Actors and Actresses

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Ice Spice, Brian Jordan Alvarez and More Breakout Stars of 2023

      by

      These eight performers and artists broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.Gutsy and offbeat, with an abundance of heart. The stars who rose to the top in 2023 shared a similar mentality: do it their own way and go full tilt without sacrificing emotion or authenticity. Here are eight artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans.TelevisionBella RamseyAs the TV landscape continues to fracture, one new show emerged as a bona fide phenomenon: “The Last of Us,” HBO’s stunningly heartfelt zombie apocalypse thriller. Given that its source material was a beloved, acclaimed 2013 video game that has sold over 20 million copies, the bar was extraordinarily high. The show’s debut season delivered, in large part because of the synergy between the duo at its center: Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, two characters who find themselves on a cross-country quest, dodging reanimated corpses to (hopefully) save the world.Ramsey, 20, who was born and raised in central England, offered a layered, tenacious, haunting performance as a teenager who is coming-of-age while being humanity’s possible last hope. They have been a working actor since they signed on to “Game of Thrones” at age 11, as the scene-stealing giant slayer Lyanna Mormont, and went on to have celebrated turns in the BBC/HBO adaptation of “His Dark Materials” and Lena Dunham’s 2022 period comedy, “Catherine Called Birdy.”For “The Last of Us,” Ramsey nailed a specific combination of contradictions — funny and quirky, but violent and rough — that Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, its creators, were looking for. “There are few people better between the words ‘action’ and ‘cut,’” Mazin told The New York Times.Ramsey’s performance earned them an Emmy nomination, for outstanding lead actress in a drama, joining the likes of established stars such as Keri Russell and Elisabeth Moss. “It’s only recently that I’ve accepted I am Ellie, and I can do it, and I am a good actor,” Ramsey told us.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?  More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Andre Braugher Died of Lung Cancer, His Publicist Says

      by

      Mr. Braugher, who died this week, received the diagnosis a few months ago. The “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” actor won an Emmy for his work on “Homicide: Life on the Street.”Andre Braugher, the Emmy-winning actor who died this week at 61, was diagnosed with lung cancer a few months ago before succumbing to the disease, his longtime publicist, Jennifer Allen, said on Thursday.When Ms. Allen confirmed his death this week, she said he had died after a brief illness. A 2014 profile by The New York Times Magazine said that Mr. Braugher was intensely private and “stopped drinking alcohol and smoking years ago.”Though he had an expansive career, Mr. Braugher was best known for his roles as a stoic, composed police officer on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” the 1990s NBC police procedural, and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” the Fox sitcom that later moved to NBC.Mr. Braugher won Emmy Awards in 1998 for his work as Detective Frank Pembleton on “Homicide” and in 2006 for his role as a coolheaded crook in the six-part FX crime thriller “Thief.” He was nominated four times for his portrayal of Capt. Raymond Holt in “Brookyn Nine-Nine.” More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Andre Braugher: Captain Holt on ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ and More Defining Roles

      by

      The versatile actor was most known for vastly different portrayals of TV cops, but also shone in roles across film and stage.Andre Braugher, an Emmy-winning actor who, for over 30 years, adapted his no-nonsense, unflappable persona to great success across genres on television, in film and onstage, died at 61 years old on Monday night after a brief illness. Most famous for his roles as police officers — early in his career in the procedural “Homicide: Life on the Street” and later in the sitcom “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” — Braugher fell in love with acting while attending Stanford University, where he first performed in a student production of “Hamlet.” He went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts from Juilliard School. “When I graduated from school, I felt like I had the tiger by the tail; I could do almost anything,” Braugher told Variety in 2020.Here’s a look back at some of the moments that would go on to define Braugher’s career.1988“Glory”Braugher made his film debut in “Glory” in 1998.TriStar Pictures, via Getty ImagesBraugher’s father was reluctant to support his acting career — Braugher remembered him saying, “Show me Black actors who are earning a living. What the hell are you going to do, juggle and travel the country?” — but landing a supporting role in “Glory” was a crucial early breakthrough. He played the studious, timid union Corporal Thomas Searles in the Civil War drama alongside Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman.1990Making His Mark in TheaterBraugher won an Obie for his turn as “Henry V” in 1996.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      With ‘The Gilded Age,’ Louisa Jacobson Cuts Her Own Path

