Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Liz Sheridan, Who Played Jerry Seinfeld’s Mom, Dies at 93

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      She was Helen Seinfeld on his sitcom and was seen on many other TV shows and on Broadway. She also wrote of her youthful romance with James Dean.Liz Sheridan, a stage, film and television actress best known for playing Helen Seinfeld, Jerry’s mother on the acclaimed sitcom “Seinfeld,” died on Friday at her home in New York City. She was 93.Her manager, Amanda Hendon, confirmed the death.Ms. Sheridan started her career as a dancer in the 1950s. Her acting career blossomed in the 1970s, when she appeared in seven Broadway shows (one, “Happy End” in 1977, also featured Meryl Streep, still early in her career) and on an episode of the TV series “Kojak.”The 1980s brought dozens of roles in made-for-TV movies and on series like “Hill Street Blues” and “Remington Steele,” including a prominent one as a nosy neighbor on the comedy “ALF,” which ran from 1986 to 1990. She first appeared on “Seinfeld” in the second episode, in May 1990, and turned up throughout the series, including in the widely watched finale in May 1998.In a 2007 interview for Mark Voger’s newspaper column “Celebs,” Ms. Sheridan recalled auditioning for the part. Mr. Seinfeld and Larry David, the creators of the series, were in the room with a friend of Mr. Seinfeld’s.“I walked in the room and I smiled at Jerry because my husband and I had watched him do stand-up when he was not famous yet,” she said. “We love stand-up. I told him that I liked his work, his stand-up. He smiled, and I smiled, and then I read and they laughed, and then I left. By the time I got home, I got a phone call.”On the show, Jerry’s parents lived in Florida, so Helen and her husband, Morty, played by Barney Martin (another actor played the part in that first episode), appeared only occasionally. And she was somewhat overshadowed, among the show’s mothers, by Estelle Harris, who played Estelle Costanza, the high-intensity mother of Jason Alexander’s George. (Ms. Harris died on April 2.) But Helen made an impression nonetheless.“So many people stop me on the street, and they say, ‘You know, your relationship with Jerry is what my relationship is with my parents,’” Ms. Sheridan told CNN in 1998.Ms. Sheridan in an undated publicity photo. She had a long list of television and theater credits.NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesElizabeth Ann Sheridan was born on April 10, 1929, in Manhattan. Her father, Frank, was a concert pianist, and her mother, Elizabeth Poole-Jones, was a singer.Her parents separated when she was young, and she grew up with her mother in Westchester County, N.Y. Dance was her first interest. “I was dancing all the time,” she said in a 2012 interview on “The Paul Leslie Hour.”In her early 20s she took her dance skills to New York, where she lived at the Rehearsal Club, a residence for young women in the arts. In “Dizzy & Jimmy: My Life With James Dean, a Love Story,” a memoir published in 2000 (“Dizzy” was her childhood nickname), she wrote about a young man she met in the lobby of that building one day in 1951. It was James Dean, then an unknown from Indiana who at the time had a job testing stunts for the game show “Beat the Clock.”They started dating, and the relationship grew intense; sometimes they would check into hotels as Mr. and Mrs. James Dean.“Back in those days when nice girls didn’t, I did,” she wrote.Dean, she said, had his dark moments and his quirks. In a 2004 appearance on the CNN show “Larry King Live,” she recalled that Dean had a cape from the famed American bullfighter Sidney Franklin.“We used to play with it in Central Park,” she said, “and I always got to be the bull, and I never got to be the matador.”One time, making their way to Indiana for a visit, the couple snagged a ride with a man who turned out to be Clyde McCullough, a catcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was then, she said, that she realized that if she and James were to marry, as they had discussed, she would be Dizzy Dean, an echo of the Hall of Fame pitcher.James Dean’s career began to take off, and their relationship was a casualty. It had ended when Dean died in a car wreck in 1955. Ms. Sheridan was working as a singer and piano player in the Caribbean at the time.She later met Dale Wales, a jazz musician, while working in Puerto Rico. They had been together for years when they married in 1985. He died in 2003.Ms. Sheridan’s survivors include a daughter.Mr. Seinfeld posted a tribute on Twitter on Friday.“Liz was always the sweetest, nicest TV mom a son could wish for,” he wrote. “Every time she came on our show it was the coziest feeling for me. So lucky to have known her.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Christopher Coover, Auction Expert in the Printed Word, Dies at 72

