Actors and Actresses

Subterms

    More stories

    • 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

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Ellen Holly, Trailblazing Star in ‘One Life to Live,’ Dies at 92

      by

      Ms. Holly was the first Black performer to play a lead role on daytime television.Ellen Holly, whose star turn in the soap opera “One Life to Live” made her the first Black actor to play a lead role in daytime TV, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 92.Her publicist, Cheryl L. Duncan, confirmed her death in a statement. No cause was given.Ms. Holly was born in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1931, and grew up in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. Her parents were William Garnet Holly, a chemical engineer, and Grayce Holly, a writer. Relatives included several prominent figures in the civil rights movement.After graduating from Hunter College, she debuted on Broadway in 1956 in “Too Late the Phalarope,” then went on to perform in several other Broadway productions.In 1968, Ms. Holly wrote in The New York Times about the difficulty of finding roles as a Black woman with lighter skin. The column caught the attention of a television producer, Agnes Nixon, who gave Ms. Holly the groundbreaking role of Carla that would catapult her to fame after “One Life to Live” launched on ABC. She played the role from 1968 to 1980 and 1983-’85.The character for a time passed as white, before revealing that she was Black, amid a love triangle with two doctors: one white and the other Black. When her character appeared to be in an interracial relationship with a Black man, a station in Texas canceled the show, and Ms. Nixon, the producer, received hate mail, she said in an interview in 1997.“A white woman falling in love with a Black man,” Ms. Holly said in a 2018 interview, “people started looking at that soap opera because they were saying, ‘This is something new, we better see where this is going.’”She wrote about her experience in a New York Times column in 1969, writing that she found the storyline of a Black woman passing as white “fascinating.”“I felt that the unique format of a soap would enable people to examine their prejudices in a way no other format possibly could,” she wrote, because unlike a play or movie, viewers would follow the character for months.“The emotional investment they made in her as a human being would be infinitely greater,” she wrote, “and when the switch came, their involvement would be real rather than superficial. A lot of whites who think they aren’t prejudiced — are. It seemed like a marvelous opportunity to confront their own prejudices.”Ms. Holly wrote that while she called herself Black, she also had French, English and Shinnecock ancestry.Ms. Holly wrote an autobiography, “One Life: The Autobiography of an African American Actress,” which was published in 1996. Over the years, she wrote opinion columns for The New York Times about the arts, race and civil rights.After retiring from acting, she became a librarian in the 1990s, working at the White Plains Public Library for years.Ms. Holly, who never married or had children, is survived by several grand-nieces, cousins and other family members. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Andrea Fay Friedman, Who Built a Breakthrough Acting Career, Dies at 53

