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      Michel Bouquet, Award-Winning French Actor, Dies at 96

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      One of his country’s great theater actors, he went on to appear in over 100 films during a decades-long career.Michel Bouquet, a French actor whose talent for suggesting passion and turmoil beneath a bland, middle-class facade made him a favorite of New Wave directors, has died. He was 96.The Élysée Palace, the office of the French president, on Wednesday announced Mr. Bouquet’s death. The news release did not give a cause of death. Mr. Bouquet, one of France’s great theater actors, found a special niche in film in the late 1960s and ’70s playing ordinary Frenchmen, somber and reserved, with complicated inner lives and deep reserves of emotion, a contrast heightened by his impassive, guileless face.He played the lethally jealous husband in Claude Chabrol’s “Unfaithful Wife” (1969) and the advertising executive leading a double life in that director’s “Just Before Nightfall” (1971). He was also one of Jeanne Moreau’s hapless victims in the François Truffaut film “The Bride Wore Black” (1968).An actor of considerable range, Mr. Bouquet was equally at home in comedy and drama, and both in sympathetic and unsympathetic roles, like the unsavory detective Comolli in Mr. Truffaut’s 1969 film “Mississippi Mermaid.”Mr. Bouquet appeared in more than 100 films, and won a new generation of admirers with his performance in 1991 as the older incarnation of the title character in “Toto the Hero.” His two best actor Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscar, came when he was in his 70s. The first was for his understatedly menacing performance in “How I Killed My Father” (2001), as a feckless parent who sows emotional chaos when he re-enters his sons’ lives.“He’s a greatly original actor,” Anne Fontaine, the director of “How I Killed My Father,” said of Mr. Bouquet in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, noting that she had written the role with him in mind. “Even if he has a very relaxed and smiling air, there’s something in his acting that’s disconcerting, destabilizing, that provokes strangeness all the time.” He sometimes described himself as “a calm anarchist.”Mr. Bouquet won a second César for his tour de force as François Mitterrand, the ailing French president, in “The Last Mitterrand” (2005).“Charming, arrogant, childlike and teasing in turn, Bouquet offers up a master class in understated character acting, and delivers an indelible interpretation of a complex, infuriating man,” The Daily Telegraph of London wrote of that performance.Michel Francois Pierre Bouquet was born on Nov. 6, 1925, in Paris, to Georges and Marie (Monot) Bouquet. His mother was a milliner. His father was an officer in the French Army who was taken prisoner by the Nazis soon after the invasion of France. To help support the family, Michel worked as an apprentice to a pastry maker and as a bank clerk.Encouraged by the actor Maurice Escande, he began studying at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Paris and, after appearing in a production of Albert Camus’s “Caligula,” took his first major role in Jean Anouilh’s “Roméo et Jeannette.”He went on to build a distinguished theatrical career, in which he was known especially for his work in plays by Molière, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco and Thomas Bernhard.“This is a very lonely job, just like painting,” he told the French newspaper Sud Ouest in 2011. “One does it in public, but the essence of it is secret.”He made his first film appearances in 1947, as an assassin in “Criminal Brigade” and as a consumptive in “Monsieur Vincent,” a biography of St. Vincent de Paul. Two years later, he offered a hint of things to come in “Pattes Blanches,” based on a play by Mr. Anouilh, in which he portrayed a beaten-down aristocrat hopelessly infatuated with the young girlfriend of the local innkeeper.He later provided the narrator’s voice in Alain Resnais’s landmark Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog” (1956).In 1965, he made the first of his half-dozen films with Mr. Chabrol, the campy secret agent film “The Tiger Smells Like Dynamite,” which was followed by his signature performances in “The Unfaithful Wife” and “Just Before Nightfall.”Mr. Bouquet’s talents were ideally suited to Mr. Chabrol’s chilling explorations of love, violence and moral ambiguity. As Charles Desvallées, the jealous husband in “The Unfaithful Wife,” he seethed, schemed, suffered and eventually dispatched the lover of his wife, played by Stéphane Audran.Mr. Bouquet’s marriage to Ariane Borg, an actress, ended in divorce. She died in 2007. In 1970, he married Juliette Carré, who survives him, according to the Élysée news release. Ms. Carré, also an actress, often appeared alongside Mr. Bouquet onstage.Mr. Bouquet (who was unrelated to the actress Carole Bouquet) continued to act well into his later years, appearing in Molière’s “Hypochondriac” on the stage in 2008, and in the films “La Petite Chambre” in 2010 (released as “The Little Bedroom” in U.S. theaters in 2014) and “The Origin of Violence” in 2016. In 2014, he was nominated for another best actor César for his performance as the title character in “Renoir.” More

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      Rae Allen, Tony Winner and TV Mainstay, Dies at 95

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      In a varied career, she had memorable roles in “Damn Yankees” and on “Seinfeld” and was nominated for three Tonys. She later became a director.Rae Allen, a Tony Award-winning actress who was seen in both the stage and film versions of the hit musical comedy “Damn Yankees,” and whose many television roles included a world-weary unemployment counselor to the jobless George Costanza on “Seinfeld” and Tony Soprano’s aunt on “The Sopranos,” died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 95.Her death, at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home, was confirmed by her niece Betty Cosgrove.Ms. Allen made her Broadway debut in 1948 and her big splash seven years later, when she was cast as the sports reporter Gloria Thorpe in “Damn Yankees, the story of a middle-aged Washington Senators fan who makes a Faustian bargain to become a slugger named Joe Hardy and help his team keep the hated Yankees from winning the pennant. She led a group of nimbly dancing Senators in celebration of Hardy’s beneficial impact on the team with the showstopping song “Shoeless Joe From Hannibal, Mo.” (“Who came along in a puff of smoke? Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.”)Ms. Allen earned her first Tony Award nomination for that performance, which she reprised in the 1958 movie version, her first film. She received her second Tony nomination in 1965 for Jean Anouilh’s play “Traveller Without Luggage,” and won the Tony six years later, as best featured actress, for Paul Zindel’s “And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little,” in which she played a neighbor in a story about the relationship between three neurotic sisters.