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      Michael Lang, a Force Behind the Woodstock Festival, Dies at 77

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      He and his partners hoped their weekend of “peace and music” would draw 50,000 attendees. It ended up drawing more than 400,000 — and making history.Michael Lang, one of the creators of the Woodstock festival, which drew more than 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm in 1969 for a weekend of “peace and music” — plus plenty of drugs, skinny-dipping, mud-soaked revelry and highway traffic jams — resulting in one of the great tableaus of 20th-century pop culture, died on Saturday in a hospital in Manhattan. He was 77.Michael Pagnotta, a spokesman for Mr. Lang’s family, said the cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.In August 1969, Mr. Lang was a baby-faced 24-year-old with limited experience as a concert promoter when he and three partners, Artie Kornfeld, John P. Roberts and Joel Rosenman, put on the Woodstock Music and Art Fair on land leased from a dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, in bucolic Bethel, N.Y., about 100 miles northwest of New York City.Since Monterey Pop in California two years before, rock festivals had been sprouting around the country, and the Woodstock partners, all in their 20s, were ambitious enough to hope for 50,000 attendees. Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld, a record executive, booked a solid lineup, with, among others, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and a new group called Crosby, Stills & Nash (they would be joined at the festival by Neil Young). The show was set for Aug. 15-17.They sold 186,000 tickets in advance, at $8 a day. On the opening day, traffic snarled much of the New York State Thruway, and many ticket holders did not make it. Others simply entered the field without paying.In an interview, Mr. Rosenman said that days before the show, workmen had said that they could build a stage or ticket booths but not both; the partners chose a stage.The event became a defining moment for the baby boomer generation, as a celebration of rock as a communal force and a manifestation of hippie ideals. Despite the presence of nearly half a million people, and the breakdown of most health and crowd-control measures, no violence was reported.Mr. Lang — described in The New York Times Magazine in 1969 as a “groovy kid from Brooklyn” — became the public face of the powers behind the festival. He was seen in Michael Wadleigh’s hit documentary “Woodstock” (1970) roaming the grounds in cherubic curls and a vest. Despite the festival’s inception as a moneymaking endeavor, Mr. Lang always insisted that its aims were to bring out the best in humanity.“From the beginning, I believed that if we did our job right and from the heart, prepared the ground and set the right tone, people would reveal their higher selves and create something amazing,” Mr. Lang said in his memoir, “The Road to Woodstock” (2009), written with the music journalist Holly George-Warren.Mr. Lang with an associate, Lee Blumer, at the site of the Woodstock festival in August 1989, its 20th anniversary. Mr. Lang would later be involved in anniversary versions of Woodstock in 1994 and 1999 and an unsuccessful attempt to stage a 50th-anniversary concert in 2019.Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesMichael Scott Lang was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 11, 1944, and grew up in middle-class surroundings in Bensonhurst. His father, Harry, ran a business that installed heating systems, and his mother, Sylvia, kept the books.Michael attended New York University and the University of Tampa, and in 1966 he opened a head shop in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. He soon became involved in the music scene there, and in May 1968 he was one of the promoters of the Miami Pop Festival, with Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.Later that year Mr. Lang moved to Woodstock, N.Y. — then known as a prime bohemian outpost thanks to the residency of Bob Dylan — and he soon met Mr. Kornfeld. Around the same time, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman, two young businessmen who were roommates on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, placed a classified ad in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal introducing themselves, half in jest, as “young men with unlimited capital” in search of investment ideas.Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld always maintained that they never saw that ad. But the four men met through one of Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman’s investments, a recording studio in New York, and Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld suggested a studio in Woodstock, which they said was swarming with talent. The four set up a partnership, Woodstock Ventures, and agreed to work together.In his memoir, Mr. Lang said that Mr. Roberts, who had a large inheritance, had agreed to finance both the studio and the festival. Mr. Rosenman, in an interview, said the plan had been for profits from the festival to pay for the studio.When the Woodstock festival took place, it was initially portrayed in the news media as a catastrophe. The Daily News’s front page declared, “Traffic Uptight at Hippie Fest,” and a Times editorial bore the headline “Nightmare in the Catskills.”But images of endless fields of longhaired fans idling peacefully, and of stars like Hendrix, the Who and Santana commanding thousands of fans, ricocheted around the world and established a new template for the rock festival — even though many local governments around the country quickly took action to keep other such hippie fests out of their backyards.Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld quit the partnership. To settle more than $1 million in debts from Woodstock, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman sold film and soundtrack rights to Warner Bros.; according to Mr. Rosenman, it took about a decade for Woodstock Ventures to break even. Mr. Roberts died in 2001, and in 2006 a performing arts center and museum, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, was opened on the site of the 1969 festival.Mr. Lang in 2018, when the ill-fated 2019 Woodstock concert was in the planning stages.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesIn 1971, Mr. Lang formed a record label, Just Sunshine, which signed artists including the folk singer Karen Dalton and the funk singer Betty Davis. He also managed Joe Cocker, whose memorable performance at Woodstock helped build his fame. Mr. Lang was also involved in anniversary versions of Woodstock in 1994 and 1999 — the latter marred by fires, rioting and allegations of sexual assault — and he eventually rejoined Woodstock Ventures as a minority partner.That company holds the trademark and other intellectual property rights for the Woodstock festival, including the image of a dove on a guitar that was part of its first poster. Among its many licensing deals was one for Woodstock Cannabis.Mr. Lang is survived by his wife, Tamara Pajic Lang; two sons, Harry and Laszlo; his daughters Molly Lang, LariAnn Lang and Shala Lang Moll; a grandson; and his sister, Iris Brest.In 2019, Mr. Lang attempted to revive Woodstock for a 50th-anniversary concert in Watkins Glen, N.Y., that would feature Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, the Killers, Chance the Rapper, Santana and Imagine Dragons. But the event collapsed amid a legal battle with its financial backer, an arm of the Japanese advertising conglomerate Dentsu.To make the 50th-anniversary show stand out in a market that had become crowded with large-scale festivals like Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, Mr. Lang envisioned the new event as one that would make social and environmental activism central to its experience, and hark back to its roots.“It just seems like it’s a perfect time,” he said in an interview with The Times, “for a Woodstock kind of reminder.” More

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      Peter Bogdanovich, 82, Director Whose Career Was a Hollywood Drama, Dies

