 18 with his husband. The two were first married in 2004, one of the first 100 same-sex couples to wed in San Francisco before the California Supreme Court annulled the unions.While well-liked by both his colleagues and his adversaries, his performance during the strike has earned some critiques from his own membership. Despite the loyalty exhibited on the picket lines, many who have dealt with the union behind the scenes describe a messy, disorganized approach — specifically when it comes to the rules about what its members can and can’t do during the strike.One point of contention was the issue of interim agreements, which essentially allowed actors to work on and publicize projects that were not backed by the studios the union was striking against.The rules were fuzzy, however, and many actors were confused about what was permissible. The comedic actress Sarah Silverman blasted SAG-AFTRA on her Instagram account, and Viola Davis declined to begin production on a film granted an interim agreement. Soon, publicists began hounding the union to clarify whether actors could promote independent films without worrying that they were crossing the picket line.On Aug. 24, less than a week before the start of the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland issued a statement that read in part, “Whether it’s walking a picket line, working on approved Interim Agreement productions, or maintaining employment on one of our other permissible, non-struck contracts, our members’ support for their union is empowering and inspiring.”Mr. Crabtree-Ireland also talked to many actors who had concerns.“I underestimated how quickly our members were going to need that information,” Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said. “That is one of the few things that I would do differently.”It was a pragmatic response, in keeping with the reputation Mr. Crabtree-Ireland has built throughout his career. And many in the entertainment industry are hoping that same style will be a key in the negotiations that could get Hollywood back to business.“It’s tricky to navigate because he’s trying to please his members and fight for their issues and a lot of them have different issues,” said Lindsay Dougherty, lead organizer for Teamsters Local 399, the union that represents Hollywood workers like truck drivers, casting directors and animal trainers. “It’s obviously not all on him, but I’m sure he feels the pressure.”Brooks Barnes More

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      Conducting Lessons: How Bradley Cooper Became Leonard Bernstein

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      On a late-spring day in 2018, when the New York Philharmonic was deep in rehearsals of a Strauss symphony, an unexpected visitor showed up at the stage door of David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.The visitor, Bradley Cooper, the actor and director, had come on a mission. He was preparing to direct and star in a film about Leonard Bernstein, the eminent conductor and composer who led the Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969. He was asking the orchestra’s leaders for help with the movie, “Maestro,” which has its North American premiere on Monday at the New York Film Festival.The Philharmonic is accustomed to having luminaries at its concerts. But it was unusual for someone like Cooper to express such deep interest in classical music, a field often neglected in popular culture.“How many top Hollywood stars can be genuine or interested in that way?” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s then-president and chief executive. “We were really impressed.”Soon, Cooper was a regular at the Philharmonic’s concerts and rehearsals, sitting in the conductor’s box in the second tier and peppering musicians with questions. He visited the orchestra’s archives to examine Bernstein’s scores and batons. And he joined Philharmonic staff members on a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, placing a stone on Bernstein’s grave, a Jewish rite.Cooper as Bernstein.Jason McDonald/NetflixBernstein as Bernstein, in 1962.Eddie Hausner/The New York Times“You could see that he was watching with a very special eye,” said Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director. “He wanted to get into Bernstein’s soul.”Cooper’s time with the Philharmonic was the beginning of an intense five-year period in which he immersed himself in classical music to portray Bernstein, the most influential American maestro of the 20th century and a composer of renown, whose works include not just “West Side Story” but music for the concert hall.He attended dozens of rehearsals and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Berlin and at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. And he befriended top maestros, including van Zweden; Michael Tilson Thomas, a protégé of Bernstein who led the San Francisco Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who served as the film’s conducting consultant.Cooper has portrayed musicians before: He took piano, guitar and voice lessons for his role as Jackson Maine, a folksy rock star, in the 2018 film “A Star Is Born,” which he also directed.But “Maestro,” in theaters on Nov. 22 and on Netflix on Dec. 20, posed a new challenge. Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure with an exuberant style at the podium. Cooper needed to learn not only to conduct, but also to captivate and seduce like a great maestro.Cooper watched archival footage of Bernstein conducting, and Nézet-Séguin recorded dozens of videos on his phone in which he conducted in Bernstein’s manner. He also sent play-by-play voice-overs of Bernstein’s performances and assisted Cooper on set, sometimes guiding his conducting through an earpiece.Nézet-Séguin said the biggest challenge for Cooper, as for many maestros, was “feeling unprotected” and “naked emotionally” on the podium. “He wouldn’t settle for anything less than what he had in mind.”Cooper with Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Ely Cathedral, in England, where Nézet-Séguin coached Cooper for the film’s re-creation of a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra.NetflixCooper, who wrote “Maestro” with Josh Singer, declined to comment for this article because he belongs to the union representing striking actors, which has forbidden its members from promoting studio films. But in a discussion last year with Cate Blanchett, who played the fictional maestro Lydia Tár in “Tár” (2022), he described conducting as “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.”He said that people often ask: “What does a conductor even do? Aren’t you just up there doing this?” He waved his arms.“My answer is it’s the absolute hardest thing you could possibly ever want to do,” he said. “It is impossible.”Cooper grew up near Philadelphia surrounded by music. He played the double bass and showed an interest in conducting, inspired by portrayals of mischievous maestros in “Looney Tunes” and “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. When he was 8, he asked Santa for a baton.“I was obsessed with conducting classical music,” he told Stephen Colbert on the “Late Show” last year. “You know you put your 10,000 hours in for something you never do? I did it for conducting.”Steven Spielberg, who had been planning to direct “Maestro,” was aware of Cooper’s obsession. He recalled Cooper telling him that “he’d conduct whatever came out of their hi-fi system at home.”After a screening of “A Star Is Born,” Spielberg was so impressed that he decided to hand “Maestro” over to Cooper, with whom he shares a love of classical music.“It only took me 15 minutes to realize this brilliant actor is equaled only by his skills as a filmmaker,” said Spielberg, who produced the film, along with Cooper and Martin Scorsese.Cooper worked to win the trust of the Bernstein family, including his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, who gave the film permission to use their father’s music. (“Maestro” beat out a rival Bernstein project by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal.)Jamie Bernstein said that Cooper seemed “keen to seek an essential authenticity about the story.” He asked questions about her relationship with her father, and he was adept at imitating his gestures, like placing his hand on his hip as he conducted.Cooper visited the family home in Fairfield, Conn., admiring a Steinway piano that Bernstein used to play and examining his belongings: a bathrobe, a blue-striped djellaba, a bottle of German cough syrup that he brought back from a foreign tour.“Channeling a supernova”: Cooper with Gustavo Dudamel at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.Kazu Hiro/Netflix“He was just like a sponge soaking up every detail about our family’s existence that he possibly could,” she said.Cooper sent photos of himself in makeup and costumes, holding replicas of Bernstein’s batons, to his children. (They defended him recently when he drew criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of Bernstein, who was Jewish.)At the gym, Cooper sometimes wore a shirt emblazoned with the words “Hunky Brute,” a nickname that Bernstein used for the New York Philharmonic’s brass players. (Bernstein also wore a version of the shirt.)Bernstein’s musical career unfolds in the background in “Maestro”; much of the film focuses on his conflicted identity, including his marriage to the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and his dalliances with men.Cooper was eager to approach “Maestro” less as a biography and more as the story of a marriage, Spielberg recalled.While Cooper understood Bernstein’s genius, Spielberg said, he also had “an understanding of the complexities of Felicia’s love for this man, whom she would certainly have to share not only with the world but also with his hungry heart.”The film, shot largely on location, recreates several moments from Bernstein’s career, including his celebrated 1943 debut with the New York Philharmonic, when he filled in at the last minute for the ailing conductor Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall.At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, Cooper’s Bernstein is shown leading master classes and driving a sports car with the license plate MAESTRO1 across a pristine lawn as the real Bernstein had done. He visits his mentor, the Russian conductor and composer Serge Koussevitzky, who suggests he change his surname to Burns to avoid discrimination.Cooper in the pit at the Metropolitan Opera where he observed Nézet-Séguin during a performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.”Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan OperaIn his conducting studies, Cooper spent the most time with Dudamel and Nézet-Séguin. He visited Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, dressed and made up as Bernstein, for sessions with Dudamel. And he traveled to Germany, score in hand, to observe Dudamel as he rehearsed Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. (Dudamel declined to comment because he is also a member of the actors’ union.)Cooper stealthily watched Nézet-Séguin from the orchestra pit at the Met, including at a 2019 performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” Later that year, for Bernstein’s 100th birthday, Nézet-Séguin invited Cooper and Mulligan to narrate a staging of Bernstein’s operetta “Candide” with the Philadelphia Orchestra.Nézet-Séguin said he didn’t set out to give Cooper conducting lessons but to refine his portrayals. “I had to take what he already did as an actor,” he said, “and make it into a frame that was believable.”Nézet-Séguin, who also conducts the film’s soundtrack, helped him find the downbeat for Schumann’s “Manfred” overture, which opened the Carnegie program in 1943. And he assisted Cooper with dialogue for a rehearsal scene of “Candide,” during which he conducts with a cigarette in his mouth.Last fall, Cooper and Nézet-Séguin traveled to Ely Cathedral in England to recreate a 1973 performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony by Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra, a climactic moment in the film.Cooper, who chose the music in “Maestro,” had studied the piece intensely, watching Bernstein’s performance as well as videos in which Nézet-Séguin dissected Bernstein’s gestures and explained how to count beats.“He would watch the videos,” Nézet-Séguin said, “and then text me and say, ‘Hey, can we talk about this or that moment?”Inside an empty Ely Cathedral, Nézet-Séguin, wearing a sweater that had belonged to Bernstein, coached Cooper as he rehearsed an eight-minute section of the piece with a recording.When the London Symphony Orchestra arrived, Cooper watched as Nézet-Séguin rehearsed in the style of Bernstein, who often broke the rules of conducting with his animated gestures. Sometimes, Cooper offered suggestions, such as adding tremolo in the strings.When Cooper took the podium, Nézet-Séguin provided occasional direction through an earpiece, advising him to hold onto a moment or let go.The musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra were startled by Cooper’s transformation. “It was uncanny,” said Sarah Quinn, a violinist in the orchestra. “It was just kind of a double take.”Throughout his work on “Maestro,” Cooper maintained a connection to the New York Philharmonic, soliciting stories about Bernstein. Van Zweden, who worked with Bernstein in Amsterdam in the 1980s, told him how Bernstein had broken protocol and hugged Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, calling her “darling” and taking a sip of his drink at the same time.Cooper visited Geffen Hall last fall after its $550 million renovation, attending a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and flipping through a Mahler score that had belonged to Bernstein. He returned in February when Dudamel was introduced as the Philharmonic’s next music director, embracing him and admiring a photo of Bernstein.Over the summer, Cooper invited a few Philharmonic staff members and musicians to his Greenwich Village townhouse for screenings of “Maestro.” The orchestra presented him with a gift: a replica of Bernstein’s Carnegie debut program.“From the beginning, he was intent on avoiding a broad burlesque of a personality, especially one as big as Bernstein’s,” said Carter Brey, the orchestra’s principal cellist, who attended a screening.Cooper has compared playing Bernstein to “channeling a supernova.” He said in a recorded Zoom conversation with Jamie Bernstein last year that her father transmitted his soul through conducting.“The pilot light never went out with him, which is incredible given everything that he saw, experienced, understood, comprehended, bore witness to, even within his own self,” he said in the video. “What a person. What a spirit.”Audio produced by More

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      Ed Begley Jr. Can Tell You the 3 Best Comedies of All Time