“The awful neighbors are also given precisely the right clumsy boorishness by Rae Allen and Bill Macy,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times. He called their scenes “among the most entertaining of the evening.”Her comedic skills were also on display in a memorable two-part episode of “Seinfeld.” She played Lenore Sokol, a deadpan counselor skeptical about George Costanza’s attempts to get an extension on his unemployment benefits, including his claim to have interviewed for a job as a latex salesman for a phony company, Vandelay Industries. She softens when he sees a photograph of her plain-looking daughter on her desk.Ms. Allen and Roberts Blossom in the 1961 Off Broadway production of Edward Albee’s “The Death of Bessie Smith.” Leo Friedman“This is your daughter? George says. “My God! My God! I hope you don’t mind my saying. She is breathtaking.”She asks if he wants her phone number, but after they briefly date, her daughter dumps him because he has no prospects.Ms. Allen later had roles in “A League of Their Own” (1992), as the mother of the baseball players portrayed by Geena Davis and Lori Petty,” and the science-fiction film “Stargate” (1994), as a researcher. She was also seen on TV series including “Brooklyn Bridge” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”In four episodes of “The Sopranos” in 2004, she played Quintina Blundetto, the aunt of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and the mother of the mobster Tony Blundetto, played by Steve Buscemi.Steven Schirripa, who played Bobby Baccalieri on “The Sopranos,” wrote in an email that Ms. Allen was “acting royalty” who was “respected by everyone in the cast.”Rae Julia Abruzzo was born on July 3, 1926, in Brooklyn. Her mother, Julia (Riccio) Abruzzo, was a seamstress and hairdresser. Her father, Joseph, was a chauffeur and an opera singer whose brothers performed in vaudeville. At 15, Rae played Buttercup in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” in Greenwich Village.After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1947, Ms. Allen started her Broadway career as a singer in the musical “Where’s Charley?” She followed that with a role in another musical, “Alive and Kicking.” Her next three shows, also musicals, were “Call Me Madam,” “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees,” all directed by the Broadway luminary George Abbott, who became a mentor and father figure.In the 1960s, Ms. Allen was in the Broadway productions of “Oliver!,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”From left, June Lockhart, Betty Garrett and Ms. Allen in a 2006 episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.”Ron Tom / © ABC /Everett CollectionBy then, her television and film career had begun to take off; in the 1970s, she also started directing. In 1975 she was named director of the Stage West Theater Company in Springfield, Mass., and in 1991 she directed a revival of “And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little” at the Zephyr Theater in Los Angeles.She twice directed productions of “Cyrano de Bergerac” — the first in 1978 at the Long Beach Center Theater, in Long Beach, Calif., starring Stacy Keach, and the second in 2010 at the Ruskin Group Theater in Santa Monica, starring John Colella.Reviewing Ms. Allen’s staging of Ibsen’s “When We Dead Awaken” at Stage West in 1977, Mr. Barnes wrote that it had “speed, conviction and perception.”She also ran acting workshops and was a personal coach. In her 40s, she received bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts degrees in directing from New York University.Ms. Allen’s marriages to John Allen and Herbert Harris ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive. More

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      Mira Calix, Iconoclastic Composer and Artist, Is Dead at 52

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      Her work spanned albums, public art installations, music for Shakespeare plays and touring with Radiohead.Mira Calix, a composer, producer and visual artist whose work encompassed electronic music, orchestral commissions, public art installations, theater scores, music videos and DJ sets, died on March 25 at her home and music and art studio in Bedford, England. She was 52.The death was confirmed by her partner, Andy Holden, who declined to specify the cause.“She pushed the boundaries between electronic music, classical music and art in a truly unique way,” her label, Warp Records, said in a statement.Ms. Calix’s projects included solo albums, collaborations and numerous singles, EPs, productions and remixes; music for the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s 2017 stagings of “Julius Caesar” and “Coriolanus,” and a 2003 piece, “Nunu,” that brought together the London Sinfonietta, Calix’s electronics and a cage of live cicadas and crickets, amplified and shown on video screens.She welcomed commissions to make public art.“I like trying to change somebody’s day,” she told the music and cultural website The Quietus in 2012. “I like people coming across something with no expectations. They don’t care who made it. They haven’t gone and bought a ticket, so it’s not about being reverential. People can just wander by.”Among her free installations were “Nothing Is Set in Stone,” an egg-shaped stone monolith in London that used sensors to respond to visitors’ motion with music. Another was “Passage,” a permanent installation in a train tunnel in Bath that was converted into a bicycle and pedestrian path with interactive lights and sounds. “Inside There Falls” was a hangar-size paper sculptural environment in Sydney, Australia, accompanied by music and dancers. And “Moving Museum 35” was a traveling sound installation on a city bus in Nanjing, China.Ms. Calix was the sound artist and composer of a 2018 team installation in the dry moat around the Tower of London to commemorate the centenary of Armistice Day.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Calix told students from Nanjing University of the Arts, who were working with her: “We are not trying to make things easy for our audience. We are trying to make things true.”Although her pieces often employed classical musicians and singers, Ms. Calix was not a traditionally schooled musician. She became a composer by working with computers and samplers. Her music often drew on the repetitions of Minimalism and dance music, on field recordings of rural and urban sounds, on trained and untrained voices, and on layered snippets and fragments.