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      Within one decade, the ’70s, he was transformed from one of the most celebrated of filmmakers, notably for “The Last Picture Show,” into one of the most ostracized.Peter Bogdanovich, who parlayed his ardor for Golden Age cinema into the direction of acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” only to have his professional reputation tarnished in one of Hollywood’s most conspicuous falls from grace, died early Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82.His daughter Antonia Bogdanovich confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Originally trained as a stage actor (he was also a producer, a screenwriter, a film historian, a programmer and a critic, as well as a theater and television director), Mr. Bogdanovich was long recognizable by his soulful basset-hound face, outsize horn-rimmed glasses and trademark neckerchief.As a filmmaker, he was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past — bygone in American cinema, bygone in America itself.Reviewing “The Last Picture Show” — only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film and widely considered his foremost — on its release in 1971, Newsweek’s critic called it “a masterpiece,” adding, “It is the most impressive work by a young American director since ‘Citizen Kane.’”Before the end of the ’70s, however, Mr. Bogdanovich had been transformed from one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood into one of the most ostracized. His career would be marred for years to come by critical and box-office failures, personal bankruptcies, the raking of his romantic life through the press and, as it all unspooled, an orgy of film-industry schadenfreude.Mr. Bogdanovich with Cybill Shepherd on the set of “The Last Picture Show” (1971). Only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film, it is widely considered his best.Columbia Pictures“It isn’t true that Hollywood is a bitter place, divided by hatred, greed and jealousy,” the director Billy Wilder once observed. “All it takes to bring the community together is a flop by Peter Bogdanovich.”What was more, Mr. Bogdanovich’s life and work would be affected by violent, almost unimaginable personal loss.Yet in a business that rarely grants second acts, he enjoyed a professional renaissance, both behind the camera and in front of it, in the 21st century. To television viewers of the period, he was probably best known for his recurring role on the HBO drama “The Sopranos.” He portrayed Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the psychiatrist who treats Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, played by Lorraine Bracco.Mr. Bogdanovich’s film career had seemed almost foreordained, for he was nothing short of a cinematic prodigy. “I was born,” he liked to say. “And then I liked movies.”As a writer and critic, a calling he pursued in the 1960s, he was the author of influential monographs on Hollywood directors before he was out of his 20s.As a director, he blazed to fame in the early ’70s as the auteur of three critically acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show,” based on Larry McMurtry’s novel of small-town Texas life; “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a contemporary twist on 1930s screwball comedies, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal; and “Paper Moon” (1973), starring Mr. O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum, about a Depression-era confidence man.Mr. Bogdanovich’s life, it turned out, was bracketed by loss. For as he would discover, he had been born to a family defined by absence.Ryan O’Neal as a con man in 1930s Kansas and Tatum O’Neal as the girl who may or may not be his daughter in Mr. Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” (1973). Ms. O’Neal won an Academy Award for her performance.Paramount Pictures, via PhotofestA Son of ImmigrantsThe son of Borislav and Herma Robinson Bogdanovich, Peter Bogdanovich was born on July 30, 1939, in upstate Kingston, N.Y., and reared on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His parents were recent immigrants to the United States — his father a Serbian painter, his mother a member of a well-to-do Austrian Jewish family.The Bogdanovich home, Mr. Bogdanovich recalled long afterward, was pervaded by melancholy. His father was silent and withdrawn. Throughout Peter’s boyhood, their rare moments of camaraderie came when the elder Mr. Bogdanovich took his son to silent films at the Museum of Modern Art.When Peter was about 8, he learned the source of the family sorrow: He had had an older brother, who died as a baby after a pot of boiling soup was accidentally spilled on him.Remembering Peter BogdanovichThe filmmaker, who became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors in the ‘70s before a public fall from grace, died Jan. 6, 2022.Obituary: Mr. Bogdanovich was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past.Streaming Guide: The director loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. Here are nine of his film highlights.From the Archives: Read our original reviews of Mr. Bogdanovich’s most acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon.”By this time Peter was irretrievably in love with motion pictures — sound and silent alike. From the age of 12 to about 30 he kept a file of index cards, one per picture, evaluating every movie he saw. In the end, he had amassed some five thousand cards.Pictures from the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system — by directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock, starring actors like John Wayne, Cary Grant and James Stewart — beckoned to him above all.“I just wanted to be like those people on the screen,” Mr. Bogdanovich told The Los Angeles Times in 1972. “I wanted to look like Bill Holden, because I wanted to be a real American boy and do all those wonderful things. And with a name like Bogdanovich there wasn’t much of a chance.”As a teenager, Peter studied with the famed acting teacher Stella Adler. Leaving the Collegiate School, a Manhattan prep school, “a failed algebra examination shy of a high school diploma,” as The New York Times wrote in 1971, he played small roles in summer stock, Off Broadway and on television.At 20, he directed an Off Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’s drama “The Big Knife.” (The cast included a young Carroll O’Connor.) Around this time, he began writing on film for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. He helped program Golden Age pictures for the New Yorker Theater, a Manhattan revival house, and for MoMA.Mr. Bogdanovich with Alfred Hitchcock, one of several noted directors about whom he wrote a series of monographs for the Museum of Modern Art.Universal, via Kobal/ShutterstockFor MoMA, Mr. Bogdanovich wrote his series of monographs on great directors, including Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles. It was a mission undertaken, he cheerfully confessed, so that he could meet and interview his idols.Those sessions, he said, were his de facto film-school education. (Mr. Bogdanovich would spend the rest of his career, interviewers often carped, dropping his teachers’ names. “Jack” flicked out conversationally denoted Mr. Ford. “Hitch” and “Orson” were self-explanatory.)He would become most closely involved with Welles, recording scores of hours of oral history before Welles’s death in 1985. The seminal book that resulted, “This Is Orson Welles” (1992), edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and with Mr. Bogdanovich and Welles as co-authors, is “the closest we’ll ever come to a Welles autobiography,” The Orlando Sentinel said in 2002.Though Mr. Bogdanovich repeatedly disavowed the connection, critics liked to point out affinities between Welles’s career and his own: Both men began as directorial wunderkinds. (“Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, was Welles’s first full-length feature.) Both were later expelled from the Eden of A-list directors. (In the 1970s, a down-and-out Welles lived for a time in Mr. Bogdanovich’s mansion in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles.)Hollywood-BoundMr. Bogdanovich struck out for Hollywood in 1964, accompanied by his wife, Polly Platt, a production designer he had married two years before. He was hired as a second-unit director and rewriter by the producer Roger Corman, whose movies — among them “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957) and “Teenage Cave Man” (1958) — strove for maximal shock value at minimal expense.For Mr. Corman, Mr. Bogdanovich directed his first feature, “Targets,” released in 1968. Inspired by the Charles Whitman Texas tower shootings of 1966, it was nominally a thriller about a troubled young man who embarks on a killing spree.But it was really a paean to, and an elegy for, the Hollywood films that Mr. Bogdanovich cherished. An aging, elegant Boris Karloff plays an aging, elegant version of himself. Scenes of Tim O’Kelly, who played the young man, scaling heights from which to shoot random strangers — a gas storage tank, a drive-in theater screen — are vivid homages to James Cagney’s last stand, high up in a gas plant, in “White Heat,” Raoul Walsh’s celebrated 1949 film.For its stylish direction and brisk screenplay, by Mr. Bogdanovich and Ms. Platt, “Targets” drew wide critical praise. His triumph led him to be hired to direct “The Last Picture Show” for Columbia Pictures.Cloris Leachman and Timothy Bottoms in “The Last Picture Show.” The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won two, including one for Ms. Leachman.Columbia PicturesThat film, with screenplay by Mr. Bogdanovich and Mr. McMurtry, centers on life and love in a down-at-the-heels town in the early 1950s. Shot in stark black and white in Mr. McMurtry’s hometown, Archer City, Texas, the movie, designed by Ms. Platt, portrays a world of boarded-up storefronts and blowing dust.The cast featured relative unknowns, among them Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd, a 19-year-old model whom Mr. Bogdanovich had discovered staring seductively at him from the cover of Glamour magazine while he waited in a supermarket checkout line.It also included veterans like Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson, who at midcentury had been a member of Ford’s stock company.