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      The actor and environmentalist considered hiring a ghostwriter for help with his memoir, then realized as he was writing things down, “This is too much fun.”Is there anyone in Hollywood that Ed Begley Jr. doesn’t know?“I think there’s a publicist at Paramount I need to have lunch with soon, and there’s a dolly grip at Fox,” he quipped. “I’m going to clear that up by the week’s end.”Readers of Begley’s new memoir, “To the Temple of Tranquility … and Step on It!,” might suspect that even that list is stretching it. In the book, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Christopher Guest, Cass Elliot, John Belushi, Tom Waits, the Beatles and even Charles Manson make appearances. As do memories from his work on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “St. Elsewhere,” “A Mighty Wind” and “She-Devil.”Begley, 74, had been considering writing a memoir for a year or two when his younger daughter, Hayden, asked him to spill his stories into her smartphone. His wild 20s, when he drank a quart of vodka a day, took pills and did cocaine. His transformation into an outspoken advocate for sustainable living. The Parkinson’s diagnosis he received in 2016.He took about 45 pages of notes, ostensibly for a ghostwriter, but realized he was enjoying the process. “I don’t want any ghostwriter touching it,” he recalled thinking. “This is too much fun.”In a video interview from his Los Angeles home, Begley spoke about practicing what he preaches and gave some much-needed love to the city’s Metro system. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1My BikeThere’s no doubt in my mind that the high point of my 8th year was getting a bicycle. A beautiful blue Schwinn. Later to be replaced by a white Peugeot, then a brown Nishiki, then a titanium Klein, and finally by a fat-tire American Flyer with electric assist — a compromise that my age and physical condition dictate, but I’m still riding!2‘Midnight Run’This is one of those perfect films. There’s not one misstep in the whole two hours and six minutes. Bob De Niro is great, as always, and though Charles Grodin is no longer with us, he was, and remains, a national treasure. It’s a brilliant script by George Gallo and flawlessly directed by Martin Brest. I would argue that it is one of the three best comedies of all time. The other two being “Bridesmaids” and “The In-Laws” — a self-serving selection, admittedly, but true nonetheless.3My LEED Platinum HomeTwelve-inch-thick walls, passive solar design, a 10,000-gallon rainwater tank, a gray-water system for the fruit trees, steel construction to avoid taking down trees to build a home. Not to mention the fire hazard when building homes out of sticks. Six raised beds and four compost bins allow me to grow a good deal of my own food. All of it proving that living more sustainably is certainly possible.4‘Loves of a Blonde’Milos Forman certainly made a good many fine films, several of them big hits like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus.” But there is an extraordinary early film of his, made [in Czechoslovakia] in 1965. If you haven’t seen it, please try to find it somewhere. It is a gem.5The L.A. MetroI know what you’ve heard, and most of it’s true. Things fell apart during Covid, and we haven’t been able to fix a good many serious problems that got worse during 2020. But I’m not giving up my senior pass, and I’m not giving up on public transportation in Los Angeles! Given the future that we’re facing with climate change, we must get people out of their polluting cars. And public transportation offers people a cost-effective way to do so.6Fryman Canyon ParkThere’s a precious tract of open space, a miniature Griffith Park, right in the middle of Studio City. It’s called Fryman Canyon. I’ve been in the valley my whole life and in Studio City since 1971, and I’ve been enjoying hiking this trail for over half a century. And I’m not done.7Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’No further discussion is necessary.8Paula PoundstoneI’ve seen her perform countless times, and it never ceases to bring me amazement and pure joy. It is certainly humbling to watch her work a crowd, but my more immediate problem is often catastrophic respiratory failure. I have more than once laughed so hard that I thought it would be the end of me. But what a way to go!9H.O.P. E. Healthy Organic Positive EatingA vegan restaurant in Studio City that is my go-to dining experience. It is a Thai restaurant, family-owned and delicious. One of the biggest contributions we can make to reducing the threat of climate change is to eat more plant-based food.10‘The Heart of Saturday Night’Though Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan have put out countless brilliant albums like “Mule Variations” and “Bad as Me,” “The Heart of Saturday Night” is the soundtrack for my life in the ’70s, and I always like paying a visit there. More

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      How Dumbledore Became Michael Gambon’s Most Recognizable Role

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      The great British stage actor was not initially cast as the wizarding headmaster in the “Harry Potter” films, but he made the role his own.In the latter part of Michael Gambon’s long and storied acting career, some of the most animated analyses of his performances could be found not in theater or film reviews, but in forums for the “Harry Potter” fandom, where dedicated Hogwarts obsessives would dissect his every onscreen utterance as the wizard Albus Dumbledore.It wasn’t originally his role. Richard Harris, the eminent actor who was originally cast, died after filming the second “Harry Potter” movie. Gambon took over in 2003, joining the ranks of great British actors with popular late-career turns as wizards, a lineage that includes