      by

      Exposed to the complexities of fame at a young age, she sought paths outside of acting in early adulthood. Now she is the lead of a prestige HBO drama.This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of “The Gilded Age.”“I’m sorry I’m late,” the actress Louisa Jacobson said, a little breathless, as she entered a vintage clothing boutique, in Manhattan’s East Village earlier this month. “It’s been such a crazy day.” It was a weekday afternoon, and traffic from her home in Brooklyn had been bad. The smells of the damp autumn day clung to her coat as she swept through the door, face lightly flush from the chill and manic hustle outside.She eyed a vanilla-bean-and-cedar candle and rifled through a rack of long blazers.“I like to buy pre-owned or vintage because it’s better for the planet and my wallet,” she said, adding that “I buy all my jeans here.” On the day we met, those jeans were medium-wash and boot-cut, matched with black boots and a black leather trench coat over a brown leather vest and a white button-down blouse for an overall steampunk vibe — a sartorial hint, maybe, at the Victorian fashion of the HBO drama “The Gilded Age,” if not quite the studied sensibilities of her character in the series, Marian Brook.Marian’s wardrobe, by contrast, consists entirely of long, bustled dresses and ribcage-crushing corsets. In the high society of 1880s New York, even plucky, forward-thinking heroines were expected to lace up tight for potential suitors.“Ouch,” Jacobson simply said.And yet Marian’s big decision in Episode 6 was perhaps even more constraining. Earlier in the show’s ongoing second season, her story took a dramatic turn as she went toe to toe with her formidable old-money aunt Agnes (Christine Baranski) and became a confidante of her other aunt, Ada (Cynthia Nixon). Marian also had to manage a suitor of dubious appeal, the handsome, if dull, widower Dashiell Montgomery (David Furr). Then suddenly, he proposed.“Can you imagine jumping into being the leading lady on ‘The Gilded Age’?” asked Christine Baranski, left (with Jacobson), in a scene from the series. “What a daunting task.”Barbara Nitke/HBOBowing to the conventions of her day, Marian accepted, in defiance of her own instincts. Fans, in turn, have questions — and consternation — heading into the season finale on Sunday. (“Uh-oh, “The Gilded Age’s” Marian Has Me Screaming at My TV Again,” reads one recent headline.)“There’s a lot of financial pressure on the union,” Jacobson said, referring to the engagement. “But,” she added, “she would be settling. Dashiell doesn’t take her career as a teacher or an artist seriously, and he’s like, ‘Well you can stop all of that once we’re married.’ She doesn’t vibe with that.”Jacobson, 32, has faced her own pressures — not least as the youngest daughter of perhaps Hollywood’s most celebrated screen actress, Meryl Streep. (She uses Jacobson, her middle name, as her professional surname.) And her star is ascending fast. When she was tapped to lead “The Gilded Age,” in 2019, it was her first television role. The drama was created by Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey”), a writer whom she had long admired.Then there was the cast, stacked with theater royalty including Baranski, Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy and Cynthia Nixon. Jacobson had only just graduated from drama school.“Can you imagine jumping into being the leading lady on ‘The Gilded Age’?” Baranski, a two-time Tony Award winner, said in a recent phone conversation. “What a daunting task.”Judging by her success thus far, Jacobson has remained mostly undaunted. But whatever advantages have come with her upbringing, it also showed her at a young age the pitfalls of fame and favor, enough that she spent much of her early adulthood pursuing other paths. Now that she is committed to acting — and if her stage name and hustle are any indication — she seems determined to build a career on her own terms and merits as much as possible.If Jacobson ultimately found the creative life irresistible, she came by it honestly: Her father, Don Gummer, is a sculptor; her two older sisters, Mamie and Grace Gummer, are also actors; and her older brother, Henry Wolfe, is a musician. The family lived in Salisbury, Conn., a small town near the Berkshires, until she was 9, when they moved to New York. She often performed spontaneously with her siblings at home.“I think I always knew that I wanted to act,” Jacobson said as we walked from the vintage store to a nearby flower shop on an afternoon of errands. She lifted her coat over her head as the rain picked up. “But I didn’t always know that I wanted to be an actor.”Jacobson, right, with Alison Dillulio, an old friend and the director of Chapter NY, a Manhattan art gallery. Before them is the drawing “City” (2023), by Christopher Culver.