“The Last Picture Show,” too, is a valentine to old Hollywood. At the town’s fading movie house, Vincente Minnelli’s 1950 comedy, “Father of the Bride,” is playing. When the theater is forced to close, the last picture shown there is Hawks’s “Red River” (1948), starring the indomitable John Wayne.Nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, “The Last Picture Show” won two, for the performances of Ms. Leachman and Mr. Johnson.The film catapulted Mr. Bogdanovich to the first rank of Hollywood directors. It also upended his personal life. He left Ms. Platt and their two young children for Ms. Shepherd, embarking on an eight-year relationship that furnished ceaseless grist for Hollywood gossip columns.Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in Mr. Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972).Warner Bros.His professional success continued with “What’s Up, Doc?,” a reworking of Hawks’s 1938 comedy, “Bringing Up Baby,” and again with “Paper Moon.”Set in dust-blown 1930s Kansas, “Paper Moon” brought an Oscar to 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for her performance as a scrappy girl who may or may not be the con man’s daughter. (Despite her divorce from Mr. Bogdanovich, Ms. Platt designed this film and “What’s Up, Doc?”)After the Hits, DudsBut after the wild success of the early 1970s came a string of creative debacles. Two vehicles Mr. Bogdanovich conceived to star Ms. Shepherd incurred critical vitriol: “Daisy Miller,” his 1974 adaptation of Henry James’s 1870s novella, and the musical “At Long Last Love” (1975), also starring Burt Reynolds.“Produced for $15 million, this ‘musical’ was Cole Porter sung by the tone deaf, danced by the afflicted,” The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1990. “Critics compared leading man Burt Reynolds to a wounded buffalo and Shepherd to an orphan trying to play Noël Coward. The picture, which lost $6 million, was Bogdanovich’s ‘Heaven’s Gate.’”His next film, “Nickelodeon” (1976), an overt homage to early cinema starring Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Reynolds, was also critically derided. But there was far worse to come.In the late 1970s, after his romance with Ms. Shepherd had ended, Mr. Bogdanovich met the Playboy model Dorothy Stratten at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. They fell in love, and Ms. Stratten, who was married, left her husband to move in with him.Mr. Bogdanovich gave her a small role in his caper “They All Laughed,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara. But in August 1980, before it was released, her estranged husband, Paul Snider, shot her to death before taking his own life. (The murder of Ms. Stratten, 20 at her death, would be the subject of a 1983 feature film, “Star 80,” directed by Bob Fosse and starring Mariel Hemingway.)Mr. Bogdanovich with Dorothy Stratten, who was also his partner, on the set of his “They All Laughed” (1980). Before the film was released, Ms. Stratten’s estranged husband shot her to death and then took his own life.DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection, via ShutterstockAfterward, Mr. Bogdanovich was reported to have watched “They All Laughed” — which preserves Ms. Stratten’s last film performance — over and over, as if communing with a ghost.Released in 1981, the film was a critical and box-office failure. Dissatisfied with its promotion, Mr. Bogdanovich bought the rights and tried to distribute it himself. It proved a disastrous decision, costing him some $5 million.In 1985, with “$21.37 in the bank and $25.79 in his pocket,” according to court papers, he declared bankruptcy, a move that further marginalized him in Hollywood. In the years that followed, he became, by his own account, addicted to prescription drugs.“I made an enormous number of mistakes,” Mr. Bogdanovich said in a 2004 interview. “You don’t do rational things when somebody blows up an atom bomb at your feet.”One thing he did that he said he came to regret was to write a biography of Ms. Stratten, “The Killing of the Unicorn,” which was equal parts adoration and accusation. Published in 1984, it contended that Mr. Hefner, in commodifying her, had been partly responsible for her death.Mr. Hefner retaliated with a bombshell of his own: He publicly accused Mr. Bogdanovich of having seduced Ms. Stratten’s younger half sister, Louise, shortly after the murder, when Louise was 13, below the age of consent.Mr. Bogdanovich denied the accusation. But it was a matter of record that he paid for Louise’s education; arranged for her to have corrective surgery on her jaw — an act, his detractors said, that was intended to make her look more like her dead sister — and, in 1988, when Louise was 20, married her, causing a frenzy of tabloid opprobrium.Louise Stratten, billed as L.B. Stratten, appeared in several films and TV movies directed by Mr. Bogdanovich. They divorced in 2001.“She was like a contact with Dorothy, as far as I was concerned,” Mr. Bogdanovich, speaking of the marriage, told The New York Times the next year. “There was garbage talk that I made Louise have facial surgery — to look like Dorothy. ‘Vertigo’ stuff.”‘I’m Not Bitter’Mr. Bogdanovich seemed to return to directorial form in 1985 with “Mask,” a well-received picture starring Cher as the mother of a boy with a facial deformity.But he alienated the Hollywood establishment once more by filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the studio, Universal Pictures, and the producer, Martin Starger, for cutting two scenes and substituting music by Bob Seger for the Bruce Springsteen soundtrack that Mr. Bogdanovich favored. (The suit was later withdrawn.)Several critical failures followed, including “Illegally Yours” (1988), a romantic comedy starring Rob Lowe; “Texasville” (1990), a sequel to “The Last Picture Show”; and “The Thing Called Love” (1993), a comedy-drama about country music.In the late 1990s, after declaring bankruptcy again, the down-and-out Mr. Bogdanovich lived for a time in the guesthouse of the young director Quentin Tarantino.From the mid-’90s through the first years of the 21st century, Mr. Bogdanovich resorted to directing for television. His credits include the TV movies “Prowler” (1995) and “Naked City: A Killer Christmas” (1998) and an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney.”But the medium, he said, taught him economy and speed. He returned to the big screen in 2001 with “The Cat’s Meow,” his first feature in nearly a decade. Made for just $6 million, it was shot in only 24 days.Mr. Bogdanovich and Kirsten Dunst on the set of “The Cat’s Meow” (2001), his first feature in nearly a decade.Richard Foreman/Lions Gate FilmsThat film, too, is a paean to old Hollywood. It tells the story — based on a long-suppressed incident that for years ran through the industry in whispers — of a fatal shooting in 1924 aboard the yacht of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.“The Cat’s Meow” — starring Edward Herrmann as Hearst; Kirsten Dunst as his mistress, the silent-film star Marion Davies; and Eddie Izzard as her lover Charlie Chaplin — earned mostly favorable notices.Mr. Bogdanovich’s luster was also restored with his publication of two acclaimed books: “Who the Devil Made It” (1997), a collection of his interviews with eminent directors, and “Who the Hell’s in It” (2004), about great actors and actresses.Later features he directed include “She’s Funny That Way” (2014) and “The Great Buster,” a documentary about Buster Keaton, in 2018.Mr. Bogdanovich in 2005. “Success is very hard,” he said late in his career. “Nobody prepares you for it.”Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressIn addition to his daughter Antonia, he is survived by another daughter, Alexandra (both from his marriage to Ms. Platt); a sister, Anna Bogdanovich; and three grandchildren.Among Mr. Bogdanovich’s other films as a director are “Saint Jack” (1979), starring Mr. Gazzara as an American who aims to open a bordello in Singapore; “Noises Off …” (1992), an adaptation of a play by Michael Frayn; and the documentary “Directed by John Ford” (1971).In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bogdanovich offered a cleareyed appraisal of his career.“I’m not bitter,” he said. “I asked for it. Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do. Pride goeth before the fall.”But when it came to one of his detractors, at least, Mr. Bogdanovich appeared to have the last laugh. His later-life acting roles included two appearances, in 2005 and 2007, on the NBC series “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”In both episodes, Mr. Bogdanovich, always a wicked mimic, played to the hilt a sybaritic, smoking-jacket-clad, thinly veiled incarnation of Hugh Hefner.Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      Dwayne Hickman, TV’s Lovelorn Dobie Gillis, Is Dead at 87