Alec Guinness (as the wizard-like Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars”) and Ian McKellen (as Gandalf in the “Lord of the Rings” films).Several other well-known actors were initially considered to succeed Harris in the role, including McKellen, who demurred, and Peter O’Toole, who turned it down because of his long, close friendship with Harris.In the end the choice was Gambon, who died Wednesday. He made the role his own, donning the long silver beard and half-moon spectacles and speaking in his unmistakable rich baritone voice, a stark contrast to Harris’s hoarser, more wizened readings as the headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.He was seen by millions, and after a career playing the characters of Brecht and Pinter it was Dumbledore that became his most recognizable — and probably most debated — role.Once Gambon debuted in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” imbuing the character with a darker, sometimes mischievous tone, the question was born: Who was the “better Dumbledore”? Harris, with his soft-spoken, kind hearted air? Or Gambon, with his more sinister twist on the character?Gambon was self-deprecating about the role.“I just stick on a beard and play me, so it’s no great feat,” Gambon told a British movie blog in 2007. “Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality.”Gambon, who entered the film series in his early 60s, also chose to avoid reading J.K. Rowling’s source material, an approach that he once said was similar to that of Alan Rickman, who played Severus Snape, and Ralph Fiennes, who played Voldemort. He said bluntly that he tended to take movie roles for the money, telling the blog, “I just say what the script tells me to say.”Over the course of six movies, including limited roles in the two-part finale, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” he became beloved by fans and known as something of a prankster on set, once putting a “fart machine” inside Daniel Radcliffe’s sleeping bag.In a statement sent through his publicist on Thursday, Radcliffe, whose work with Gambon spanned his teenage years, said that the loss of the actor made the world “considerably less fun,” writing:Michael Gambon was one of the most brilliant, effortless actors I’ve ever had the privilege of working with, but despite his immense talent, the thing I will remember most about him is how much fun he had doing his job. He was silly, irreverent and hilarious. He loved his job, but never seemed defined by it. He was an incredible story and joke teller and his habit of blurring the lines of fact and fiction when talking to journalists meant that he was also one of the most entertaining people with whom you could ever wish to do a press junket. The sixth film was where I got to spend the most time working with Michael and he made the hours spent in front of a green screen together more memorable and joyous than they had any right to be. I’m so sad to hear he has passed, but I am so grateful for the fact that I am one of the lucky people who got to work with him.Rupert Grint, the actor who played Ron Weasley in the series, said in an Instagram post on Thursday that Gambon brought “so much warmth and mischief to every day on set.” And Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger, described Gambon as “kind kind kind” on Instagram, writing: “You never took it too seriously but somehow delivered the most serious moments with all the gravitas.” Onscreen, the darker edge Gambon brought to the role dovetailed with the trajectory of Rowling’s story, as well as the approach of the filmmaker David Yates, who directed the second half of the movie series.“He’s got to be a bit scary,” Gambon told The Los Angeles Times in 2009 of his Dumbledore. “All headmasters should be a bit scary, shouldn’t they? A top wizard like him would be intimidating. And ultimately, he’s protecting Harry. Essentially, I play myself. A little Irish, a little scary. That’s what I’m like in real life.” More

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      Michael Gambon, Dumbledore in the ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 82

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      After he made his mark in London in the 1970s, he went on to play a wide range of roles, including Edward VII, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill.Michael Gambon, the Irish-born actor who drew acclaim from both audiences and peers for his stage and screen work, and who won even wider renown as Albus Dumbledore, the firm but kindly headmaster of the Hogwarts wizarding school, in the “Harry Potter” films, died on Wednesday night. He was 82.Mr. Gambon’s family confirmed his death in a brief statement issued on Thursday through a public relations company. “Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife, Anne, and son Fergus at his bedside, following a bout of pneumonia,” the statement said. It did not identify the hospital where he died.The breakthrough that led the actor Ralph Richardson to call him “the great Gambon” came with Mr. Gambon’s performance in Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” at London’s National Theater in 1980, although he had already enjoyed