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      At Christie’s, he managed sales of rare books, manuscripts and documents by the likes of da Vinci, Lincoln and Kerouac. On TV, he lent his eye to “Antiques Roadshow.”Christopher Coover, who made a career out of reading other people’s mail as an expert in rare books and manuscripts at Christie’s Auction House, where he oversaw the authentication, appraisal and sale of documents ranging from the original texts of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” to George Washington’s annotated copy of the Constitution, died in Livingston, N.J., on April 3, his 72nd birthday.The immediate cause was pneumonia complicated by Parkinson’s disease, his son, Timothy, said.As a connoisseur of curios, Mr. Coover was enlisted as an appraiser for the PBS program “Antiques Roadshow,” where at a single glance he could transform an all-but-forgotten autographed book or letter, retrieved from a starry-eyed guest’s basement or attic into a valuable historical heirloom.“The sense of discovery never fails,” he told The Colonial Williamsburg Journal in 2011. “I like the challenge of seeking out the larger background, the hidden meanings and connections of a given document. This means I am sometimes overworked, occasionally out of my depth, but never bored.”Mr. Coover in 2004 with letter from Abraham Lincoln to Ulysses S. Grant. “The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he said. Ruby Washington/The New York Times)For 35 years as senior specialist in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at Christie’s in Manhattan, he would authenticate material offered for auction, describe its provenance and history for the catalog, and suggest the opening price.Among his career milestones was assisting in the sale of the oil magnate Armand Hammer’s copy of an early 15th-century scientific manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci — known as the “Hammer Codex” — to Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, for a record $30.2 million in 1994.Mr. Coover appraised and managed the sale of the publisher Malcolm Forbes’s collection of American historical documents in six auctions from 2002 to 2007. The sale set records for letters by 15 presidents and generated more than $40.9 million. The sale’s catalog included a manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s last speech; Robert E. Lee’s message to Ulysses S. Grant, in which he said he was ready to discuss the “cessation of hostilities” to end the Civil War; and a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraging the American effort to build the atomic bomb.Mr. Coover also wrote the catalog for the sale of Kerouac’s “On the Road” manuscript, typed on a 119-foot-long roll of United Press Teletype paper ($2.4 million); and appraised and managed the sales of Lincoln’s 1864 Election Victory speech ($3.4 million), Washington’s letter on the ratification of the Constitution ($3.2 million), Washington’s personal annotated copy of the 1789 Acts of Congress ($9.8 million) and the original manuscript of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”Christopher Coover was born on April 3, 1950, in Greeley, Colo. His parents left his middle name blank on his birth certificate so that he could choose one later himself. He selected Robin, from his favorite childhood books; his full name became Christopher Robin Coover.The family moved shortly afterward to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where his parents were hired by Vassar College — his father, James Burrell Coover, as a professor and music librarian, and his mother, Georgena (Walker) Coover, as a teacher