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      He went on to appear in movies and other TV shows and to work as a television executive, but the role of Dobie would dog him for decades.Dwayne Hickman, the affable, apple-cheeked actor whose starring role in the revered sitcom “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” would dog him for more than half a century, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 87. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, a spokesman for his family said. Broadcast on CBS from 1959 to 1963, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” was an essential ingredient of adolescence for the postwar generation and remained popular in syndication for years. Mr. Hickman became one of TV’s first teenage idols for his portrayal of its lovelorn hero, and he remained indelibly identified with the character ever after, a fate he bore with genial resignation.“Dobie Gillis” followed the fortunes of its hero, his friends and family in Central City, a community whose precise location was never specified but that in all its wholesomeness seemed eminently Midwestern.Dobie, 17 when the show begins, is Everyteen. (Early in the series, Mr. Hickman’s brown hair was bleached blond to make him look as cornfed as possible, until the peroxide treatments began to make his hair fall out.) He pines ardently, in the words of the show’s jazzy theme song, for “a girl to call his own,” and just as ardently for the financial wherewithal to squire that girl around.For all its well-scrubbed chastity, the series marked a quietly subversive departure from the standard television fare of the day. It was among the first to place the topical subject of teenagerhood front and center by recounting the story from a teenager’s point of view. It broke the fourth wall weekly, opening with a monologue in which Mr. Hickman, seated in front of a replica of Rodin’s “Thinker,” gave viewers a guided tour of his gently angst-ridden soul.Many well-known actors received early exposure on the series, notably Bob Denver as Dobie’s best friend, Maynard G. Krebs, a scruffy junior beatnik who yelps “Work!” at the merest suggestion that he seek gainful employment. Mr. Denver would go on to star in “Gilligan’s Island.”Tuesday Weld was seen regularly as the beautiful, avaricious Thalia Menninger, the financially unattainable object of Dobie’s affections; Warren Beatty had a recurring role early in the run as a blue-blood classmate. Dobie’s cantankerous, tightfisted father and sweet, harebrained mother were played by the characters actors Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus. His deeply intellectual classmate Zelda, aflame with unrequited love for Dobie, was portrayed by Sheila James. (Under her full name, Sheila James Kuehl, she became, in 1994, the first openly gay person to be elected to the California state legislature.)Mr. Hickman had begun his screen career — reluctantly — some two decades earlier, trailing in the footsteps of his brother, Darryl, three years older and initially far better known. Darryl Hickman, whose fame was eventually eclipsed by Dwayne’s, would play Dobie’s big brother, Davey, in a few episodes of the show’s first season.Mr. Hickman, center, with Mr. Denver and Sheila James in a “Dobie Gillis” reunion special in the 1980s.CBSBy the time “Dobie Gillis” ran its course, Dwayne Hickman had become so closely identified with the title character that he had difficulty landing other roles. He was too old by then to play a teenager in any case: He had been 25 when “Dobie” began and was 29 when it ended.As a result, his career over the following decades wove in and out of Hollywood, embracing stints as the entertainment director for Howard Hughes’s Landmark Hotel in Las Vegas, an advertising man, a network programming executive and, in later years, a successful painter of realist landscapes.But for decades after his series ended, Mr. Hickman could scarcely walk down an American street without a stranger stopping, staring and joyfully calling out, “Hi, Dobie!” as if greeting a long-lost friend.Dwayne Bernard Hickman was born in Los Angeles on May 18, 1934. His father, Milton, was an insurance man; his mother, the former Louise Ostertag, had had designs on stardom herself, but, as Louise Lang, made it only as far as extra work in a few Hollywood pictures.As an adult, Mr. Hickman said that he had never planned on an acting career and had never particularly wanted one. He landed his first screen role by accident, when his mother brought him along to Darryl’s audition for “The Grapes of Wrath,” the 1940 Henry Fonda vehicle. Darryl won a part as one of the Joad children; Dwayne was cast as an extra, earning $21. Dwayne’s other childhood screen appearances included roles on the TV series “Public Defender,” “The Loretta Young Show” and “The Lone Ranger” and in the films “The Boy With Green Hair” (1948) and “Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!” (1958), based on a novel by Max Shulman, the creator of “Dobie Gillis.” He received his broadest exposure yet when he was cast in “The Bob Cummings Show” (also called “Love That Bob”) as Chuck, the nephew of Mr. Cummings’s character; the series was broadcast variously on NBC and CBS from 1955 to 1959. While working on that show, he was also a full-time student at what is now Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Though the demands of his screen career caused him to leave before graduating, he later returned and completed a bachelor’s degree in economics there.Once Mr. Hickman became a nationwide heartthrob as Dobie — other actors considered for the role had included Tab Hunter and Michael Landon — his handlers attempted to cash in by turning him into a singing star. By his own ready admission Mr. Hickman could not sing. The two resulting albums, “School Dance” and “Dobie,” he later wrote, “didn’t exactly top the Billboard charts. ”Mr. Hickman in 1965.  Starting in 1977, he spent a decade as a program executive at CBS, and he later directed episodes of several TV shows, including “Charles in Charge” and “Designing Women.” Graphic House/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesHis post-“Dobie” credits include the film “Cat Ballou,” with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin, but consist mostly of trifles like “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (1965); two TV reunions, “Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?” (1977) and “Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis” (1988); and, in the 1990s, a recurring role on the series “Clueless.”Starting in 1977, Mr. Hickman spent a decade as a program executive at CBS, where he supervised the content and development of series including “Maude,” “Good Times,” “M*A*S*H” and “Alice.” He directed episodes of several TV shows, including “Charles in Charge” and “Designing Women.”Mr. Hickman’s first marriage, to Carol Christensen, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Joanne Papile. His survivors include his third wife, Joan Roberts Hickman; their son, Albert; and a son, John, from his first marriage.In his 1994 memoir, “Forever Dobie: The Many Lives of Dwayne Hickman,” written with Ms. Roberts Hickman, Mr. Hickman recounts what happened when he took her to the hospital to await the birth of their son. “When I walked into the labor room, a nurse was asking her questions as she filled out her chart,” he wrote. “When she finished, she looked up and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Gillis, I’ll be back in a few minutes.’’Mr. Hickman continued: “Joan grabbed my hand and said, ‘Promise that if anything happens to me you won’t name this boy Dobie!’ ” More

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      Marilyn Bergman, Half of an Oscar-Winning Songwriting Duo, Dies at 93

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      With her husband, Alan, she wrote the lyrics to “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind,” as well as a number of memorable TV themes.Marilyn Bergman, who with her husband, Alan Bergman, gave the world memorable lyrics about “misty watercolor memories” and “the windmills of your mind” and won three Academy Awards, died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 93. A spokesman, Ken Sunshine, said the cause was respiratory failure.The Bergmans’ lyrics, set to melodies by composers like Marvin Hamlisch and Michel Legrand, were not everywhere, but it sometimes seemed that way. For many years their words were also heard every week over the opening credits to hit television shows like “Maude,” “Good Times” and “Alice.”The Bergmans and Mr. Hamlisch won the 1974 best-song Academy Award for “The Way We Were,” from the Robert Redford-Barbra Streisand romance of the same name. (The album of that movie’s score also won the Bergmans their only Grammy Award.) Their other best-song winner, “The Windmills of Your Mind” (“Round, like a circle in a spiral/Like a wheel within a wheel”), was written with Mr. Legrand for the 1968 film “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Their third Oscar was for the score of Ms. Streisand’s 1983 film “Yentl,” also written with Mr. Legrand.The Bergmans with Barbra Streisand at the premiere of “Yentl” in New York in 1983. They shared an Oscar with Michel Legrand for that film’s