“I wanted to put air in electronic music,” she told Interview magazine in 2015. “I record the sounds of twigs, barks, and stones. I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of combining the natural and the man-made. That juxtaposition is truly beautiful. The question of what is natural and unnatural is very open.”Although her music has often been described as experimental and avant-garde, she insisted that it spoke to ordinary listeners. In a 2012 video interview, she said: “People like the weird stuff. People like abstraction. People like magic, and those are the things that motivate me to make work.”Ms. Calix performing at the music venue Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 2002. “I wanted to put air in electronic music,” she said. Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesMira Calix (pronounced Mee-ra KAY-lix) was born Chantal Francesca Passamonte in Durban, South Africa, on Oct. 28, 1969, to Gabriele and Riccarda Passamonte. She studied photography but was an avid music fan, and with South Africa isolated by anti-apartheid sanctions, she moved to London in 1991 to have direct contact with its music scene. She got a job in a record shop, Ambient Soho; she booked clubs and parties, including events with a collective called Telepathic Fish; and she began working as a disc jockey.In 1993, after a job with the indie-rock label 4AD, Ms. Calix became the publicist at the also independent Warp Records, which specializes in electronic music. Meanwhile, she began constructing her own electronic music with an early Mac computer and a sampler.“The only thing that has really influenced what I do is lack of money,” she told Computer Music magazine in 2012. “I could never afford sample packs and expensive synths, so I looked for organic found sound instead. It’s funny, isn’t it? Being short of money limited the music I could make, but it also meant that I discovered my own sound.”Ms. Calix married Sean Booth, a fellow musician, in the late 1990s, and they separated in the mid-2000s. In addition to Mr. Holden, she is survived by her mother and her sister, Genevieve Passamonte.Executives at Warp Records heard her music and signed her to the label in 1996. She chose to record under the name Mira Calix after it “kind of appeared,” she told Red Bull Music Academy in 2003.“I wrote it down, and it looked good,” she added, “and I really like phonetics. It sounded really nice, and it sounded like a nice person.”The A-side of her first release, the 10-inch vinyl single “Ilanga,” was “Humba”; it ended with a looped vocal repeating, “Do the things that people say you cannot.”Ms. Calix in an undated photo. “I like to create the space in which the music exists and then you step into it,” she said.Warp RecordsHer recordings for Warp were adventurous and unpredictable. They could be noisily propulsive or meditative and ambient, sparse or densely packed, raucous or elegiac. She also toured as a disc jockey alongside groups including Radiohead, Autechre and Godspeed You Black Emperor!But her interests largely turned to multimedia works and site-specific installations, often in collaboration with scientists and visual artists. “I like to create the space in which the music exists, and then you step into it,” she told the website Spitfire Audio.“Chorus,” installed in Durham Cathedral in northern England in 2009, had speakers swinging on pendulums overhead, using customized software to control more than 2000 sound samples interacting with lights and movement. Her 2013 work “The Sun Is the Queen of Torches” grew out of a collaboration with a lab that created organic photovoltaic — light-sensitive, electricity-generating — materials. “Ode to the Future,” in 2018, was based on ultrasound images from pregnant volunteers.Her final album, “absent origin,” was released in 2021. It was a complex collage of her past and her ambitions. She drew from years of material she had saved on her hard drive: beats (including using her body for percussion), nature recordings, previous sessions with classical musicians, favorite songs and poetry, and preserved news footage, including CNN’s coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection.They all became material for song-length, sometimes danceable tracks holding messages of feminism and resistance: exploratory, playful and unpredictable.“The challenge in my work is to engage my audience emotionally, and music is an abstract art form,” Ms. Calix said in a 2013 TED Talk. “I can’t tell my audience how to feel. I need to coax them and guide them and hopefully draw them in.”Alex Traub More

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      Joseph Kalichstein, Pianist of Subtlety and Refinement, Dies at 76

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      An acclaimed exponent of Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, he was best known for his work as a member of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio.Joseph Kalichstein, an Israeli American pianist whose subtle, refined approach made him an exemplary chamber musician, especially as a member of the esteemed Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, died on March 31 in Manhattan. He was 76.His son Avi said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Across his career of more than 50 years, critics agreed that Mr. Kalichstein had an uncommon naturalness, whether in his earliest solo recitals or his later appearances on the chamber music circuit with his piano trio, in which he was joined by the violinist Jaime Laredo and the cellist Sharon Robinson.Mr. Kalichstein had a sense of line and timing that set him apart even as a young virtuoso. His Carnegie Hall debut “carried enough impact to remind one of Horowitz, and that is not a small thing to say,” Donal Henahan wrote in The New York Times in 1967, adding that although there was still some brash impetuosity to Mr. Kalichstein’s playing, he could already sustain “a long, poetic arc as only a born musician can.”That innate musicality made Mr. Kalichstein a stylish exponent of Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, whose solo, chamber and concertante works he recorded with an apt balance of delicacy and drive.Mr. Kalichstein’s credentials as a soloist were never in question after his 1969 victory in the prestigious Leventritt Competition, which led, among other appearances, to dates with the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra under the conductor (and Leventritt juror) George Szell. But he found particular admiration as a chamber musician.The venerable Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio came together by accident, after Mr. Kalichstein appeared as a late substitute for another elegant pianist, Rudolf Firkusny, in a program of Dvorak with his future partners — who were already husband and wife — and other musicians at the 92nd Street Y in 1976.Mr. Kalichstein in an undated photo. His credentials as a soloist were never in question after his 1969 victory in the prestigious Leventritt Competition, but he found particular admiration as a chamber musician.