      by

      Ms. Friedman, who called Down syndrome her “up syndrome,” forged an unlikely path in acting by playing characters with developmental disabilities.Andrea Fay Friedman, an actress who starred in the groundbreaking television series “Life Goes On,” died on Sunday in her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 53.She died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, according to her father, Hal Friedman. He said that she had not been able to speak for the past year because of the disease, which is common in people with Down syndrome who are over 50.Ms. Friedman was known for her portrayals of people with developmental disabilities. She called her Down syndrome her “up syndrome,” Mr. Friedman said in a phone interview.Ms. Friedman was born on June 1, 1970, in Santa Monica. After graduating from West Los Angeles Baptist High School, she studied acting and philosophy at Santa Monica College for two years.Her breakthrough in acting came in 1992 on the TV drama “Life Goes On,” in which she played Amanda Swanson, the girlfriend and later wife of the main character Charles “Corky” Thatcher, who also had Down syndrome. She played the character for two seasons.Mr. Friedman said that she got involved in the show while working at a child-care center during her college years. A parent there was writing the music for “Life Goes On,” he said, and suggested she pitch her ideas to the writers.She eventually convinced the producers to include another character who had Down syndrome, Mr. Friedman said. She was originally going to appear in just one episode, but “she did such a great job that they made her a regular on the show,” he said.She would later occasionally appear in other hit shows, like “Baywatch,” “ER” and “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.”In 2010, she had a “dispute” with Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor of Alaska and 2018 vice-presidential nominee, Mr. Friedman said.In an episode of “Family Guy,” Ms. Friedman voiced a girl with Down syndrome named Ellen, who dates the teenaged character Chris. Ellen tells him over dinner that her mother is “the former governor of Alaska.”Ms. Palin, whose son Trig has Down syndrome, said that the show “really isn’t funny” and was the work of “cruel, cold-hearted people.”Ms. Friedman wrote in an email to The New York Times at the time that Ms. Palin “does not have a sense of humor,” adding, “I think the word is ‘sarcasm.’”“In my family we think laughing is good,” she said. “My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life.”Her final appearance on screen was in the 2019 holiday drama “Carol of the Bells,” in which a man searches for his biological mother, played by Ms. Friedman, and learns she is developmentally disabled.Ms. Friedman also worked with students with intellectual disabilities through a program at U.C.L.A.She is survived by her sister, Katherine Holland, her brother-in-law, Grant Holland, her two nephews, Lawson and Andrew Holland, and Mr. Friedman, an entertainment industry lawyer. Her mother, Marjorie Jean Lawson, died about 10 years ago, Mr. Friedman said. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott on ‘All of Us Strangers’

      by

      “Have you seen the sausage ad?” Andrew Scott asked me.“No, no, we’re not going to talk about that,” Paul Mescal said.It was a mid-November morning in Los Angeles, and I was having breakfast with two actors who have created some of the most indelible romantic leads of recent vintage: Scott, 47, played the “Hot Priest” on the second season of “Fleabag,” while the 27-year-old Mescal broke through — and broke hearts — as the conflicted jock Connell in Hulu’s “Normal People.”Now, instead of aiming those love beams at women, they’ll point them at each other in the drama “All of Us Strangers,” due Dec. 22 in theaters. It’s like an Avengers-level team-up, if the Avengers recruited exclusively from the ranks of sad-eyed Irish heartthrobs who caused a sensation over the 2019-20 television season.But before we could talk about their sexy, shattering new movie, Scott gently ribbed his co-star about an ad for an Irish sausage brand, Denny, that Mescal had starred in just out of drama school. (Though the rest of the world was introduced to Mescal in “Normal People,” Ireland already knew him from the ubiquitous sausage commercial.)“Look, I needed that job in a massive way,” Mescal said. “That paid my rent for the rest of the year. But if I could take it back …”“Ah, no, it’s lovely you have that!” Scott said. “I actually thought the character you created in the sausage ad was …”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

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Broadway Babies, Singing Show Tunes for Seniors

      by

      What happened when four young theater actors performed for an older generation? “I was expecting to have the best show ever and that happened.”“Oh, baby, give me one more chance,” sang Corey J, a former Little Michael in the Broadway musical “MJ.” Dressed in a black rimmed hat and a black turtleneck, jacket and pants, he slipped through the explosion of joy that is the chord progression of the Jackson 5 song “I Want You Back.”He had performed the song hundreds of times in the Broadway show, a biographical Michael Jackson jukebox musical, at the Neil Simon Theater. But on this particular afternoon, he was on a much smaller stage: an Upper East Side senior center, where about 50 residents seated in floral chairs clapped along to the beat.The performance was part of a monthly series at the senior living community, Inspir Carnegie Hill, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt was the latest in a monthly series of Broadway-related events staged in the dining room of the senior living community, Inspir Carnegie Hill, by Evan Rossi, its senior director of resident experience, in partnership with the events company Broadway Plus. Though Inspir has hosted numerous events with Broadway actors — including Julie Benko (“Harmony,” “Funny Girl”), Charl Brown (“Motown: The Musical”) and the comedian Alex Edelman (“Just for Us”) — this was the first to feature children actors.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