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe acted throughout middle school and high school, but when it came time for college, she opted to study psychology at Vassar, in upstate New York. She wanted to become a therapist, which she viewed as a more practical career path.“Because of the way I grew up, there are parts of the business that I know are difficult,” she added. “And growing up with fame in my household, it provided us with a lot of privileges, but it also came with a lot of anxiety.”But the pull of acting didn’t relent, and she continued to do student theater. After graduation, she worked a retail job selling handbags in New York for about a year, dabbled in modeling and worked as an account coordinator at an advertising agency. She continued to rush to auditions on her lunch breaks.Finally, that pull was too strong to resist: She applied for the master’s program in acting at Yale, the same school her mother had graduated from around 40 years earlier.“I knew that if I just went into it without studying it, I would feel, I already feel, in some ways like I don’t deserve —”She trailed off.“I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing,” she said, “and that I had a tool kit of professionalism that I was walking into the room with.”Months after graduating in 2019, she booked her big break, as Marian in “The Gilded Age.” For Fellowes, who created the series, the combination of Jacobson’s “charm and strong personality” immediately stood out.“I knew I wanted Marian Brook to be someone who seemed quite the perfect young woman from that period — mild, demure, rather easy to deal with,” Fellowes said in a recent phone conversation from London. “But, as the story unfurled, it would become clearer and clearer that she had, in fact, got an extremely strong will of her own.”Initially, Jacobson said, the learning curve was steep: She was intimidated by the veteran talent around her, Baranski in particular.“I’m the one who gave her a really hard time,” Baranski acknowledged. “I tend to stay in character between shots, and I think it was quite terrifying. I felt bad because I thought, ‘Oh, does she really think this is me?’”Also, Jacobson’s corset was too tight.“I finally said, ‘Can you breathe in that?’” Baranski said. “And she said, ‘No, I go home and I’m wracked in pain, and I’m having trouble sitting and I’m having trouble speaking.’“And I said, ‘Are you kidding? You loosen that corset.’” (Midway through the first season, Baranski said, she did.)At first, Jacobson said, she was also becoming trapped in her own head, overthinking things. That’s when Nixon, a veteran actress and director, stepped in with some advice.“Drama school really does a number on people,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “It takes a while to get that out of your system.”“So it was mostly like, ‘Try to stop worrying about getting there,’” she added, “‘and know that you’re there already.’”Jacobson has ambitions to do more theater and to direct, regardless of medium. “I just want to be happy and fulfilled,” she said. Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesJacobson readily acknowledges that her upbringing has been “totally privileged in a lot of ways,” yet she still has to audition for every role, she said. At 5-foot-7, with dark brown hair (her character’s blond tresses are a wig) and her mother’s stunning cheekbones, she cuts a striking figure even on the streets of New York, but she is generally able to walk them unrecognized. During auditions, she wonders whether casting directors know whose daughter she is, but she tries to keep those thoughts in the back of her mind.“I try to stay focused on the work,” she said.Our final stop that afternoon was a Christopher Culver exhibition at a TriBeCa gallery, Chapter NY, directed by a childhood friend, Alison Dillulio, whom she has known since the fifth grade. As we examined the charcoal and pastel drawings, talk naturally turned to her sculptor father.“I got my love of art from my dad,” she said. “He would set up a still life on our kitchen table and we’d each draw it.”“Though,” she added, “His were always better than mine.”As pedigrees go, having such celebrated parents seems rather intimidating, but like her character Marian, Jacobson balances her ambitions with an independent spirit. She wants to do more stage work. (She recently acted with all three of her siblings for the first time in a reading of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” at the Williamstown Theater Festival.) She also aims to direct, in whatever medium. (This summer she was the assistant director of a play by Maia Novi, “Invasive Species,” at the Tank, in Midtown.)But Jacobson also wants to follow another piece of Baranski’s advice: Live in the moment.“That’s always been the goal,” she said, after hugging Dillulio goodbye. The rain was pouring down, and she opened the door to the Uber that would whisk her back to Brooklyn.“I just want to be happy and fulfilled.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Teo Yoo and John Magaro on ‘Past Lives’ and Inyeon