score.Ron Galella/Barbra Streisand, via ReutersAside from the Oscar winners, their other popular songs included the title track of Frank Sinatra’s album “Nice ’n’ Easy,” written with the songwriter Lew Spence; the poignant ballad “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life,” from the 1969 movie “The Happy Ending,” with music by Mr. Legrand; and “Where Do You Start?,” written with Johnny Mandel and covered by artists like Tony Bennett, Michael Feinstein and Ms. Streisand.Ms. Streisand released an album of the Bergmans’ songs, “What Matters Most,” in 2011. The compilation “Sinatra Sings Alan & Marilyn Bergman” was released in 2019.Television was a significant part of the Bergmans’ careers as well. They won three Emmy Awards: for the score of the 1976 TV movie “Sybil,” written with Leonard Rosenman; the song “Ordinary Miracles,” written with Mr. Hamlisch and performed by Ms. Streisand in a 1995 concert special; and “A Ticket to Dream,” another Hamlisch collaboration, written for the American Film Institute’s 1998 special “100 Years … 100 Movies.”But their lyrics were probably heard far more often by viewers of popular late-20th-century television series. They wrote the words to the bouncy theme songs for the hit sitcoms “Maude,” “Alice” and “Good Times,” as well as the themes for the nostalgic comedy series “Brooklyn Bridge” and the drama series “In the Heat of the Night.” Their hit “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” best known as a duet by Neil Diamond (who wrote the music) and Ms. Streisand, was originally written for Norman Lear’s short-lived series “All That Glitters.” Early in her career, Ms. Bergman was one of relatively few women in the songwriting business. In a 2007 interview with NPR, she recalled attending meetings of the performance rights organization ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) at which the only women “would be me and a lot of the widows of songwriters who were representing their husbands’ estates.” She was the first woman to serve as president of ASCAP, a position she held from 1994 to 2009.The Bergmans in 1980. “Our experiences in the theater and film have shown us that the two require entirely different kinds of writing,” Ms. Bergman once said, and movies were always the couple’s first love.Associated PressMarilyn Katz was born on Nov. 10, 1928, in the same Brooklyn hospital where Alan Bergman had been born four years earlier. The daughter of Edith (Arkin) and Albert Katz, she attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, now LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.A school friend introduced her to an uncle, Bob Russell, who wrote the lyrics to the Duke Ellington hit “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and would later write the lyrics to “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” Marilyn regularly went to his home after school to play piano for him as he wrote.By the time she had earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and English from New York University, she had set aside ideas of a music career and planned to become a psychologist. But a fateful accident sent her back to the arts.In 1956 she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her shoulder. Seeking help during her recuperation, she flew to Los Angeles to stay with her parents, who had moved there. So had Mr. Russell, and when she looked him up he suggested that she do some songwriting herself. Unable to play the piano because of her injury, she recalled many years later, she could not compose and so decided to write lyrics instead.Working under the name Marilyn Keith, she took a job with Mr. Spence, who also worked with Alan Bergman. Mr. Spence introduced the two, and their musical partnership began immediately. They were married two years later.Asked in 2010 on the television program “CBS News Sunday Morning” how she and Mr. Bergman managed to work together while staying married, she said: “The way porcupines make love. Carefully.”Ms. Bergman’s husband survives her, as do their daughter, Julie Bergman, and a granddaughter.In a 2002 interview with American Songwriter magazine, Ms. Bergman defined the difference between an amateur and professional songwriter as “the ability to rewrite” and “not to have fallen so in love with what you have written that you can’t find a better way.”The Bergmans were inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980 and jointly received a Trustees Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2013.Although best known for their movie and television work, the Bergmans did try writing for the Broadway stage, although they did not have much success. “Something More!,” starring Barbara Cook and Arthur Hill, for which they wrote the lyrics and Sammy Fain wrote the music, lasted less than two weeks in 1964. They fared better, but not by much, in 1978 with “Ballroom,” an adaptation of the 1975 TV movie “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom” with music by Billy Goldenberg. Despite being produced and directed by Michael Bennett, whose previous Broadway show had been the monster hit “A Chorus Line,” “Ballroom” closed after three months.“Our experiences in the theater and film,” Ms. Bergman told The New York Times in 1982, “have shown us that the two require entirely different kinds of writing.” And movies were always the couple’s first love.“We found we must be more abstract when writing for film,” she said, “because film really speaks more to the preconscious part of the brain, the part of us that dreams.” More

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      Stephen Lawrence, Whose Music Enriched ‘Sesame Street,’ Dies at 82

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      He composed the title song of the landmark album “Free to Be … You and Me.” He then moved on to Big Bird and friends.Stephen Lawrence, who provided a soundtrack of sorts for countless childhoods as the music director for the landmark “Free to Be … You and Me” album and television special and as a longtime composer for “Sesame Street,” died on Dec. 30 at a medical center in Belleville, N.J. He was 82.His wife, Cathy (Merritt) Lawrence, said the cause was multiple organ failure.Mr. Lawrence had a gift for catchy tunes and song constructions that would appeal to young minds.“One of the most effective devices, and for children one of the most important, is repetition,” he wrote in “How to Compose Music for Children,” an essay on his blog. “Did you write a first line you like? Why not repeat it?”The essay went on to show how composers from Beethoven to John Lennon had done just that, and Mr. Lawrence employed the device often on “Sesame Street” classics like “Fuzzy and Blue (and Orange),” a jaunty 1981 number with lyrics by David Axelrod.One of Mr. Lawrence’s most captivating tunes was also one of his first for the children’s market: the title track of “Free to Be … You and Me,” the star-studded 1972 album and book conceived by Marlo Thomas. The record, full of songs and stories celebrating tolerance and busting gender stereotypes, became an enduring hit and was recently selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry of culturally significant works.Mr. Lawrence, working with the lyricist Bruce Hart, was given the task of coming up with the opening number. A memorable folk melody recorded by the New Seekers, it begins with a banjo, an instrument not often heard in the pop and rock music of that time.“Banjo was perfect for the introduction of this song,” Mr. Lawrence said on the radio program “Soundcheck” in an interview marking the 40th anniversary of the album. “It is sort of timeless. It says joy. It says non-sophistication — although some of the album is quite sophisticated. It says: ‘Listen up. This is an unusual instrument you don’t hear every day. It’s going to set up a song you’re going to like.’”Ms. Thomas had recruited a formidable roster of stars to perform on the record. In addition to writing the music for several of the songs, Mr. Lawrence, as the project’s music director, had the task of overseeing recording sessions. That meant working with a quirky array of performers, some of them professional singers and some of them, like Mel Brooks and the football player Rosey Grier, not.Mr. Lawrence was a relative unknown at the time. Recording Diana Ross singing “When We Grow Up” (another “Free to Be” song for which he wrote the music) at Motown’s studios in Los Angeles provided him with a pinch-myself moment.“I arrived at Motown Studios and thought about the many famous recording artists who had recorded there, none more famous than Diana Ross,” he wrote on his blog. “I realized that the entire ‘Free to Be’ project was lifting my career to new heights.”The album was a runaway best seller, and Mr. Lawrence went on to compose more than 300 songs for “Sesame Street.” Beginning in 1989, he was nominated repeatedly, along with the show’s other composers and lyricists, for Daytime Emmy Awards for music direction and composition. He won three times.Mr. Lawrence didn’t work only on children’s material. He composed the music for the 1973 baseball drama “Bang the Drum Slowly,” the 1976 horror movie “Alice, Sweet Alice” and other films, and collaborated on several stage musicals.Ms. Thomas, though, said he was the perfect choice to reach young audiences.