modest success, notably in plays by Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter.Peter Hall, then the National Theater’s artistic director, described Mr. Gambon (pronounced GAM-bonn) as “unsentimental, dangerous and immensely powerful.” He recalled in his autobiography that he had approached four leading directors to accept him in the title role, only for them to reject him as “not starry enough.”After John Dexter agreed to direct him in what Mr. Gambon was to describe as the most difficult part he had ever played, the mix of volcanic energy and tenderness, sensuality and intelligence he brought to the role — in which he aged from 40 to 75 — excited not only critics but also his fellow performers.Mr. Gambon in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” at the National Theater in London in 1980. He called it the most difficult part he had ever played.Donald Cooper/AlamyAs Mr. Hall recalled, the dressing-room windows at the National, which look out onto a courtyard, “after the first night contained actors in various states of undress leaning out and applauding him — a unique tribute.”That brought Mr. Gambon a best-actor nomination at the Olivier Awards. He would win the award in 1987 for his performance as Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” at the National Theater. Again it was his blend of vulnerability and visceral force that impressed audiences; Miller declared that Mr. Gambon’s performance as the embattled longshoreman was the best he had seen. Mr. Ayckbourn, who directed the production, described Mr. Gambon as awe-inspiring.“One day he just stood in the rehearsal room and just burst into tears — no turning upstage, no hands in front of his face,” Mr. Ayckbourn said. “He just stood there and wept like a child. It was heartbreaking. And he did angry very well too. That could be scary.”Michael John Gambon was born in Dublin on Oct. 19, 1940. He became a dual British and Irish citizen after he and his seamstress mother, Mary, moved to London to join his father, Edward, an engineer helping to reconstruct the city after it had been badly bombed in 1945.By his own admission he was a dreamy student, often lost in fantasies of being other people, and he left school “pig ignorant, with no qualifications, nothing.” When the family moved from North London to Kent, he became an apprentice toolmaker at Vickers-Armstrongs, which was famous for having built Britain’s Spitfire fighter planes.The teenage Mr. Gambon had never seen a play — he said he didn’t even knew what a play was — but when he helped build sets for an amateur dramatic society in Erith, Kent, he was given a few small roles onstage. “I went vroom!,” he recalled. “I thought, Jesus, this is for me, I want to be an actor.” He joined the left-leaning Unity Theater in London, performing and taking lessons in improvisation at the Royal Court.This emboldened him to write to Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, the founders of the Gate Theater in Dublin, claiming to be a West End actor passing through the city en route to New York. An invitation ensued, as did a job as the Second Gentleman in “Othello,” followed by an offer to join Laurence Olivier’s new National Theater, which (Mr. Gambon said) was seeking burly six-footers like himself to play spear carriers.Several small or nonspeaking roles followed — Mr. Gambon remembered little but saying “Madam, your carriage awaits” to Maggie Smith in a Restoration comedy — until Olivier himself advised him to seek better parts in the provinces. That he did, closely modeling an Othello in Birmingham in 1968 on the Moor famously played at the National by Olivier, an actor Mr. Gambon said he always regarded with “absolute awe.”Mr. Gambon didn’t make his mark in London until 1974, when he played a slow-witted veterinary surgeon in Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy “The Norman Conquests.” One scene, in which he sat on a child’s chair so low that only half his face was visible, became celebrated for the hilarity it generated. Indeed, Mr. Gambon said, he actually witnessed a man “laugh so much he fell out of his seat and rolled down the gangway.”Mr. Gambon in 1987, the year he won an Olivier Award for his performance in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesMr. Gambon said he disliked looking in mirrors; so unpleasant did he find his face that he compared it to a crumpled plastic bag. His jowls and his heavy build meant that he never played Hamlet or any obviously heroic or conventionally good-looking characters, yet he won universal admiration for his versatility. He seemed able to grow or shrink at will. For a man compared to a lumberjack, he was astonishingly fleet and nimble. One critic saw him as a rhinoceros that could almost tap-dance.And he brought a paradoxical delicacy to many a role: King Lear and Antony, which he played in tandem for the Royal Shakespeare Company; leading roles in Pinter’s “Betrayal” and “Old Times”; Ben Jonson’s Volpone at the National Theater; and the anguished restaurateur in David Hare’s “Skylight,” a performance he took from London to Broadway, where it earned him a Tony Award nomination for best actor in 1996.At the time he was best known in the