      by

      It’s fitting, maybe, that the male leads of the continent-spanning “Past Lives” had to do their joint interview from different countries. John Magaro hopped on the video call from Budapest, where he was filming a new project, while Teo Yoo joined from Los Angeles, where he had traveled to attend November’s starry Art+Film Gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.“It was quite overwhelming for me,” Yoo told us, still reeling from the party. “You try to look nice and be present, and not freak out when you shake hands with Keanu Reeves and Pedro Pascal.”Both men, who are in their 40s, felt fortunate to still be celebrating “Past Lives.” The movie has come on strong at the start of awards season, earning the top prize at November’s Gotham Awards and a strong haul of five Golden Globe nominations this week, including a key one for best drama. Directed by Celine Song, the film stars Greta Lee as Nora, a Korean immigrant living in New York whose marriage to good-natured Arthur (Magaro) is tested by a visit from her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Yoo).It’s the most delicate of love triangles, because Nora can’t simply choose one or the other: Hae Sung is her Korean past and Arthur is her American present, and she must hold space for both in order to feel complete. Still, the carefully calibrated performances from Yoo and Magaro have had audiences swooning. (The Times critic Alissa Wilkinson called the men “magnificent.”) As each gazes at Nora, wondering if she will return his love, the accumulation of all their loaded glances is almost certain to break your heart.Greta Lee with Magaro and Yoo in the film. “Each and every one of us were, at one moment in time, working in that neighborhood as struggling actors,” Yoo said. A24“I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of something quite like this,” Magaro said. “To continue to be in the conversation of films, especially at this time of the year when such enormous things are coming out with a lot more power behind them, it’s been really nice. It’s one of those little films that could.”Much is made in “Past Lives” about inyeon, the Korean concept of destiny, and Yoo referred to it frequently when describing the film’s long tail. For the actor, who grew up in Cologne, Germany, and now works primarily in South Korea, “Past Lives” has been a major breakthrough since its Sundance Film Festival debut in January.“Oh my God, I was a mess,” Yoo said, recalling how he felt after the premiere there. “But I want to put John on the spot. John, have you seen it with an audience yet?”Not yet, Magaro admitted: The movie is simply too special to him. “If it’s a film that I don’t have so much invested in, I’m more inclined to watch it with an audience,” he said. “But because we all left a big piece of ourselves on the screen for this one, it’s just been hard for me to have the courage.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“I knew people would make it, like, ‘me vs. Teo,’ but that’s not what the film is about,” Magaro said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWhat sort of reactions did you get when the film came out this summer?JOHN MAGARO I knew people would make it, like, “me vs. Teo,” but that’s not what the film is about. This is not “Twilight,” this is not Edward and Jacob. If I’m being honest about it, it bothered me that some audience members have turned it into that kind of movie, but it’s been really nice to see the people who are really seeing the deeper message of what Celine was trying to do. This is much more than just a story of unrequited love — it’s about something that’s deep and cosmic.YOO I think it also depends on the amount of life experience an audience member has had and what they can perceive. Maybe they will come back to the film at some point and they will say, “Oh my God, I hadn’t seen that other layer.”MAGARO The heart of the story is her coming to terms with who she is and choosing herself instead of being defined by either of the two men. It’s the idea of standing on your own two legs and being able to have one foot in the past and one foot in the present, and still being OK with that. I think that’s a lovely notion.What did your wives think of the movie?MAGARO My wife is Korean American, too, so she saw a lot of parallels between her own life and her own family story. She isn’t an immigrant herself, but her folks came here in their university days and she was first-generation. There is a piece of her that is still back in Korea and there’s a piece of her that is part of whatever this American experience is, so she felt very connected to the story and pretty emotional about it.YOO My wife already thinks of it as a modern classic. She thinks it’s going to be one of those movies that people are going to talk about throughout the future.What was going on in your lives when the script for “Past Lives” came to you?YOO I was in the middle of shooting a reality TV show in South Korea.MAGARO What?YOO Yeah. It was during Covid, and I was on a small island with a few celebrities on a cooking show. It was for newlyweds who didn’t have a chance during the pandemic to go on their honeymoon, so we were providing this extra special experience for them, and I was cooking my butt off every day for two weeks.MAGARO I got the script right before the pandemic. My wife was pregnant at the time, and we had just moved into our new place in Brooklyn. I remember loving the script and wanting to be a part of it, but then Covid hit and it was gone. That summer, there were some rumblings that it was coming back but they were going much younger. I think they had cast Teo’s role, and it was a younger guy. Then that all broke down and they needed old people to do it, so they called the nursing home and we came out.YOO I remember Celine saying the initial idea for the film was conceived when she was 29, so she thought she needed to write it for 20-year-olds. And as the film progressed, she turned 30, and then became early 30s, so then she needed to revise it — she matured, and the characters needed to mature. So in this way, we met, and this is how inyeon comes into play.