and specialist in early childhood education.Chris attended Arlington High School in Poughkeepsie before his father took a teaching post at the State University of New York at Buffalo, bringing his family with him. Chris graduated from Kenmore West High School in Buffalo. He earned a bachelor’s degree in musicology from SUNY Buffalo in 1973.He subsequently formed a band that played at weddings and other receptions, drove a school bus, worked for The New Grove Dictionary of Music in London and in the rare books room of the Strand book store in Manhattan before he was hired by Sotheby’s in 1978.He left for Christie’s in 1980. While working there, he earned a master’s in library science from Columbia University. He retired in 2016 as senior specialist and vice president of the auction house.Mr. Coover also lectured on American documents and built his own collection of literary and historical books and manuscripts, which he donated to Columbia.Mr. Coover, who died in a hospital, lived in Montclair, N.J. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Lois (Adams) Coover; a daughter, Chloe; and two sisters, Mauri and Regan Coover.In the authentication of documents, Mr. Coover said, most forgeries are readily apparent, typically because the paper cannot be faked. Such was the case with a supposed 1906 first edition of “Madame Butterfly,” purportedly signed and dedicated by the composer, Puccini, which a reader of The Chicago Tribune asked Mr. Coover to authenticate.Sight unseen, he was able to recite the dedication, in Italian (he said he had seen 10 to 15 copies of the score with the same words), and identified the reader’s find as only a photolithographic copy.Then again, he said, ordinary-looking documents can contain surprises.“An otherwise boring diary or series of family letters mainly recording weather and local news may contain a long description of an election campaign, demonstrations against the Stamp Act, the convening of the Confederacy to draft a constitution, or a raid by Pancho Villa,” he told the Williamsburg journal.“The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he added. “I once discovered an exceptional letter of Ethan Allen at the bottom of a pile of old deeds, copies of minor poetry and otherwise uninteresting papers.”Assessing the monetary value of an item is highly subjective, he said.“Family bibles and birth and death records are valuable for their genealogical information, but they have very little commercial value,” he was quoted as saying in Marsha Bemko’s book “Antiques Roadshow: Behind the Scenes” (2009), “and I think it is a shame to see little old ladies waiting in line for hours while hefting a 40-pound Bible that is worth very little monetarily.”“You have to trust your innate instincts and perception of the size of the potential market,” he said. “The value of some letters and documents can only be determined by letting the free market operate, at auction.”Mr. Coover recalled that in 1992 he was asked by the grandson of a woman who had recently died to appraise her collection of books. He visited her Manhattan apartment and immediately realized that the books were not very valuable, but as he was leaving, the grandson asked him to look at some papers in a tattered Manila envelope.Inside, Mr. Coover told The Times in 2004, he found an old black leather book with the word “autograph” embossed in gold on the cover. On the very first page, he recognized Lincoln’s signature, followed by the last handwritten paragraph of his Second Inaugural Address. He told the young man that that one page alone was worth at least $250,000. When it finally went to auction, it sold for $1.2 million. More