“‘Free to Be … You and Me’ was first and always a children’s project,” she said by email, “so it required a composer and musical director who could create songs that sparked the imaginations and touched the hearts of girls and boys everywhere. Stephen was that person. I loved him and I loved working with him.”Stephen James Lawrence was born on Sept. 5, 1939, in Manhattan. His father, Allan, was head of a manufacturing company, and his mother, Helen (Kupfer) Lawrence, was a homemaker.He grew up in Great Neck, on Long Island. He started taking piano lessons at 5, and at 17 he won a New York radio station’s jazz piano contest; the prize was lessons with the pianist Mary Lou Williams.While majoring in music at Hofstra College (now Hofstra University), where he graduated in 1961, he composed music for student shows and other entertainments. One was a musical, “The Delicate Touch”; the book and lyrics were by a fellow student, Francis Ford Coppola.Mr. Lawrence came to the “Free to Be” project through Mr. Hart, with whom he had written some songs and whose wife, Carole Hart, was producing the project with Ms. Thomas. The two women asked Mr. Hart and Mr. Lawrence to come up with a song that would introduce the album and convey what it was about. It was Mr. Hart who came up with the phrase “Free to be you and me” and built that idea into a full song lyric, which he presented to Mr. Lawrence.Marlo Thomas and friends in a scene from the 1974 television special “Free to Be … You and Me,” based on the record album of the same name. Mr. Lawrence was the music director for both.“As sometimes happens,” Mr. Lawrence recalled in his blog, “I got an idea right away and completed the song in one day.”The label, Bell Records, told the group to expect to sell about 15,000 copies. Instead sales soared past the million mark. A 1974 television version, with Mr. Lawrence as music director, added to the phenomenon.The Harts (he died in 2006, she in 2018) and Mr. Lawrence worked together on other projects, including the 1979 television movie “Sooner or Later,” which yielded the Rex Smith hit “You Take My Breath Away,” written by Mr. Hart and Mr. Lawrence.Mr. Lawrence began writing for “Sesame Street” in the early 1980s and continued to do so for years. The job gave him a chance to indulge in a wide assortment of musical styles. One of his earliest compositions for the show was “Kermit’s Minstrel Song” (1981, lyrics by Mr. Axelrod), which called to mind Renaissance-era tunes. Ms. Lawrence said one of her favorites was “Gina’s Dream” (lyrics by Jon Stone), in which Mr. Lawrence did a pretty good job of imitating Puccini.Mr. Lawrence lived in Bloomfield, N.J. His marriage to Christine Jones ended in divorce in 2000. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Hannah Jones Anderson; Ms. Lawrence’s sons, Sam and Nicholas Kline; and a grandson. More

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      Max Julien, Star of a Cult Blaxploitation Film, Dies at 88

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      Black audiences flocked to see him in “The Mack,” and generations of cinephiles have paid homage to his star turn, his smooth delivery and his extraordinary costumes.Max Julien, the sultry, soft-voiced actor and screenwriter who rose to pop-culture prominence with his starring role in “The Mack,” a 1973 film about the rise and fall of a pimp, died on Jan. 1 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 88.His wife, Arabella Chavers Julien, said the cause was cardiopulmonary arrest.“The Mack” is the story of Goldie, a young man who is framed and sent to jail, and who upon his release aims to make his fortune and his name by becoming a pimp. (The word “mack” is an Americanization of “maquereau,” French street slang for pimp.) It’s a hero’s journey, played out on the mean streets of Oakland, Calif., a real-life war zone in the early 1970s presided over by Black crime lords and Black militants, who battled each other for turf.Mr. Julien’s Goldie had a gentle gravitas and a kinetic sidekick, portrayed by Richard Pryor. Mr. Julien said that he and Mr. Pryor, working off a story written in prison by an actual convict, wrote much of the screenplay, though they did not receive credit onscreen.In the decades since its release, “The Mack” has accrued legions of devotees who can recite its lines verbatim. Artists like Snoop Dogg, Too Short and others have sampled its dialogue in their work. Quentin Tarantino paid homage to it in his script for the 1993 film “True Romance.” In 2013, when the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art held a screening in honor of the film’s 40th anniversary, Mr. Tarantino lent his vintage 35-millimeter print.“The film is a blaxploitation classic,” Todd Boyd, chair for the study of race and popular culture at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, said in an interview. Part of the film’s legend is that Oakland’s crime boss, Frank Ward, gave the filmmakers his protection so they could shoot there. (He has a cameo as himself, dispensing pimp wisdom in a barbershop scene as a barber tends to his kingly locks.) The movie’s vernacular and its rituals were authentic, and they still fascinate, as do the clothes.Goldie’s single-breasted white fur maxi-coat was a character in its own right. (Years later, Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul, would offer Mr. Julien $10,000 for it, Mr. Julien told The Los Angeles Times in 2004. It now lives in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.) Mr. Julien had a hand in the film’s costumes and made sure they were crafted by local Black clothing designers, he said in a 2002 documentary about the film.The white fur maxi-coat worn by Mr. Julien’s character in “The Mack” is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureWhile the blaxploitation genre was problematic for some — Junius Griffin, then president of the Hollywood branch of the N.A.A.C.P., coined the term and described its themes as “just another form of cultural genocide” — urban Black audiences flocked to movies like “The Mack.” (The Los Angeles Times noted in 2013 that it was released in only 20-odd theaters in African American communities but quoted its director, Michael Campus, as saying it did better in those cities than “The Godfather” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”)Such movies “were critic-proof,” Dr. Boyd said. “People were not reading Pauline Kael reviews to determine if they should go see these films.”Melvin Van Peebles had set the tone with “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” his independently made 1971 box-office hit about a performer in a sex show turned revolutionary. Gordon Parks’s “Shaft,” less transgressive but still wildly popular, appeared the same year.By the late 1970s, the blaxploitation category had fizzled out. A decade later, young cinephiles and hip-hop artists would devour VHS tapes of “The Mack” and other gems from that era — a trove of movies with powerful Black imagery that also included “Super Fly” and “Black Caesar.”“Because of Hollywood’s racism,” Dr. Boyd said, “at the time there was just not that much else. And the tale of an underworld figure like Goldie, working outside the system, was enormously appealing to the young rising stars of a new musical genre, gangsta rap.”Mr. Julien worked as a screenwriter, too. “Cleopatra Jones” (1973), which he wrote, featured a different kind of hero, on the right side of the law. It starred the statuesque Tamara Dobson as a machine-gun-toting, martial-arts-swirling model and undercover agent on a mission to rid her community of drugs. (Shelley Winters played a drug lord named Mommy.)He also wrote “Thomasine & Bushrod,” a lightly feminist western, released in 1974, and starred in it with Vonetta McGee, his girlfriend at the time. The film brings to mind a sweeter and goofier version of the 1967 movie “Bonnie & Clyde.” Mr. Julien said he was inspired by the exploits of a great-grandfather, a bank robber named Bushrod, to turn his family history into a love story.Maxwell Julien Banks was born on July 12, 1933, in Washington. His father, Seldon Bushrod Banks, was an airline mechanic. His mother, Cora (Page) Banks, was a restaurant owner. She was murdered in her home in 1972, and Mr. Julien said that his grief over her death influenced his performance in “The Mack.”He won a basketball scholarship to Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., where he spent a year before transferring to Howard University. He joined the Air Force in 1955 and served as an air traffic controller before beginning his acting career. He took his middle name as his stage name because he felt it sounded more theatrical than Banks.Mr. Julien played a Black militant in “Getting Straight,” a much-panned 1970 drama about campus unrest starring Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, and appeared in “Uptight,” a 1968 update of the 1935 movie “The Informer” written by Ruby Dee and directed by Jules Dassin. He also acted on television. He and Ms. Chavers Julien married in 1991. She is his only immediate survivor.As much as Mr. Julien enjoyed the accolades from generations of “The Mack” fans — he appeared as a suave, pimplike elder in the 1997 comedy “How To Be a Player” — he told Dr. Boyd that he often felt his Goldie character overshadowed his own persona.Mr. Julien and Vonetta McGee in the 1974 film “Thomasine & Bushrod,” for which he wrote the screenplay. He said he was inspired by the exploits of a great-grandfather who was a bank robber to turn his family history into a love story. Columbia Pictures, via PhotofestEarly on, he also disliked the term “blaxploitation,” which he felt diminished his work.