“In the end,” Mr. Kalichstein later recalled of that concert, “we all remarked how easy the performance was. We seemed to phrase together, breathe together, sing together. Sharon and Jaime came to me and said, ‘Maybe we should play together.’”Their official debut as a trio came in 1977, in unusually auspicious surroundings: the East Room of the White House, during the inauguration festivities for President Jimmy Carter, who hired them on the advice of the conductor Robert Shaw.From the start, the trio drew strong reviews for its poise and blend. Mr. Henahan suggested in 1978 that “while predictions as to its longevity and success would be pointless just yet,” the trio’s balance and evident good sense still brought to mind artists of the stature of the Guarneri String Quartet or, more to the point, the then-dominant Beaux Arts Trio.The Beaux Arts lasted 53 years in name, but its initial membership endured for little more than a decade. The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, arguably its successor in stature in concert halls if not on record, still had its original personnel at its last concert, in Phoenix on March 17 — 45 years after its debut.Joseph Chaim Kalichstein, later known as Yossi to his friends, was born on Jan. 15, 1946, in Tel Aviv, the third child of Yitzhak and Mali (Bendit) Kalichstein. Fervent Zionists, they had tried to settle in Palestine in the 1920s, returning to Poland only to flee the fate that befell much of the rest of their family in the Holocaust.Mr. Kalichstein played the piano from a young age and took lessons from Joshua Shor in Israel. He enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York in 1962, studying with Eduard Steuermann and Ilona Kabos. For his Carnegie Hall debut, he paid tribute with two works by Mr. Steuermann, a rarely heard Schoenberg acolyte who died in 1964.After graduating in 1967, Mr. Kalichstein received a master’s degree from Juilliard in 1969 and considered doctoral work before his solo career took off. Sponsored by the Young Concert Artists after 1967, he played Beethoven in one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, in 1968, broadcast on CBS.European as well as American performances followed. The Musical Times noted after Mr. Kalichstein’s European debut in 1970 that the impression he made in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto — with the London Symphony and André Previn — “was not of the extreme brilliance and confidence expected from a young virtuoso so much as thoughtful, sensitive musicianship.”Allan Kozinn of The New York Times in 1999 bracketed Mr. Kalichstein with pianists like Alfred Brendel and Richard Goode, as “a musician who searches beyond the dots on the page, recognizes the breadth of possibilities within a work and has the technique to give those possibilities life.”Mr. Kalichstein was by then primarily known as a chamber musician, above all for his work with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, with which he cultivated a style of polished ease.The trio recorded much of the core repertoire, including the complete Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms trios, as well as an exquisite set devoted to Ravel, for which Mr. Kalichstein contributed a moving account of the solo “Pavane Pour une Infante Défunte.” The trio commissioned works from such living composers as Arvo Pärt, André Previn and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, whose piano concerto Mr. Kalichstein recorded.Mr. Kalichstein consulted for the Kennedy Center after 1997 and was artistic director of its chamber music series until his death. He became a member of the piano faculty at Juilliard in 1983 and added a chair in chamber music studies in 2003.The pianist Emanuel Ax, a colleague at Juilliard, said in an interview that Mr. Kalichstein was “a remarkably direct and openhearted musician, in the best sense uncomplicated and natural.” He added that Mr. Kalichstein was a warm, witty teacher who did not impose his own views on his students, but “would think about the way someone was looking at a piece of music and try to help him or her attain the best possible of version of that.”In addition to his son Avi, Mr. Kalichstein is survived by his wife, Rowain (Schultz) Kalichstein; another son, Rafi; and three grandchildren.His wife had resolved to marry him before she had even met him, after being captivated by a recital he gave at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan in 1971. They were married later that year and were longtime residents of Maplewood, N.J., until moving to Rhode Island last year.In 1994, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times asked Mr. Kalichstein whether he and the other members of the trio enjoyed greater fame as individual soloists or as a collective.“It could very well be the trio,” he responded. “I certainly cannot complain if it’s one or the other. I hope people know me as someone with two different hats.”“I want to have that balance,” he added. “In fact, that is my ideal.” More

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      Nehemiah Persoff, Actor With a Familiar Face (and Voice), Dies at 102

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      His most prominent roles included three tenderly caring parents, but he was most associated with the dapper gangsters he portrayed in the movies and on television.Nehemiah Persoff, a ubiquitous character actor whose gravelly voice and knack for conveying an air of menace magnified his portrayals of a bevy of sinister types, most notably a half-dozen Prohibition-era gangsters, died on Tuesday in San Luis Obispo, Calif. He was 102. The cause was heart failure, his grandson, Joey Persoff, said.For decades Mr. Persoff was one of most recognizable faces on television, by face if not by name; he was seen on hundreds of shows, beginning in the late 1940s. He usually played a supporting character, sometimes kindly, sometimes malevolent, but, given his gift for dialect, frequently with an undefined foreign accent.He appeared on such durable series of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s as “Gunsmoke,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Route 66,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Columbo,” and he continued into the 1990s, with parts on “Law & Order” and “Chicago Hope.”Mr. Persoff, a native of Jerusalem who emigrated to the United States when he was 9, was in real life an amiable father of four who was married to the same woman for seven decades, and who in retirement became an accomplished painter.His most prominent roles included three tenderly caring parents: a Jewish refugee escaping the Nazis and hoping to reunite with his daughter in Havana in the 1976 film “Voyage of the Damned”; the father of an Orthodox Jewish girl in early-20th-century Poland who poses as a boy so that she can study in a yeshiva, in Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl” (1983); and the voice of the father of Fievel Mousekewitz, the Russian Jewish mouse who emigrates to the United States to escape marauding cats, in the 1986 animated feature “An American Tail” and its