United States for a television performance as the daydreaming invalid in Dennis Potter’s acclaimed 1986 mini-series, “The Singing Detective.” Though he always said that the theater was his great love and he pined for it when he was away, he often appeared on screens both large and small during a career in which he was virtually never out of work.Before being cast as Dumbledore, Mr. Gambon was best known in the United States for his performance as the daydreaming invalid in Dennis Potter’s acclaimed 1986 mini-series, “The Singing Detective.”BBCFrom 1999 to 2001, he won successive best-actor BAFTA awards, for “Wives and Daughters,” “Longitude” and “Perfect Strangers.” His portrayal of Lyndon B. Johnson in the 2002 mini-series “Path to War” won him an Emmy nomination, as did his Mr. Woodhouse in the 2009 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”His television roles varied from Inspector Maigret to Edward VII, Oscar Wilde to Winston Churchill. And in film he played characters as different as Albert Spica, the coarse and violent gangster in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” and the benign Professor Dumbledore.Mr. Gambon took over the role of Dumbledore, a central character in the Harry Potter saga, when Richard Harris, who had originated it, died in 2002. Reviewing “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” in which he first appeared in the role, A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that the film, though noteworthy for its special effects, was also, like the two earlier films in the series, “anchored by top-of-the-line flesh-and-blood British acting,” and noted that “Michael Gambon, as the wise headmaster Albus Dumbledore, has gracefully stepped into Richard Harris’s conical hat and flowing robes.” Mr. Gambon continued to play Dumbledore through the final movie in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” released in 2011.For all the attention that role brought him, Mr. Gambon claimed not to see this or any other performance as a great accomplishment; he tended to answer interviewers who questioned him about acting by saying, “I just do it.” But in fact he prepared for his roles conscientiously. He would absorb a script, then use rehearsals to adapt and deepen his discoveries.“I’m very physical,” he once said. “I want to know how the person looks, what his hair is like, the way he walks, the way he stands and sits, how he sounds, his rhythms, how he dresses, his shoes. The way your feet feel on the stage is important.” And slowly, very slowly, Mr. Gambon would edge toward what he felt was the core of a person and, he said, rely on intuition to bring him to life onstage.Though he was no Method actor, Mr. Gambon did use memories when strong emotions were needed. He found it easy to cry onstage, he said, sometimes by thinking of the famous photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack. Acting, he said, was a compulsion, “a hard slog, heartache, misery — for moments of sheer joy.”Mr. Gambon in the 1989 film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.”Steve Pyke/Getty ImagesIn person Mr. Gambon was elusive; he said that he didn’t exist aside from his acting and that he hated the idea of celebrity, even popularity. He adamantly refused to reveal anything about his private life to interviewers, though it’s on public record that he married Anne Miller when he was 22 and that together they had a son, Fergus. They both survive him. It is believed that they remained on good terms even after he had two other sons, Tom and William, with the set designer Philippa Hart.He was knighted in 1998.His engineering apprenticeship left him fascinated with the workings of mechanical things: clocks, old watches and especially antique guns, of which he possessed scores. He also took delight in fast cars; he once appeared on the television show “Top Gear” and drove so recklessly that a section of the track he’d taken on two wheels was renamed Gambon Corner.He became notorious for impish behavior on and off the stage. A qualified pilot, he promised to cure a fellow actor of his fear of flying by taking him up in a tiny plane, then mimed a heart attack as, his tongue lolling, he nose-dived toward outer London. Mr. Ayckbourn recalled a moment in “Othello” when Mr. Gambon shoved Iago’s head into a fountain. “Shampoo and set, shampoo and set,” roared the Moor — but such was the emotion already generated the audience reportedly didn’t notice.“I’m actually serious about my work,” Mr. Gambon once said. However, much of that work came to a premature end after he played a wily, drunken, needy Falstaff at the National Theater in 2005, followed by the alcoholic Hirst in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” in 2008.Having admitted that he often felt terrified before making an entrance, he had panic attacks while rehearsing the role of W.H. Auden in Alan Bennett’s “The Habit of Art” in 2009 and was twice rushed to a hospital before withdrawing from the production. By then he was finding it difficult to remember lines. After playing the nonspeaking title character in Samuel Beckett’s “Eh Joe” in 2013, he announced that he would no longer perform onstage.He continued to appear on film and television, notably as the ailing title character in “Churchill’s Secret” in 2016. But his departure from theater meant that he ended his stage career with a deep sense of loss.“It’s a horrible thing to admit,” he said. “But I can’t do it. And it breaks my heart.”Alex Marshall More