“The average white audience has had opportunities to explore every facet of their existence by now,” he told The Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1974, the year “Thomasine & Bushrod” was released. “No one ever talks about white exploitation films. If ‘The Sting’ had been done by Ron O’Neal” — the star of “Super Fly” — “and Max Julien, everyone would have called it Black exploitation. A 10-year-old kid came up to us in Baltimore and thanked us for making the picture. He said he’d read about Black cowboys all his life, but didn’t believe it until he saw it on the screen.”He added: “Blacks didn’t want to see ‘Sounder’” — the 1972 film taken from the book of the same name about a poor Black boy, his dog and the grim travails of his sharecropping family in the 1930s. “That’s not the image they want. They’ve seen that image all their life.” More

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      Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94

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      The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No cause was given.Sidney Poitier was the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry.Matt Sayles/Associated PressMr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.Mr. Poitier with, from left, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967). He played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws.Columbia Pictures“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him. In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), a racial fable that established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, he was a prisoner on the run, handcuffed to a fellow convict (and virulent racist) played by Tony Curtis. The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert. Mr. Poitier and Lilia Skala in “Lilies of the Field” (1963), for which Mr. Poitier won an Oscar. United ArtistsIn 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. “In the Heat of Night” placed him opposite Rod Steiger, as an indolent, bigoted sheriff, with whom Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia detective played by Mr. Poitier, must work on a murder investigation in Mississippi. (In an indelible line, the detective insists on the sheriff’s respect when he declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”) In “To Sir, With Love” he was a concerned teacher in a tough London high school, and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a taboo-breaking film about an interracial couple, he played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote.Mr. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, but he was born on Feb. 20, 1927, in Miami, where his parents traveled regularly to sell their tomato crop. The youngest of nine children, he wore clothes made from flour sacks and never saw a car, looked in a mirror or tasted ice cream until his father, Reginald, moved the family from Cat Island to Nassau in 1937 after Florida banned the import of Bahamian tomatoes.When he was 12, Mr. Poitier quit school and became a water boy for a crew of pick-and-shovel laborers. He also began getting into mischief, and his parents, worried that he was becoming a juvenile delinquent, sent him to Miami when he was 14 to live with a married brother, Cyril.Mr. Poitier played a Philadelphia detective and Rod Steiger played a bigoted Mississippi sheriff in “In the Heat of Night,” one of three hit films in which Mr. Poitier appeared in 1967.Mirisch/United Artists, The Kobal CollectionMr. Poitier had known nothing of segregation growing up on Cat Island, so the rules governing American Black people in the South came as a shock. “It was all over the place like barbed wire,” he later said of American racism. “And I kept running into it and lacerating myself.”In less than a year he fled Miami for New York, arriving with $3 and change in his pocket. He took jobs washing dishes and working as a ditch digger, waterfront laborer and delivery man in the garment district. Life was grim. During a race riot in Harlem, he was shot in the leg. He saved his nickels so that on cold nights he could sleep in pay toilets.In late 1943 Mr. Poitier lied about his age and enlisted in the Army, becoming an orderly with the 1267th Medical Detachment at a veterans hospital on Long Island. Feigning a mental disorder, he obtained a discharge in 1945 and returned to New York, where he read in The Amsterdam News that the American Negro Theater was looking for actors.His first audition was a flop. With only a few years of schooling, he read haltingly, in a heavy West Indian accent. Frederick O’Neal, a founder of the theater, showed him the door and advised him to get a job as a dishwasher.Undeterred, Mr. Poitier bought a radio and practiced speaking English as he heard it from a variety of staff announcers. A kindly fellow worker at the restaurant where he washed dishes helped him with his reading. Mr. Poitier finally won a place in the theater’s acting school, but only after he volunteered to work as a janitor without pay.His lucky break came when another actor at the theater, Harry Belafonte, did not show up for a rehearsal attended by a Broadway producer. Mr. Poitier took the stage instead and was given a part in an all-Black production of “Lysistrata” in 1946. Although panned by the critics, it led to a job with the road production of “Anna Lucasta.”“No Way Out” was followed by a sprinkling of film and television roles, but Mr. Poitier still bounced between acting jobs and menial work.In 1951 he married Juanita Marie Hardy, a dancer and model, whom he divorced in 1965. They had four daughters, Beverly, Pamela, Sherri and Gina. In 1976 he married Joanna Shimkus, his co-star in “The Lost Man” (1969), a film about a gang of Black militants plotting to rob a factory. They had two daughters, Anika and Sydney.Ms. Shimkus survives him. His daughter Gina Patrice Poitier Gouraige died in 2018. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Poitier with Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones” (1958), which established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.United ArtistsAfter breakout movies like “Blackboard Jungle” and “The Defiant Ones,” Mr. Poitier’s fate was tied to Hollywood, his purpose to expand the boundaries of racial tolerance. “The explanation for my career was that I was instrumental for those few filmmakers who had a social conscience,” he later wrote.In “The Defiant Ones” and “In the Heat of the Night,” racial politics coincided with meaty roles. Just as often, however, Mr. Poitier found himself playing virtuous messengers of racial harmony in mawkish films like “A Patch of Blue” (1965) or taking race-neutral roles in less than memorable films, like a newspaper reporter in the Cold War naval drama “The Bedford Incident” (1965), Simon of Cyrene in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965) or the former cavalry sergeant in “Duel at Diablo” (1966). “The Defiant Ones” remained one of Mr. Poitier’s favorite films, but to get the part he had to cross swords with Samuel Goldwyn, who was assembling a cast for “Porgy and Bess.” After Mr. Belafonte turned down the role of Porgy as demeaning, Mr. Goldwyn set his sights on Mr. Poitier, who also regarded the musical as an insult to Black people. As Mr. Poitier told it in his lively, unusually frank first memoir, “This Life” (1980), Mr. Goldwyn pulled strings to ensure that unless Mr. Poitier played Porgy, the director Stanley Kramer would not hire him for “The Defiant Ones.”Mr. Poitier, seething, bowed to the inevitable. “I didn’t enjoy doing it, and I have not yet completely forgiven myself,” he told The New York Times in 1967.The critics who would later accuse him of bowing and scraping before the white establishment seemed to dismiss Mr. Poitier’s longstanding, outspoken advocacy for racial justice and the civil rights movement, most visibly as part of a Hollywood contingent that took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Early in his career, his association with left-wing causes and his friendship with the radical singer and actor Paul Robeson made him a politically risky proposition for film and television producers.His style, however, remained low-key and nonconfrontational. “As for my part in all this,” he wrote, “all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role.”Mr. Poitier with Claudia McNeil in the 1959 Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Reviewing his performance, Brooks Atkinson of The Times wrote, “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control.”Leo