sequels.Yet he was most associated with the dapper gangsters he portrayed in the movies and on television. He was the underworld boss Johnny Torrio in the 1959 film “Al Capone,” which starred Rod Steiger in the title role. In the TV series “The Untouchables,” he played two different real-life gangsters: Jake Guzik, the financial brains of Capone’s bootleg liquor gang, in a few episodes, and Waxey Gordon, New York’s king of illicit beer, in a 1960 episode in which he gleefully aimed a Tommy gun into a competitor’s barrels.His most memorable supporting role may have been his outsize parody of a mobster, Little Bonaparte, in the classic Billy Wilder comedy “Some Like It Hot” (1959). Two of his lines from that movie are often quoted by film buffs.In one, addressing a mob gathering disguised as an opera lovers’ convention, he says: “In the last fiscal year we made a hundred an’ twelve million dollars before taxes … only we didn’t pay no taxes!”And after a hit man pops out of a huge birthday cake and machine-guns another mobster, played by George Raft, and his entourage, Mr. Persoff tells an inquiring detective, “There was something in that cake that didn’t agree with ’em.”Mr. Persoff as the real-life mobster Jake Guzik in a 1962 episode of the TV series “The Untouchables.” He portrayed the gangster Waxey Gordon in another episode.Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesMr. Persoff once said he loved working on “The Untouchables” because he could lock horns with Elliot Ness, the federal agent played with righteous hauteur by Robert Stack.“Bob Stack was so nose-in-the-air stuck up, he was so correct and superior, so aristocratic, that without any effort on my part it brought out the rebel in me,” he told the magazine Cinema Retro. “It struck a vein of anger in me, anger which in my mind is such an important part of what makes a gangster.”Nehemiah Persoff was born in Jerusalem on Aug. 2, 1919, during the years when the territory was transitioning from Ottoman rule to a British mandate. His father, Shmuel, a silversmith, jeweler and art teacher, decided that his prospects would improve in America and emigrated on his own. After six years he brought over his wife, Puah (Holman) Persoff, a homemaker, and his three sons and two daughters.It was the start of the Depression, and the family lived in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, though they eventually moved to the Bronx.Nehemiah attended the Hebrew Technical Institute to study the electrician’s trade, and his first job was as a signal maintenance worker on the old IND subway line. It paid him $38 a week, more than his father earned.His introduction to acting happened by chance: He was asked to perform a walk-on in a play that was the highlight of a Zionist organization’s function. The experience planted a notion, and after completing three years in the stateside Army, he took a leave from subway work and began studying acting.Mr. Persoff was among the first students at the Actors Studio, where his teachers were Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, proponents of method acting. His fellow students included Julie Harris, Martin Balsam, Cloris Leachman and Kim Hunter.His first bit part was in the 1948 film noir “Naked City,” but it was another small part that brought him to widespread attention: He was the silent cabdriver in the memorable taxi scene in “On the Waterfront” (1954). His face appears briefly after one of film lore’s most famous conversations, when Marlon Brando tells Rod Steiger: “I could’ve had class, I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been a somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”Mr. Persoff was usually cast in small supporting parts, but he often turned them into gems of characterization. One was Leo, the crooked accountant, in Humphrey Bogart’s last picture, “The Harder They Fall” (1956). He coolly tells a furious Bogart that out of the $1 million gate for a championship fight, the story’s overmatched boxer will receive $49.07.In 1951, Mr. Persoff married Thia Persov, a distant relation who had been a nurse with the Palmach, a Zionist military group, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. She died of cancer last year. In addition to his grandson, Mr. Persoff is survived by three sons, Jeffrey, Dan and Perry; a daughter, Dahlia; and four granddaughters. He lived in the town of Cambria on the central Californian coast.In Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl” (1983), Mr. Persofff played the father of an Orthodox Jewish girl (Ms. Streisand) who poses as a boy so that she can study in a yeshiva.United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock PhotoWhile acting in Hollywood, Mr. Persoff kept his hand in live theater. In 1959, he starred on Broadway as the newspaper editor and essayist Harry Golden in a short-lived adaptation of Mr. Golden’s folksy book “Only in America.” It was the last of his more than a dozen Broadway appearances.In California, he starred as a cantankerous socialist in his 80s in the Herb Gardner comedy “I’m Not Rappaport” and as the milkman Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” And for almost two decades he appeared as Tevye’s creator, the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, in a one-man show for which Mr. Persoff adapted five of the writer’s fables.In 1975, he was awarded the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his supporting role in “The Dybbuk” at the Mark Taper Forum.When high blood pressure and other health problems forced him to reduce his workload, Mr. Persoff took up painting, studying in Los Angeles and producing watercolors that have been exhibited in galleries in Northern California. He kept painting until the last week of his life. In 2021 he published a memoir, “The Many of Faces of Nehemiah.”Beyond dialects and accents, he had a telling philosophy about acting. “If I’m playing a good guy, I’ll try to show that he has some bad in him,” he once said. “If I’m playing a bad guy, I’ll give him some dignity and love.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Bobby Rydell, Teenage Idol With Enduring Appeal, Dies at 79