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      Onstage, Michael Gambon’s Depth Transcended the Unspoken

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      The actor conveyed the gravitational force of mortality, tugging the men he played so commandingly toward a void beyond meaning, our critic writes.Even in silence, he thundered. Make that, especially in silence.The last two times I saw the mighty Michael Gambon onstage, his characters didn’t have much to say, and in one case, nothing at all. Both the plays in which this British actor, who died on Wednesday at the age of 82, was appearing on those occasions were by Samuel Beckett, “Eh Joe” and “All That Fall.”Few, if any dramatists, made better use of the resonance of the unspoken than Beckett. And few actors brought such profound visceral weariness — and agitation — to Beckett’s wordlessness. Even in performances that required him to bellow, quip or speechify, Gambon made sure we were aware of the gravitational force of mortality, tugging the men he played so commandingly toward a void beyond meaning, beyond will, beyond life.He was not an obese man, but he was an uncommonly solid and fleshly presence in live theater, from his haunted, corrugated face to his bearlike torso and unexpectedly expressive feet. Here was someone, you felt, whom it was better never to cross.That impressive avoirdupois made him a natural onscreen for roles as different as the magisterial wizard Dumbledore in the “Harry Potter” movies; the terrifying, vengeful gangster in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”; and the hospital patient, fantasist mystery writer in Dennis Potter’s sublime television mini-series “The Singing Detective.” Onstage that presence allowed Gambon to convey, effortlessly, the subliminal menace and explosiveness in the husband and lover of Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” and David Hare’s “Skylight,” and the rueful rage beneath Falstaff’s heartiness in the Henry IV plays.Yet he always gave the impression that all that powerful density might melt into the helplessness we associate with the newborn and the dying, a sense that thrums like a bass line through Beckett’s work. In “Eh Joe,” a television play that was brought to the London stage by the director Atom Egoyan in 2006, Gambon’s role was almost entirely passive.The only words we heard were spoken by an unseen woman, who voiced a droning litany of accusations of a life lived in bad faith. It was Egoyan’s conceit to have Gambon’s face projected on a scrim in immense, simultaneous video close-up, registering each blow of memory with flickers of expression so subtle as to seem subterranean.It was a device that reminded us of the miraculous way cameras can discover, in certain seemingly unchanging faces, a multitude of conflicted feelings. The astonishment was how even more complete a portrait Gambon provided through the physicality of his live presence, when the camera wasn’t running.Wearing a threadbare bathrobe in a shadowed, shabby room, Gambon’s Joe began the play by running his fingers across window curtains as he closed them, then sitting with immense weariness onto his bed. For much of those opening moments, you couldn’t even see his face.Nonetheless, you sensed you had been vouchsafed a vision of a man at his most defeated, so overcome by his own futility that movement had become pointless. The very set of his shoulders let us know that Joe was so raw, so spent that you felt, as you sometimes do with great actors, that you were violating a privacy you had no right to witness.I am sorry I missed Gambon in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” in London in 2010. But I did get to see him in a lesser-known Beckett work, “All That Fall,” three years later in New York. Brought to the stage by the director Trevor Nunn, “All That Fall” follows a day in the life of the chattery, scrappy Mrs. Rooney (played, wonderfully, by Eileen Atkins), who goes to pick up her blind, broken-down husband at the train station.Gambon’s Mr. Rooney made his entrance late and didn’t begin to match his wife in loquacity. His physique, though, spoke volumes. He was, I wrote at the time, “a crumpled Goliath,” as he sloped onto the frail support of Atkins’s shoulder. Just to see the two of them, side by side, alone, in their codependency, was to understand the dynamic of a marriage.It is, however, as perhaps befits what was originally a radio play, a single sound that I remember most vividly from that production. The wife had quoted the text from the local church sermon: “The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.”And with those words, Gambon and Atkins roared, coarsely and deeply, with laughter. To grasp the absurdity of the text, you had only to look at the derelict couple before you. But there was the triumph of defiance in their laughter.That triumph was implicit in every performance that Gambon gave us. More