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      Marvin Chomsky, Director of ‘Roots’ and ‘Holocaust,’ Dies at 92

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      A four-time Emmy Award winner, he directed landmark historical TV dramas and the movie “Inside the Third Reich.”Marvin Chomsky, an Emmy Award-winning director renowned for his work on historical dramas, including the blockbuster mini-series “Roots” and “Holocaust,” died on March 28 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 92.His son Eric confirmed the death, in hospice care in a retirement community.Mr. Chomsky had been directing episodic television for many years when he was hired as one of the four directors of “Roots,” the groundbreaking 12-hour series based on Alex Haley’s book tracing his family’s origins from an African village to enslavement in the United States. Shown on eight consecutive nights in January 1977, it drew spectacular ratings and won nine Emmys.The “Roots” cinematographer Joseph Wilcots said in a Television Academy interview in 2007 that Mr. Chomsky was “a brilliant director” who “always thought his shots out very clearly,” in particular one in which Tom Harvey, the Black character played by Georg Stanford Brown, was whipped.Louis Gossett Jr., who played the enslaved musician Fiddler, told the syndicated columnist Cleveland Amory in 1977 that Mr. Chomsky and another director, John Erman, who were both white, were “very sensitive” and “let each of us do what we thought was best for our particular role.”Mr. Chomsky was nominated for an Emmy for “Roots” but lost to David Greene, another “Roots” director. He won his first Emmy a year later for directing “Holocaust” (1978), a four-part series, starring Meryl Streep and Michael Moriarty, that focused on two families in Nazi Germany: one Jewish, the other headed by an SS officer.Before filming a scene in which Mr. Moriarty, who played Erik Dorf, the SS officer, broke into tears, Mr. Chomsky showed him photographs of Nazi atrocities.“What you saw was Michael Moriarty’s response to those pictures,” Mr. Moriarty told The Fort Lauderdale News shortly after the series premiered. “The horror of what Dorf had done, the level of guilt — it was very close.”Eric Chomsky said in an interview that his father had been “traumatized” by the experience of filming in Germany and Austria, which included directing one scene in the former gas chamber at the Mauthausen concentration camp and another in which a large group of extras, portraying Jewish prisoners, were forced to strip naked and machine-gunned in a ravine.One young cameraman, Mr. Chomsky said, did not believe that the scene could have been based on reality.“Mr. Marvin, you are making this up for the movie,” Mr. Chomsky recalled the man telling him in a 2007 Directors Guild of America interview. “This didn’t really happen.”Mr. Chomsky called on a German crew member to attest to its veracity.When Mr. Chomsky accepted the Emmy for “Holocaust,” he said he had mixed feelings about winning an honor for a series that “depicted events that never should have happened at all.”But, he added, “They did happen, and I’m proud to have been able to tell that story to those who didn’t know, like my sons David, Eric and Peter, and possibly to remind some of those who forgot.”Marvin Joseph Chomsky was born on May 23, 1929, in the Bronx and grew up in Brooklyn. His father, Harry, and his mother, Gloria (Yarmuk) Chomsky, both immigrated from what is now Belarus and owned a candy store.While Mr. Chomsky was attending Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, his deep voice brought him to the attention of an all-city radio workshop. That led to his appearing on a local radio station and, soon, working on a TV show for teenagers in the medium’s early days.He graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in speech in 1950 and earned a master’s in drama at Stanford University a year later. Following his Army service, Mr. Chomsky spent the next decade as an art director and scenic designer for TV shows, including “Captain Kangaroo,” “Arthur Godfrey Time” and the anthology series “Studio One.”While working as an art director on the series “The Doctors and the Nurses” in the early 1960s, Mr. Chomsky was asked by the show’s executive producer, Herbert Brodkin, if he wanted to become a producer. Mr. Chomsky declined, saying he’d rather be a director. He went on to direct three episodes of the show, followed by a long run of work on series like “The Wild Wild West,” “Star Trek,” “Gunsmoke,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Mannix.”After “Roots” and “Holocaust,” Mr. Chomsky won Emmys for directing “Attica” (1980), a TV movie about the bloody prison riot in upstate New York, and “Inside the Third Reich” (1982), a two-part film based on the autobiography of Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production.He won his fourth Emmy as a producer of “Peter the Great” (1986), a mini-series about the Russian czar Peter I, starring Maximilian Schell, which Mr. Chomsky also co-directed with Lawrence Schiller.His last credits include “Strauss Dynasty” (1991), a mini-series about the Austrian musical family, and “Catherine the Great” (1995), a TV movie starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.In addition to his son Eric, Mr. Chomsky is survived by his other sons, Peter and David, and a granddaughter. He was separated from his second wife, Christa Baum-Chomsky. His marriage to Tobye Kaplan ended in divorce.Eric Chomsky said his father had wanted the facts in his work to stand up to scrutiny:“I worked with him on ‘The Deliberate Stranger’” — a 1986 mini-series about the serial killer Ted Bundy — “and my whole job was to read the trial transcripts to make sure the script was accurate.” More