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      He had his first hit in 1959. Six decades later, teamed with his fellow singers Frankie Avalon and Fabian, he was still drawing crowds.Bobby Rydell, a Philadelphia-born singer who became a teenage idol in the late 1950s and, with his pleasant voice, stage presence and nice-guy demeanor, maintained a loyal following on tours even after both he and his original fans were well past retirement age, died on Tuesday in Abington, Pa. He was 79.The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Maria Novey, a spokeswoman.Mr. Rydell and two other affable performers who became stars in those years, Frankie Avalon and Fabian, grew up within about two blocks of one another in South Philadelphia. Long after their days on the pop chart were past them, they enjoyed great success on the oldies circuit. The three had toured extensively together since 1985, billed as the Golden Boys.Mr. Rydell did not just have staying power; he also made a comeback after years of alcohol abuse, which he chronicled in his autobiography, “Bobby Rydell: Teen Idol on the Rocks” (2016), written with the guitarist and producer Allan Slutsky. Near death, he had a kidney and liver transplant in July 2012. By that October he was back, singing on a cruise ship with Mr. Avalon. But five months later, he underwent cardiac bypass surgery. Some of his later appearances were charity promotions for organ donation.By 2014, his schedule was heavy again, including 11 concerts in Australia that February. He continued to perform for the rest of his life.Mr. Rydell performing with the City Rhythm Orchestra In Concert at Lincoln Center in New York City, in 2016.Bobby Bank/WireImage, via Getty ImagesMr. Rydell’s recording prime encompassed the era roughly between 1959, when Elvis Presley was in the Army and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and 1964, when Beatlemania hit America. It didn’t hurt that Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” was broadcast in those years from Philadelphia, the home of Mr. Rydell’s label, Cameo Records.Mr. Rydell’s repertoire included plaintive love ballads; slow, danceable tunes; occasional frenetic rockers like “Wild One” and “Swingin’ School”; and ageless songs like Domenico Modugno’s 1958 hit “Volare,” which became Mr. Rydell’s signature song in his later touring years.Mr. Rydell was a pop phenomenon but hardly a cutting-edge rock star. Still, he sold a lot more records than some of those who were. Over the course of his recording career he placed 19 singles in the Billboard Top 40 and 34 in the Hot 100. His name alone could conjure up an entire era: The 1970s rock musical “Grease,” in both its Broadway and movie versions, was set in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High School.Mr. Rydell was born Robert Louis Ridarelli on April 26, 1942. His father, Adrio, was a machine shop foreman, and in 1995 the city of Philadelphia honored South 11th Street, where he grew up, as Bobby Rydell Boulevard. Mr. Rydell’s 1963 song “Wildwood Days” paid homage to Wildwood, the New Jersey beach town where his grandmother had a boardinghouse and he spent his early summers; like Philadelphia, Wildwood later held an honorary street-naming for Mr. Rydell.Unlike some of the other pretty faces of his era, Mr. Rydell was a real musician. His father, a fan of the big bands, would take him as a child to see Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia. At age 6, he told his father he wanted to play the drums like Gene Krupa, and he was singing in local nightclubs a year or two later.The bandleader Paul Whiteman had an amateur talent show, “TV Teen Club,” on Philadelphia television in the early 1950s. Young Bobby entered the contest when he was 9; he soon became a regular on the show, remaining for three years. Bobby’s father shortened the boy’s name to Rydell for the show.After a brief period as the drummer for a local group, Rocco and the Saints, which included Frankie Avalon on trumpet, Mr. Rydell went solo as a singer. His first three songs on the Cameo label were flops, but he scored in 1959 with “Kissin’ Time,” which Dick Clark, whose show had succeeded Paul Whiteman’s, immediately liked. It reached No. 11 on the Billboard chart.Mr. Rydell’s romantic voice, cute face and regular-guy personality drew screaming girls, but he also had enough adult appeal to be booked at the Copacabana in New York at 19.Reviewing his Copacabana performance in 1961, Variety complimented him on his “sense of career.” “Right now, he’s a teenager’s teenager,” the Variety critic said. “His style is packed with rhythm and bounce and his ‘nice boy next door’ demeanor is quite winning. Even the adults realize this, and it works to his advantage.”By his 21st birthday, Mr. Rydell had made three trips to perform in Europe and three others to Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan. In a 2011 interview, he recalled the reaction in Australia: “They stormed the stage, thousands and thousands of kids. The Australian police had to make a wedge to get us out of Sydney Stadium. It was scary, but all in all it was absolutely tremendous.” (Mr. Rydell went on to tour in Australia more than 20 times.)He also recalled that in 1963, in England, the Beatles climbed onto his tour bus to meet him. He didn’t know them, but they knew him. In the 2000 book “The Beatles Anthology,” Paul McCartney was quoted as saying that he and John Lennon based “She Loves You” on a Bobby Rydell song. He didn’t name the song, but his 1960 hit “Swingin’ School” includes a “Yeah, yeah, yeah” refrain. (Some sources say the song was “Forget Him,” which is somewhat similar lyrically.)Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell in a scene from “Bye Bye Birdie” on the movie set in Hollywood in 1962.Associated PressColumbia Pictures signed him to a contract in 1961. But the only movie in which he made much of an impact was “Bye Bye Birdie,” released in 1963 and based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name, which poked fun at show business in general and rock ’n’ roll frenzy in particular. Mr. Rydell played Hugo Peabody, the meek high school steady of Kim McAfee, played by Ann-Margret, the small-town girl chosen to give the Elvis-like Conrad Birdie a kiss on national television. Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh were the film’s stars, but the parts of Hugo and Kim were considerably beefed up in the transition from stage to screen.In a radio interview in 2013 with Ted Yates of CKOC in Hamilton, Ontario, Mr. Rydell explained why he hadn’t stayed in Hollywood to make more movies: “I couldn’t. There was something about the lifestyle in California that I really wasn’t used to. I was basically a South Philadelphia kid, and I was an East Coast guy, and I really couldn’t stay out in California.” (Mr. Rydell also played a nightclub singer in the 1975 film “That Lady From Peking,” which was shot in Australia.)Underscoring his ties to his family and his city, and going against recommendations that he live on the West Coast, Mr. Rydell bought a house in 1963 in Penn Valley, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, and moved in with his parents and grandparents. He raised his children there, and moved in 2013 only because the house had grown too big for him and his wife. “I had the good fortune to spend my peak years as a recording artist during the golden age of the TV variety show,” Mr. Rydell wrote in his autobiography. “Throughout the early ’60s, I appeared on almost all of them.” Those included shows hosted by, among others, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Perry Como, Jack Benny, Milton Berle and, most notably, Red Skelton.After making two appearances on “The Red Skelton Hour” on which he just sang, he appeared in sketches intermittently from 1961 to 1969 as various characters, including Zeke Kadiddlehopper, cousin to Skelton’s country-bumpkin character Clem Kadiddlehopper.