“To be an East Asian actor and not have to lean against tropes like martial arts and comedy, but to be a romantic lead and be accepted as that with the power of my talent?” Yoo said. “That’s really something to me.”It’s funny that the film was conceived prepandemic because so much of it feels even more relatable now, like the frequent video calls between Nora and Hae Sung.MAGARO That’s one of those inyeon things Teo was talking about. If this movie came out before Covid, would it have resonated as much? I mean, look at what we’re doing right now on Zoom. The whole idea of me being in this part of the world and you being in the other part of the world is so much more universal.How did the two of you get to know each other?MAGARO We were kept apart until the scene where the two characters actually meet. We were really lucky to have a crew of people who were able to facilitate Celine’s wish, so that night when we finally did meet, we got to share this real experience that made it into the movie. But after that, we went back and hung out in our trailers for a while. We had a drink, we had a toast and we got to break the ice a little bit.YOO It was a relief, after all the pent-up stress.MAGARO Yeah, because Celine wanted Greta to talk about him to me, and about me to him. That night, we got to hang out and let our hair down.YOO On my end, I feel like there was an unspoken bond of trust. I’d never met you, but just seeing your body of work and the person you are, I knew that the moment that we would meet and work together, there will be something of a shared brotherhood.And all that lent an electric charge to the bar scene you have together.MAGARO That’s one of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever done, actually. First of all, it was our chance to finally share a moment. All this mythology had been built up around each other, and we got to sit there in the bar and talk man to man and play a scene that was written so beautifully, showing these men who were not combative men. Although they’re both jealous, they could temper that.YOO Yeah, I always talk about it in terms of vulnerability. I’ve watched a few of those YouTube reactions to the movie, and I see those faces that they make: “Ooh, awkward.” And I’m like, yeah, that’s exactly the sweet spot, that vulnerability, because it gives way to human beings who are able to get hurt a little more, but that also gives human beings kind of a passage to get loved a little more. That vulnerability is a space that is a bit more needed nowadays, and I feel people are seeking that out and thirsting for that.How did you feel when you wrapped the film?YOO First of all, there was a tremendous sigh of relief. I felt this heavy burden was lifted off my shoulders because I’m not at all a person like Hae Sung: I don’t live with a lot of repressed emotions, so it was really, really hard to live in that bubble for those seven, eight weeks. But there was a scene we shot in St. Mark’s Place and one moment in between takes where we didn’t go back into our trailers. We were cherishing the moment because each and every one of us were, at one moment in time, working in that neighborhood as struggling actors and bartending somewhere around the corner. And now we were all leading actors with our names tagged to the back of our chairs in an A24 film in the middle of New York City.Teo, you came to New York as a young man to study acting but didn’t see opportunities there to play characters you could relate to. How does it feel to come back and star in a film like this?YOO It feels like a dream come true, who am I kidding? To be an East Asian actor and not have to lean against tropes like martial arts and comedy, but to be a romantic lead and be accepted as that with the power of my talent? That’s really something to me. I’m really, really lucky, and I don’t take it lightly.How close is your current path to the one you imagined you’d be walking?MAGARO Not this at all. I think a similarity between me and Teo is that you’re from Cologne, I’m from Ohio — we’re from places where this didn’t really exist. I went to school, I stumbled ass-backwards into agents in New York, and I thought maybe I’ll work in regional theater or something like that because the idea of film was so alien to me. I try to keep a level head because it’s weird to work with people who you had posters on your wall of, you know?YOO Totally.MAGARO And when you get to work on films like this, it’s surreal. You are part of this magic that you grew up loving and not knowing how to reach. And even for a moment, you get to peek in and touch it and taste it. I’m getting emotional, actually, saying this. It’s beyond words, but no, I never expected this.YOO Me neither. I mean, in a faint way, in the distance maybe you dream about it and you hope for it. But initially, after my studies in New York, I thought I would be a street performer in Europe, to be honest with you. I really thought I would be performing in parks for children, doing juggling acts. My wife helped me to set my mind into a different trajectory to go to Korea and then get cast in film and television, but I had my mind set on something like a nomad lifestyle.I guess that’s where we all are coming from: If the industrialized world wouldn’t have had invented the magic of light and cinema, we would still be on the back of a carriage going from town to town, from village to village, gathering people around and telling stories. Now, we just do it in a more heightened and luxurious way. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Andre Braugher, ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ and ‘Homicide’ Actor, Dies at 61