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      in Music

      Franz Mohr, Piano Tuner to the Stars, Is Dead at 94

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      “I play more in Carnegie Hall than anybody else,” he said of his career adjusting instruments for Horowitz, Gould and others, “but I have no audience.”Franz Mohr, who in his 24 years as the chief concert technician for Steinway & Sons brought a musician’s mind-set to the mechanics of important pianos and the care of those who played them, died on March 28 at his home in Lynbrook, N.Y., on Long Island, where he lived. He was 94.His son Michael, the director of restoration and customer services at Steinway, confirmed the death.“I play more in Carnegie Hall than anybody else,” Mr. Mohr said in 1990, “but I have no audience.”Sometimes a string would snap or a pedal would need adjusting during a concert, and he would step into the spotlight for a moment. But he did much of his work alone, on that famous stage and others around the world. He might have been mistaken for a pianist trying out a nine-foot grand for a recital — until he reached for his tools and began making minute adjustments, giving a tuning pin a tiny twist or a hammer a slight shave.For years, he went where the pianists went. When Vladimir Horowitz went to Russia in the 1980s, Mr. Mohr traveled with him, as did Horowitz’s favorite Steinway. Mr. Mohr made house calls at the White House when Van Cliburn played for President Gerald R. Ford in 1975, and again in 1987, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev was in Washington for arms-control talks with President Ronald Reagan.Mr. Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, wanted Cliburn to play one of the pieces that had made him famous — Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 — but there was no orchestra. Instead, Cliburn played some Chopin and, as an encore, played and sang the Russian melody “Moscow Nights.”“I was amazed that Van Cliburn, on the spur of the moment, remembered not only the music but all the words,” Mr. Mohr recalled in his memoir, “My Life with the Great Pianists,” written with Edith Schaeffer (1992). “The Russians just melted.”He also attended to performers’ personal pianos. The pianist Gary Graffman, whose apartment is less than a block from the old location of Steinway’s Manhattan showroom, and Mr. Mohr’s home base, on West 57th Street, recalled that Mr. Mohr would come right over when a problem presented itself.“If he came because I broke strings, he would replace the strings,” Mr. Graffman said in an interview. But if more extensive work was needed — if Mr. Graffman’s almost constant practicing had worn down the hammers and new hammers had to be installed, for example — “he would take out the insides of the piano and carry it half a block to the Steinway basement. He would work on it and carry it back.” (The unit Mr. Mohr lifted out and took down the street is known as the key and action assembly, a bewildering combination of all 88 keys and the parts that respond to a pianist’s touch, driving the hammers to the strings.)Franz Mohr was born in Nörvenich, Germany, on Sept. 17, 1927, the son of Jakob Mohr, a postal worker, and Christina (Stork) Mohr. The family moved to nearby Düren when he was a child; in 1944, when he was a teenager, he survived an air raid.His interest in music began not with pianos but with the viola and the violin. He studied at academies in Cologne and Detmold and, in his 20s, played guitar and mandolin in German dance bands.He was playing Dixieland music one night when he spotted a woman on the dance floor. “I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her and said to my friends, ‘That is the girl I’m going to marry,’” he recalled in his memoir. Her name was Elisabeth Zillikens, and they married in 1954. Besides his son Michael, she survives him, as does a daughter, Ellen; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Peter, died in 2019.Tendinitis forced Mr. Mohr to give up performing when he was in his 20s, his son said, and he turned to pianos, answering a want ad from the piano manufacturer Ibach that led to an apprenticeship. Another advertisement, in 1962, sent him to the United States.It said that Steinway was looking for piano technicians — in New York. A devout churchgoer, he had made a connection with a German-speaking Baptist church in Elmhurst, Queens, that showed him the ad. He contacted Steinway and was soon hired as an assistant to William Hupfer, the company’s chief concert technician.Before long, he was tuning for stars like the famously eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who came to New York to make recordings. (In Toronto Gould relied on another tuner, Verne Edquist, who died in 2020.)Mr. Mohr not only worked on the piano at the recording studio, he also rode around New York with Gould. “He loved Lincoln Town cars,” Mr. Mohr wrote in his memoir. “That is all he would drive. He once said to me: ‘Franz, I found out that next year’s model will be two inches shorter. So, you know what I did? I bought two Town Cars this year.”He succeeded Mr. Hupfer as Steinway’s chief concert technician in 1968. The job made him the keeper of the fleet of pianos that performers could try out before a concert in Steinway’s West 57th Street basement. They could choose the one they were most comfortable with, but there were pianos that were off limits — Horowitz’s favorite, for example.Sometimes, maybe with a wink, Mr. Mohr would let pianists try it out.  “He’d regulate Horowitz’s piano to make it feather-light and capable of an enormous range of sound,” the pianist Misha Dichter recalled. “When I’d see Franz in the Steinway basement, I’d ask to try that piano when it was parked in a corner. He’d conspiratorially look over his shoulder and then give me the OK. It was like starting up a Lamborghini.”Mr. Mohr, who retired in 1992, said in 1990 that the first time he tuned Arthur Rubinstein’s piano, before a recital at Yale, he cleaned the keys. Then he proudly told Rubinstein what he had done.“Young man,” Rubinstein told him as they stood in the wings with the audience already in their seats, “you didn’t know, but nobody ever cleans the keys for me. It makes them too slippery.”Mr. Mohr had to find something to gum up the keys and find it fast, before the lights went down. The stickiest thing he could get his hands on backstage was hair spray. “I went pssst up, pssst down,” he said. “The audience laughed. But he loved it.” More

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      in Movies

      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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      in Television

      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