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      Jane Powell, Hollywood’s Girl Next Door, Is Dead at 92

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      Typecast from the outset, she was a star of movie musicals before she was out of her teens. But her big-screen career peaked when she was in her 20s.Jane Powell, whose pert good looks and lyrical soprano voice brought her Hollywood stardom before she was out of her teens — but whose movie career peaked when she was still in her 20s with a starring role in one of the last great MGM musicals, the 1954 extravaganza “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” — died on Thursday at her home in Wilton, Conn. She was 92. Susan Granger, her friend, confirmed the death.Ms. Powell, who was just over five feet tall and retained the guileless features of an innocent teenager well past adolescence, found herself typecast from the outset.Ms. Powell in Los Angeles, in 1944, the year her first film, “Song of the Open Road,” was released. “I should have been the happiest girl in the world,” she said of becoming a movie star in her teens. “Well, I wasn’t.”Associated PressShe was only 15 when her first film, “Song of the Open Road” (1944), was released. She played a disenchanted young film star who finds happiness when she runs away from home and joins a group of young people picking crops while adult farmworkers are at war. The film is noteworthy mostly because the name of the character she played, Jane Powell, became hers as well when the movie was released. She was born Suzanne Lorraine Burce. Ms. Powell had already been signed by MGM, but the studio lent her to United Artists for “Song of the Open Road.” Her first several MGM movies were mostly forgettable musicals, with slender story lines that were little more than frameworks for the songs.In “Holiday in Mexico” (1946), she played the daughter of the American ambassador to that country (Walter Pidgeon), while the piano virtuoso José Iturbi, the bandleader Xavier Cugat and Ms. Powell provided the music. In “Luxury Liner” (1948), she was a stowaway on a cruise ship captained by her father (George Brent), with Mr. Cugat and the opera singer Lauritz Melchior among the passengers.Her breakthrough was “Royal Wedding” (1951), the first movie in which she played an adult. This time Ms. Powell had an outstanding director, Stanley Donen; an outstanding score, by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner; and, most important, an outstanding co-star: Fred Astaire.Set just before the wedding of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, “Royal Wedding” centers on an American brother-sister song-and-dance act (Astaire and Ms. Powell) on tour in London. Cast at the last minute to replace Judy Garland, who had been fired (and who herself had replaced a pregnant June Allyson), Ms. Powell had almost no time to learn her dance routines. But she acquitted herself well, notably in a knockabout vaudeville-style number with Astaire, “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?”Her movie career appeared to be gaining steam. In fact, it was halfway over.After “Royal Wedding,” Ms. Powell, to her frustration, found herself once again cast as the girl next door in lightweight musicals like “Rich, Young and Pretty” (1951) and “Three Sailors and a Girl” (1953). It would be three years before she had another role of substance — but it was a memorable one.Set in a pioneer community in 19th-century Oregon, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” told the story of newlyweds (Ms. Powell and Howard Keel) whose first order of business as a married couple is to find wives for the groom’s six rowdy brothers. Directed by Mr. Donen, with a lively score by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer and acrobatic choreography by Michael Kidd, it earned a place on many lists of the greatest film musicals of all time. It was, Ms. Powell later said, “my last really wonderful role in a film.”Suzanne Burce was born on April 1, 1929, in Portland, Ore. An only child, she was still a toddler when her parents — Paul Burce, who worked for a bread company, and Eileen (Baker) Burce — began grooming her as a potential successor to Shirley Temple.By the time she was 5 she was taking singing and dancing lessons and appearing on the radio. When she was 14 her parents took her to Hollywood, where her performance on a popular radio talent show led to an audition for Louis B. Mayer of MGM and, in short order, a seven-year contract.Looking back on that time in her 1988 autobiography, “The Girl Next Door and How She Grew,” Ms. Powell wrote: “I should have been the happiest girl in the world. Well, I wasn’t.” All she wanted to do, she said, was return home, go to high school and make friends. Her parents’ relentless efforts to make her a star had made for a lonely, artificial childhood. Despite her almost immediate success, she wrote, “Sometimes I just wanted to run away from it all.”Ms. Powell in performance at a nightclub in Las Vegas in 1957.David Smith/Associated PressWith musicals beginning to fall out of fashion, she had few film roles after “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” (“I didn’t quit movies,” she once said. “They quit me.”) Two middling musicals followed: “Hit the Deck” (1955), her last film for MGM, and “The Girl Most Likely” (1958), in which she was courted by Cliff Robertson and two other men.Her big-screen career came to an anticlimactic end in 1958 with the dramas “The Female Animal,” in which she played the alcoholic daughter of a fading movie star (Hedy Lamarr), and “Enchanted Island,” in which she was improbably cast as a Polynesian islander. (“It was a terrible movie,” she said. “The best thing about it was that it gave the family a great vacation in Acapulco.”)Ms. Powell found a new home on television. A 1961 pilot for a sitcom, “The Jane Powell Show,” was not picked up, but she appeared regularly on dramatic anthology series, variety shows and musical specials, as well as in a recurring role as Alan Thicke’s mother on the sitcom “Growing Pains” in the late 1980s and in a long-running ad campaign for denture products. Her last TV appearance was on an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” in 2002.She also performed in touring productions of musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music” and “Carousel.” She made her Broadway debut in 1974, when she replaced her friend and frequent MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds as the title character in the hit revival of the 1919 musical “Irene.”Ms. Powell in 1984 with Dick Moore, who, like her, had been a child star, and whom she would marry four years later.G. Paul Burnett/Associated PressShe never returned to Broadway, although she played the queen in a 1995 New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” and occasionally appeared Off Broadway. She seemed headed back to Broadway in 2003, when she played the mother of the entrepreneurial Mizner brothers in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Bounce” in Chicago and Washington. But the show was poorly received and never made it to New York. (It was later reworked, retitled “Road Show” and staged at the Public Theater in New York in 2008, without Ms. Powell in the cast.)Ms. Powell’s first four marriages ended in divorce. In 1988 she married Dick Moore, whom she met when he was writing a book about child actors. Although, as Dickie Moore, he had once been a child actor himself, their paths had never crossed until he interviewed her for his book.Ms. Powell at her apartment in New York in 1996. She appeared frequently on television until 2002.Jack Manning/The New York TimesMr. Moore died in 2015, and Ms. Powell died in the home they had shared. She is survived by a son, Geary Anthony Steffen III; two daughters, Suzanne Steffen and Lindsay Cavalli; and two granddaughters.Looking back in 1988 on her youthful stardom and her place in the Hollywood studio system, Ms. Powell was philosophical.“I get angry when I hear other actors blame the studios for all their problems,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It really bothered me when Judy Garland used to say, ‘The studio made me do this, the studio made me do that.’“Nobody makes you do anything. You make your own choices.”Alyssa Lukpat More