“Mr. Skelton fell in love with Bobby,” Mr. Rydell’s personal assistant, Linda F. Hoffman, said in 2013. “His son had passed away, and Bobby always felt he was looked upon by Mr. Skelton as a son. They were very close.”New York Times reviews of two rock ’n’ roll revival shows at Madison Square Garden suggested reasons for both his lesser place in the rock firmament and his future career longevity. In 1975, Ian Dove wrote: “Mr. Rydell is not your hard rocker — his era was in the late 1950s, when rock was being softened and made less frightening. With such songs as ‘Volare,’ he emerges more like a crooner than a rocker.” Reviewing a 1977 show, Robert Palmer wrote that Mr. Rydell “seemed uncomfortable with his rock ’n’ roll hits and would probably have become an Italian crooner had he not grown up in the rock ’n’ roll era.”After his television appearances dwindled, he continued to perform in nightclubs and nostalgia shows, and to tour Australia, until the promoter Dick Fox put the Golden Boys together in 1985, initially for a PBS special. Mr. Rydell, Mr. Avalon and Fabian would perform their own songs and then sing together; there would also be tributes to Frank Sinatra and to Mr. Rydell’s favorite singer, Bobby Darin.“When the three of us are onstage, we’re having fun,” Mr. Rydell said in a 2012 interview with the writer Pat Gallagher. “We’re not trying to fool anybody. Everybody has known us for the better part of 50 years. We just go out there and have fun and the audience can see that.”Mr. Rydell married his high-school sweetheart, Camille Quattrone, in 1968. She died in 2003. He is survived by his wife, Linda J. Hoffman (who is not related to Linda F. Hoffman); two children from his first marriage, Robert Ridarelli and Jennifer Dulin; and five grandchildren.In 2011, Mr. Rydell was characteristically modest. He praised Red Skelton and other show-business veterans for helping him along, recalled that in 1985 the touring trio didn’t think their act would last more than two years, and joked that the “G” sometimes fell off marquees where they performed, making their name “the Olden Boys.”He also said he felt odd that he was one of the first 10 people inducted into the Philadelphia Music Foundation’s Hall of Fame. “Leopold Stokowski, Dizzy Gillespie and Bobby Rydell,” he mused. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”Vimal Patel contributed reporting. More

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      Alan J. Hruska, a Founder of Soho Press, Dies at 88

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      A litigator for 44 years, he was also a novelist; a writer, director and producer of plays and films; and helped establish the independent publishing house Soho Press.Alan J. Hruska, a corporate litigator who had a second, wide-ranging career as a founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, which invests in serious fiction by unsung authors; as a novelist; and as a writer, director and producer of plays and films, died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was lymphoma, his daughter, Bronwen Hruska, the publisher of Soho Press, said.Even before Mr. Hruska retired from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York in 2001 after four decades there, he published his first novel, in 1985. The next year, with his wife, Laura Chapman Hruska, and Juris Jurjevics, a former editor in chief of Dial Press, he founded Soho Press.Soho Press made its reputation by welcoming unsolicited manuscripts from little-known writers. Its ambitions, Mr. Jurjevics said, were “not to have a certain percentage of growth a year and not to be bought by anybody.”Soho Press, based in Manhattan, has specialized in literary fiction and memoirs with a backlist that includes books by Jake Arnott, Edwidge Danticat, John L’Heureux, Delores Phillips, Sue Townsend and Jacqueline Winspear. The company also has a Soho Teen young adult imprint and a Soho Crime imprint that publishes mysteries in exotic locales by, among others, Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Peter Lovesey and Stuart Neville.Mr. Hruska (pronounced RUH-ska) often said that there was less of a vocational disconnect between lawyering and literature than met the eye. Both, done successfully, he said, are about storytelling, whether arguing a case in a legal brief or writing a novel, script or screenplay.“I was a trial lawyer, and, while I would expect my actors to remember their lines better than my witnesses did, there is less disparity between the two professions than might be thought,” he said in an interview with a blogger in 2017.“A trial and a play are both productions,” he added. “Putting each together involves telling a story. So does writing a brief or making an oral argument to a panel of judges. If you don’t tell a story, you will very likely put them to sleep.”Mr. Hruska made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005.Joan MarcusAlan Jay Hruska was born on July 9, 1933, in the Bronx and was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, Harry Hruska, was in the textile business. His mother, Julia (Schwarz) Hruska, was a homemaker.While he was undecided on a profession, Alan had a penchant for filmmaking that took hold when he was 8. As a youth, he would ride the subway into Manhattan to attend double features at first-run movie theaters.After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1955 and was persuaded to apply to Yale Law School by a college professor who was impressed by his skills in logic and rationalization. He, in turn, found the law to be an ideal vehicle for his writing and reasoning.He graduated from the law school in 1958, the same year he married Laura Mae Chapman, one of three women in their law school class.She died in 2010. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by two sons, Andrew and Matthew; his wife, Julie Iovine, a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, whom he married in 2013; and six grandchildren.Mr. Hruska borrowed from his litigation experiences in major cases in writing a number of his novels, including “Wrong Man Running” (2011); “Pardon the Ravens” (2015); “It Happened at Two in the Morning” (2017), which The Wall Street Journal said showed the author “at his thriller-writing best”; and “The Inglorious Arts” (2019).Michael Cavadias as the cross-dressing character Wendy in a scene from the romantic comedy “Nola,” a 2003 film written and directed by Mr. Hruska.Samuel Goldwyn FilmsHe also wrote and directed the film “Nola,” a romantic comedy starring Emmy Rossum which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.Other films of his include “The Warrior Class,” a comedy about a rookie lawyer that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005; and “The Man on Her Mind,” an existential comedy based on his play of the same name, which premiered at the Charing Cross Theatre in London in 2012.He made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005. Ten years later, when a surreal play of his about love, marriage and an impending hurricane opened, the critic Alexis Soloski wrote in The Times in 2015, “If an existentialist philosopher ever attempted a light romantic comedy, it might sound a little like ‘Laugh It Up, Stare It Down,’ Alan Hruska’s quaintly absurdist play at the Cherry Lane Theater.”Mr. Hruska oversaw a wide range of civil litigation at Cravath in the 44 years before he retired in 2001. He was named senior counsel in 2002. He also served as secretary of the New York City Bar Association.Asked by The American Lawyer in 2015 whether he ever felt that the law was not his true calling, he replied: “Not at all. I had a great experience. I did about 400 cases, won 200 and settled 200. I’m particularly proud of the settlements because they can put people in a much better position than winning a case.” More