      by

      Mr. Braugher was best known for playing stoic police officers in the two acclaimed television series. He died on Monday after a brief illness, his publicist said.Andre Braugher, an Emmy Award-winning actor best known for playing stoic police officers on the television shows “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” died on Monday. He was 61.His death was confirmed on Tuesday by his longtime publicist Jennifer Allen. She said that Mr. Braugher, who lived in New Jersey, had died after a brief illness. She did not elaborate.Mr. Braugher had a breakout role as an intense cop on “Homicide,” a 1990s Baltimore crime show that chronicled the frustrations of policing a city beset with murders. He spent the last years of his life playing another serious police officer in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” but in a very different register: The series was a sitcom, and he played his role as a police commander for laughs. He also earned plaudits for his portrayal of an openly gay cop who didn’t play to stereotypes.In between, he showed his range by playing parts as diverse as Shakespeare’s Henry V, a car salesman named Owen Thoreau Jr. and an executive editor of The New York Times grappling with the investigative reporting that would kick off the #MeToo era.“I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful actors,” the former Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon, who wrote the book that “Homicide” was based on years before he created the seminal crime drama “The Wire,” said in a post on social media. “I’ll never work with one better.”Mr. Braugher as Detective Frank Pembleton, right, and James Earl Jones in an episode of “Homicide.”Michael Ginsbury/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesAndre Keith Braugher was born in Chicago on July 1, 1962, and grew up on the city’s West Side. His mother, Sally Braugher, worked for the United States Postal Service. His father, Floyd Braugher, was a heavy-equipment operator for the state of Illinois.“We lived in a ghetto,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “I could have pretended I was hard or tough and not a square. I wound up not getting in trouble. I don’t consider myself to be especially wise, but I will say that it’s pretty clear that some people want to get out and some people don’t. I wanted out.”Mr. Braugher attended St. Ignatius College Prep, a prestigious, Jesuit Catholic high school in Chicago, and later earned a scholarship to Stanford University. His father, who wanted his son to be an engineer, was furious when he gravitated to acting instead.“Show me Black actors who are earning a living,” his father told him at the time. “What the hell are you going to do, juggle and travel the country?”After graduating from Stanford with a major in math, Mr. Braugher earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the Juilliard School.One of his first professional acting roles was in “Glory,” an Oscar-winning 1989 film about Black soldiers fighting for the Union during the American Civil War. Its star-studded cast included Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington.“I’d rather not work than do a part I’m ashamed of,” Mr. Braugher told The Times that year. “I can tell you now that my mother will be proud of me when she sees me in this role.”Mr. Braugher, far left, next to Denzel Washington, in “Glory.” It was one of his first professional acting roles.Everett Collection, via Alamy Mr. Braugher, who insisted on living in New Jersey even though he often worked in California, would go on to star in many other films. Among the highlights were “Get on the Bus” (1996), about a group of Black men traveling to Washington for the Million Man March, and “City of Angels” (1998), about an angel (Nicolas Cage) who falls in love with a doctor (Meg Ryan).One of Mr. Braugher’s last film projects was “She Said” (2022), a drama about New York Times reporters’ efforts to document sexual abuse by the film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Mr. Braugher played Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s executive editor at the time.He also performed Shakespearean roles at the New York Shakespeare Festival and other venues. In 2014, he told The Times that he was saving the play “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” for later in life.“I’ve never read it because I’d like to see one Shakespeare play that I don’t know what happens,” he said.Ms. Allen said that Mr. Braugher is survived by his wife, the actress Ami Brabson; his sons Michael, Isaiah and John Wesley; his brother, Charles Jennings; and his mother. His father died in 2011.His most recent project, “The Residence,” a miniseries about a murder in the White House, had been scheduled to resume shooting in January after shutting down because of the Writers Guild of America strike, the entertainment site Deadline reported.As Capt. Raymond Holt in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”FOX Image Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Braugher was best known for his acting on acclaimed television series, which included the lead role of an unorthodox physician on the ABC drama “Gideon’s Crossing” (2000-2001) and the car salesman Owen Thoreau Jr. on the TNT series “Men of a Certain Age” (2009-2011). He also starred in the sixth and final season of the Paramount+ legal drama “The Good Fight” (2017-2022).On “Homicide,” a police procedural that ran from 1993 to 1998, Mr. Braugher played Frank Pembleton, a Baltimore homicide detective. It was a breakout role that earned him an Emmy Award in 1998, along with two Television Critics Association Awards in 1997 and 1998 for best actor in a drama series.In 2006, he won an Emmy for outstanding performance by a lead actor in a miniseries for his starring role as a gang leader in “Thief,” an FX miniseries about crime in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.And on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” a comedy show that aired from 2013 to 2021, Mr. Braugher played Capt. Raymond Holt, a comically stern precinct commander. He received four Emmy nominations and won two Critics Choice Awards for best supporting actor in a comedy series.After the first few episodes of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” aired, he told The New York Times that he saw parallels between that show and “Homicide.”“I don’t want to go way out on a limb about this, you know what I’m saying, and be challenged about it,” he said. “But I think they’re both workplace comedies. In essence it’s taken 20 years to come full circle, but I think they’re in the same place.”Rebecca Carballo More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Madwomen of the West’ Is Comedy as Comfort Food