FriedmanIn 1959 Mr. Poitier made a triumphant return to Broadway in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” winning ecstatic reviews. “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “Cast as the restless son, he vividly communicates the tumult of a high-strung young man. He is as eloquent when he has nothing to say as when he has a pungent line to speak. He can convey devious processes of thought as graphically as he can clown and dance.” Mr. Poitier repeated the role in the 1961 film version of the play.With the rise of Black filmmakers like Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Poitier, now in his 40s, turned to directing and producing. He had proposed the idea for the romantic comedy “For Love of Ivy” (1968), in which he starred with Abbey Lincoln. After joining with Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand in 1969 to form a production company called First Artists, he directed the western “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), in which he acted opposite Mr. Belafonte, and a series of comedies, notably “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974) and “Let’s Do It Again” (1975), in which Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby teamed up to play a pair of scheming ne’er-do-wells, and “Stir Crazy” (1980), with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.The critics thought little of Mr. Poitier’s directing talents, but enthusiastic audiences, Black and white, made all three films box-office hits. Neither audiences nor critics found much to like in subsequent directorial efforts, like the comedy “Hanky Panky” (1982), with Mr. Wilder and Gilda Radner, or “Ghost Dad” (1990), with Mr. Cosby as a dead father who refuses to leave his three children alone.President Barack Obama presented Mr. Poitier with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his later years, Mr. Poitier turned in solid performances in forgettable action films and thrillers like “Shoot to Kill” (1988), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “Sneakers” (1992). It was television that provided him with two of his grandest roles.In 1991 he appeared in the lead role in the ABC drama “Separate but Equal,” a dramatization of the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. In 1997 he delivered a widely praised performance as Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and de Klerk,” a television movie focusing on the final years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment by the white-minority government in South Africa, with Michael Caine in the role of President F.W. de Klerk.“Sidney Poitier and Nelson Mandela merge with astonishing ease, like a double-exposure photograph in which one image is laid over the other with perfect symmetry,” Caryn James wrote in a review in The New York Times.In 2002, Mr. Poitier was given an honorary Oscar for his career’s work in motion picture. (At that same Oscar ceremony, Denzel Washington became the first Black actor since Mr. Poitier to win the best-actor award, for “Training Day.”) He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1995. And in 2009, President Barack Obama, citing his “relentless devotion to breaking down barriers,” awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Mr. Poitier was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974.Mr. Poitier’s memoir “This Life” was followed by a second, “The Measure of a Man,” in 2000. Subtitled “A Spiritual Autobiography,” it included Mr. Poitier’s thoughts on life, love, acting and racial politics. It generated a sequel, “Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter” (2008).Despite his role in changing American perceptions of race and opening the door to a new generation of Black actors, Mr. Poitier remained modest about his career. “History will pinpoint me as merely a minor element in an ongoing major event, a small if necessary energy,” he wrote. “But I am nonetheless gratified at having been chosen.” Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More

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      Harry Colomby, Teacher Who Aided a Jazz Great’s Career, Dies at 92

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      A chance encounter with Thelonious Monk led to a 14-year stint as his manager. After seeing a young Michael Keaton at a stand-up club, he became his manager, too.Harry Colomby was a schoolteacher with a love of jazz when he stopped by the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village in 1955 to remind the drummer Art Blakey that he and his band, the Jazz Messengers, were scheduled to perform in a few days at the school where Mr. Colomby taught.While waiting, Mr. Colomby greeted the celebrated composer and pianist Thelonious Monk; they had met once before. “Oh, Harry. Yeah, I remember you,” Mr. Colomby recalled him saying, as detailed in the liner notes to the live 1965 Monk album “Misterioso.” “Say, you got your car here? You can drive me uptown?”In the car, Monk asked if Mr. Colomby was ready to quit teaching. “So I drove Thelonious to his house at 2:30 in the morning and at 3 a.m., a half-hour later, became his personal manager,” he wrote. “I’m still not sure how it happened.”Mr. Colomby’s younger brother, Bobby, the original drummer with Blood, Sweat & Tears and later a record producer and an executive at several record companies, said in a phone interview that Monk viewed Harry as someone who was “bright, honest and would work hard,” adding, “Harry told him, ‘I can’t promise you you’ll be rich, but you’ll be appreciated as an artist.’”Thelonious Monk in 1961. “I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician,” Mr. Colomby said. “He was potentially a symbol.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMr. Colomby died on Dec. 25 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 92. His brother confirmed the death.When Mr. Colomby began working with Monk, he was little known beyond the jazz cognoscenti and his unorthodox approach divided critics. He was also rarely heard in New York City because he lacked a cabaret card, which in those days was needed to perform in bars and nightclubs there; he had not had one since 1951, when it was revoked because of a drug arrest. In 1957, Mr. Colomby helped Monk get his card back. His subsequent extended engagement at the Five Spot in the East Village was the beginning of his emergence as a jazz star.For most of the 14 years that he managed Monk from obscurity to renown, Mr. Colomby taught English and social studies at high schools in Brooklyn, Queens and Plainview, on Long Island. “I had no illusion about how much money there is in jazz,” Mr. Colomby told the historian Robin D.G. Kelley for his biography “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original” (2009). “But I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician. He was potentially a symbol. He was symbolic of strength, stick-to-it-iveness, purity, you know, beyond music, beyond jazz.”Harry Golombek was born on Aug. 20, 1929, in Berlin, and fled with his parents and his brother Jules to New York City in the spring of 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. Family members who had immigrated earlier to the United States changed their surname to Colomby. His father, Saul, who became Fred in the United States, started a watchmaking company in Manhattan. His mother, Elsie (Ries) Colomby, worked there.After graduating from New York University in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Harry began his teaching career.As a manager, Mr. Colomby had only four clients: Monk; the singer and pianist Mose Allison; the comedian and impressionist John Byner; and the actor Michael Keaton.Mr. Byner said that he met Mr. Colomby in the early 1960s at a John F. Kennedy impression contest. “He was fantastic,” he said in a phone interview. “He knew everybody.” But they parted in 1986 because Mr. Colomby became focused on his business with Mr. Keaton.“He left me for another guy,” Mr. Byner said.Mr. Colomby first encountered Mr. Keaton, then a stand-up comic, performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood in the late 1970s.“What I saw in Michael was something original,” Mr. Colomby told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I also saw charisma onstage. Something about his look and timing was exquisite.”Mr. Colomby was also the producer or executive producer of starring vehicles for Mr. Keaton including the television series “Working Stiffs” (1979) and “Report to Murphy” (1982) and the films “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Johnny Dangerously” (1984) and “One Good Cop” (1991).In addition to his brother Bobby, Mr. Colomby is survived by his wife, Lee, and his son, the actor Scott Colomby. His brother Jules, who briefly ran a jazz record company, Signal, died in the 1990s.Mr. Keaton was Mr. Colomby’s client for about 25 years, and the two remained friends afterward.“What we shared was, we saw things in an offbeat way and we’d talk for hours and make each other laugh,” Mr. Keaton said in a phone interview. “I was probably the only stand-up whose manager was funnier than he was.” More