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      June Brown, a Mainstay of Britain’s ‘EastEnders,’ Dies at 95

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      As the memorable Dot Cotton, she appeared in thousands of episodes of the hugely popular soap opera over 35 years.June Brown, who appeared in thousands of episodes of the British soap opera “EastEnders” across 35 years, portraying Dot Cotton, one of the more memorable residents of the fictional Albert Square, died on Sunday at her home in Surrey, near London. She was 95.Her death was announced on the show’s Twitter account. In one of many tributes shared by that account, Natalie Cassidy, another star of the show, called Ms. Brown “the best character actress ‘EastEnders’ has ever seen or will ever see.”Ms. Brown was classically trained at the Old Vic drama school and had a decent career in the theater until she and her second husband, Robert Arnold, whom she married in 1958, began having their six children.“Touring was difficult with children,” she told The Daily Telegraph of London in 1995, “so I did a great deal of television work. And, in 1985, ‘EastEnders’ and Dot came along.”Dot was the mother of the villainous Nick Cotton. Ms. Brown was originally contracted for three months.“Then I was asked if I wanted to be a permanent character,” she told The Express of Britain in 2020, the year her character was finally written out of the series. “I had no idea it was going to be for 30-odd years.”Ms. Brown, left, in an episode of “EastEnders” with, from left, Wendy Richard, Ian Lavender, James Alexandro and Natalie Cassidy. AFP/Getty ImagesIt turned out that audiences found Dot, a chain-smoking bundle of prejudices, oddly endearing. The Daily Telegraph, in the 1995 article, called her “the holy-rolling hypochondriac, one-woman moral majority of Albert Square.”Ms. Brown enjoyed creating a flawed character — so much so that in 1993, after playing Dot for eight years, she left the show when she felt the writers were dialing back some of Dot’s more objectionable characteristics.“In the early days Dot was a terrible racist,” Ms. Brown explained in the 1995 interview. “But she gradually became more and more politically correct, which was disastrous for the character and the program. It’s no good having a program that is supposed to reflect society but covers it all up and pretends that everything in the garden is lovely.”She returned in 1997. As the years rolled by, Dot continued to change, becoming less gossipy and more like the fictional world’s matriarch, and Ms. Brown was given some meaty story lines — a request from a friend for Dot’s help with euthanasia, for instance, and Nick’s death from a heroin overdose.A much-praised episode in 2008 was devoted solely to Ms. Brown, as Dot made a 30-minute tape recording for her comatose husband. The Observer called it “an absolutely brilliant 30 minutes of prime time — beautifully written, economically directed and faultlessly, movingly performed by June Brown.”Ms. Brown recently dealt with macular degeneration in real life, something that was incorporated into scripts. The character disappeared in 2020 without much fanfare — Dot moved to Ireland. The show’s producers said a return was always possible, but Ms. Brown wasn’t interested. “I’ve sent her off to Ireland and that’s where she’ll stay,” she said of Dot.In 2001, Ms. Brown and her fellow cast member Barbara Windsor were visited on the set of “EastEnders” by Queen Elizabeth II.Pool photo by Fiona Hanson“EastEnders” Twitter posts said she had appeared in 2,884 episodes.“There was nobody quite like June Brown,” Nadine Dorries, Britain’s culture minister, said on Twitter. “She captured the zeitgeist of British culture like no other in her many years on our screens.”June Muriel Brown was born on Feb. 16, 1927, in Suffolk, England, to Henry and Louisa (Butler) Brown. Her father owned an electrical engineering company, and her mother worked in a milliner’s shop.Ms. Brown’s childhood was marked by loss. A brother died in infancy. She was particularly close to an older sister, Marise, who died of an ear infection when June was 7, an event that affected her more deeply than her parents seemed to realize.“People weren’t concerned with psychology then,” Ms. Brown wrote in her autobiography, “Before the Year Dot” (2013). “Perhaps it was better because you learnt to survive without sympathy.”Ms. Brown grew up in Ipswich. A career in acting was not at all on her mind.“I once played the Virgin Mary at school,” she told The Daily Telegraph, “but only because my teacher thought I’d look lovely in blue.”During World War II she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service — the Wrens — where one of her jobs was showing training films to airmen. She also performed in a touring revue that performed for troops.“We took it ’round the Southern Command area and I really enjoyed it,” she told The Independent in 2010. “I got laughs, and that was when the bug got me.”After the war she studied at the Old Vic and began appearing in plays. By the late 1950s she was turning up in roles on “ITV Television Playhouse” and similar TV programs. In the early 1970s she appeared in several episodes of “Coronation Street,” another long-running British soap.She credited Leslie Grantham, an original “EastEnders” cast member, with suggesting her for the role of Dot.“He’d seen me in an episode of ‘Minder,’” another British show, she told The Daily Mirror in 2003. “I’ll always be grateful to him.”A few dozen episodes into the series, Dot made her first appearance. At the 2005 British Soap Awards, Ms. Brown received a lifetime achievement honor for her work on the show. “EastEnders” has also been seen on various outlets in the United States for years.In 1950 Ms. Brown married John Garley, a fellow actor, who died in 1957. Her second husband, Mr. Arnold, also an actor, died in 2003. Her survivors include five children, Chloe, Naomi, Sophie, Louise and William. More