      by

      In Sandra Tsing Loh’s zany play, the stage is star-studded but familiarity alone can’t sustain this story about a group of old college friends.There comes a moment when a show tells you exactly who its audience is. In “Madwomen of the West,” a nostalgic new comedy by Sandra Tsing Loh with a cast of baby boomer screen stars, that moment is a singalong.The song is “Love Is All Around,” the theme from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” When Marilu Henner led the crowd in singing it mid-scene on a Saturday afternoon at the Actors Temple Theater, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, there was no hesitation. Practically the whole room joined in, the lyrics lodged in people’s heads since the 1970s.If only “Madwomen” as a whole worked so seamlessly. But the shaggy script is in desperate need of trimming and shaping, while Thomas Caruso’s production is so stiff that a reading might have succeeded better than a full staging.None of that cancels out the comfort-food appeal of a play about a group of women who have been friends since college, portrayed by actors in their 70s who have been familiar for decades on TV and in film: Caroline Aaron (recently Shirley Maisel on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”); Brooke Adams (“Days of Heaven”); Melanie Mayron (“Thirtysomething”); and Henner (“Taxi,” of course).The setting is “the birthday brunch from hell” that the acerbic Marilyn (Aaron) hosts at the Los Angeles home of the wealthy Jules (Adams) for the bummed-out Claudia (Mayron). Long out of contact, Zoey (Henner), their actress turned wellness-guru pal, unexpectedly joins the party, too.Each is liberal, feminist and struggling somehow: money, marriage, parenthood, career. All are grappling with the ways that the world, and the gender binary that shaped so much of their experience, have changed.Zanily meta-theatrical, “Madwomen” does much breaking of the fourth wall and blurring of the line between actor and character. And Loh, known for her 2014 memoir, “The Madwoman in the Volvo,” makes room for each of her stars to have some drama — most rewardingly Aaron (a veteran of Loh’s stage adaptation of the memoir) in a verbal symphony of a confession, and Adams in a kinetic outburst of rage.Will you believe the characters as friends? No, and you may wish that the actors had had more time to settle into their roles. Will you regret having to sit through some of the staler bits of political dialogue? Yes, unless you can’t get enough of Gloria Steinem quotations and Hillary versus Bernie partisanship.Will you laugh anyway? I did, three times: at Marilyn’s sharp line about the electoral college; Jules’s appreciation of her own drunken math; and Marilyn’s mortified reaction to Zoey’s evocative use of an anatomical term.“Madwomen” isn’t nearly as convivial as it wants to be. But it does have one virtue that shouldn’t be remarkable, yet is. It never condescends to older women — characters, actors or audience members.Madwomen of the WestThrough Dec. 31 at the Actors Temple Theater, Manhattan; actorstempletheatre.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Ryan O’Neal, Who Became a Star With ‘Love Story,’ Dies at 82

      by

      He was a familiar face on TV before his breakout performance opposite Ali MacGraw in the 1970 blockbuster movie. But it was overshadowed by years of personal problems.Ryan O’Neal, who became an instant movie star in the hit film “Love Story,” the highest-grossing movie of 1970, but who was later known as much for the troubles of his personal life as for his acting in his later career, died on Friday. He was 82. His son Patrick confirmed the death in a post on Instagram. It did not give the cause or say where he died.Mr. O’Neal was a familiar face on both big and small screens for a half-century, but he was never as famous as he was after “Love Story.”He was 29 years old at the time and had spent a decade on television but had made only two other movies when he was chosen to star in Arthur Hiller’s sentimental romance, written by Erich Segal, who turned his screenplay into a best-selling novel. Mr. O’Neal’s performance in “Love Story” as Oliver Barrett IV, a wealthy, golden-haired Harvard hockey player married to a dying woman played by Ali MacGraw, garnered him the only Academy Award nomination of his career.He had played the town rich boy, Rodney Harrington, for five years on the prime-time soap opera “Peyton Place.” But in 1970 Hollywood was not that interested in television actors, and he had been far from the first choice to star in “Love Story.”“Jon Voight turned the part down. Beau Bridges was supposed to do it,” he told a reporter in 1971. “When my name came up through Ali, they all said ‘No.’ Ali said, ‘Please meet him.’”“So we met in one of those conference rooms where everybody sits half a mile away from everybody else,” he continued. “Weeks later, they asked me to test. Then I didn’t hear anything until they finally called and said, ‘Will you give us an extension of a week to make up our minds?’”In the end, Ms. MacGraw persuaded Paramount to cast Mr. O’Neal. He was hired for $25,000 (a little more than $200,000 in today’s currency), and his movie career was ignited.Before he became a movie star, Mr. O’Neal played the town rich boy, Rodney Harrington, for five years on the prime-time soap opera “Peyton Place.”Bettmann/Getty ImagesIt never burned quite as brightly again, although he maintained a high profile throughout the 1970s, appearing in films like “Barry Lyndon” (1975), Stanley Kubrick’s elegantly photographed adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel about a poor 18th-century Irish boy who rises into English society and then falls from those heights; and “A Bridge Too Far” (1977), Richard Attenborough’s epic tale of World War II heroism.He also demonstrated his knack for comedy in three films directed by Peter Bogdanovich. He co-starred with Barbra Streisand in “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a screwball comedy inspired by the 1938 Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn movie “Bringing Up Baby”; with Burt Reynolds in “Nickelodeon” (1976), a valentine to the early days of moviemaking based on the reminiscences of Raoul Walsh and other directors; and, with his 9-year-old daughter, Tatum, in the best known of the three films he made with Mr. Bogdanovich, “Paper Moon” (1973).In “Paper Moon,” set in the Midwest during the Depression, Mr. O’Neal played a small-time swindler hornswoggled by a cigarette-smoking orphan who just might be his illegitimate daughter. Tatum O’Neal won an Academy Award for that performance — she remains the youngest person ever to win one of the four acting Oscars — and for a while it appeared that Mr. O’Neal would become the patriarch of an acting dynasty.When Tatum starred as a Little League pitcher in “The Bad News Bears” (1976), she became the highest-paid child star in history, with a salary of $350,000 (the equivalent of about $1.9 million today) and a percentage of the net profits. Her younger brother Griffin seemed poised for stardom as well when it was announced that he would appear with his father in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1979 remake of “The Champ,” the 1931 tear-jerker about a washed-up former boxer and his son.Mr. O’Neal’s Oscar-winning co-star in Peter Bogdanovich’s period comedy “Paper Moon” (1973) was Tatum O’Neal, his daughter.Everett CollectionBut Mr. Zeffirelli ended up making the film with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder instead, and Griffin O’Neal’s career never got off the ground. He did have one starring role, in the 1982 film “The Escape Artist,” but that film was not a success. When he was next in the public eye, five years later, it was not for his acting but for his involvement in a boating accident that killed his friend Gian-Carlo Coppola, the son of the director Francis Ford Coppola. He was convicted of negligent operation of a boat but acquitted of manslaughter.The O’Neal family would go on to have many more problems with the law, with drugs and with one another.Mr. O’Neal, who was well known in Hollywood for his temper — when he was 18, he spent 51 days in jail for a brawl at a New Year’s Eve party — was charged with assaulting his son Griffin in 2007. Those charges were dropped, but a year later he and Redmond O’Neal, his son with the actress Farrah Fawcett, were arrested on a drug charge. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to undergo counseling, while Redmond entered rehabilitation but continued to struggle with addiction.Tatum O’Neal had her own highly publicized drug problems and was estranged for many years from her father, who she said physically abused her when she was a child.Mr. O’Neal’s fame was beginning to slip by 1978, when Paramount offered him $3 million to star in “Oliver’s Story,” a sequel to “Love Story.” He accepted, even though his distaste for the project was clear.“There’s something cheap about sequels,” he told a reporter, “and this one’s a complete rip-off.” When the movie was released, the critics agreed.Mr. O’Neal with Farrah Fawcett in 1981. They began their highly publicized on-again, off-again relationship when she was still married to the actor Lee Majors.Steve Sands/Associated PressHis days as an A-list star were soon over, although he continued to work steadily in the 1980s and ’90s. His more memorable movies in this period included “Partners” (1982), in which he played a heterosexual police detective who goes under cover with a gay partner, played by John Hurt; “Irreconcilable Differences” (1984), as a successful Hollywood director whose 10-year-old daughter, played by Drew Barrymore, sues him for divorce; and “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (1987), a crime drama written and directed by Norman Mailer. He also co-starred with Ms. Fawcett in the short-lived 1991 television series “Good Sports.”Most of Mr. O’Neal’s later work was on television, including a recurring role on the series “Bones.”Patrick Ryan O’Neal was born in Los Angeles on April 20, 1941, the elder son of Charles O’Neal, a screenwriter, and Patricia Callaghan O’Neal, an actress. At 17 he joined his nomadic parents in Germany and got his first taste of show business as a stunt man on the television series “Tales of the Vikings.”He never took an acting lesson, but his striking good looks, as well as the anger that seemed to boil just below the surface, helped win him roles on television not long after he returned to Los Angeles.Mr. O’Neal in 2015. The last major role he played, four years earlier, was himself, on the reality show “Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals.”Ryan Stone for The New York TimesHis marriages to the actresses Joanna Moore and Leigh Taylor-Young ended in divorce. Ms. Taylor-Young, his co-star on “Peyton Place,” told an interviewer that their marriage never recovered from the success of “Love Story,” which she said brought “a type of life which is not suitable for Ryan’s personality.”Mr. O’Neal was romantically linked with many actresses, but it was his on-again, off-again relationship with Ms. Fawcett, which began when she was still married to the actor Lee Majors, that garnered the most attention. The couple never married but were together for almost 20 years before they separated in 1997. They later reconciled and were living together when Ms. Fawcett died of cancer in 2009. In 2012 he published a book about their relationship, “Both of Us: My Life With Farrah.”Besides his daughter, Tatum, and his son Patrick, a sportscaster, complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.In 2012, Mr. O’Neal revealed that he was being treated for prostate cancer. That diagnosis came 11 years after he contracted chronic myelogenous leukemia, which eventually went into remission. The last major role Mr. O’Neal played was himself. In the summer of 2011, he and his daughter starred in a reality show, “Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals,” on Oprah Winfrey’s cable channel, OWN. The series left the impression that the two had ended their long estrangement, but Mr. O’Neal later told an interviewer that it painted a false picture.“We’re further apart now than we were when we started the show,” he said.Peter Keepnews More