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      Joan Washington, Dialect Coach to the Stars, Dies at 74

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      She taught Barbra Streisand, Penélope Cruz and countless other performers how to sound like someone else.Joan Washington, an acclaimed dialect coach who taught Penélope Cruz to sound Greek, Jessica Chastain to sound Israeli and an entire cast of British actors to speak like Brooklyn Jews, died on Sept. 2 at her home in Avening, England. She was 74.Her husband, the actor Richard E. Grant, announced her death on Twitter. He later said the cause was lung cancer.In a career spanning four decades, Ms. Washington developed a reputation as a sort of reverse version of Henry Higgins, the elocutionist who taught Eliza Doolittle the King’s English in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion.” She instructed actors to speak not just in national dialects but also in regional and local lilts, even historical ones.She taught actors for most of Britain’s leading national and regional theaters; if a British performer appeared onstage speaking a thick American patois — say, in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” — there was a good chance it was Ms. Washington’s handiwork.She also worked on a steady stream of films. She teamed up with Ms. Cruz for “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), Ms. Chastain for “The Debt” (2010), Kate Beckinsale for “Emma” (1996) and the British actress Thandie Newton for “W.,” Oliver Stone’s 2008 take on the life of George W. Bush, in which she played Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. national security adviser.Jessica Chastain in a scene from “The Debt” (2010). Ms. Washington trained Ms. Chastain to sound Israeli for that movie, in which she played a secret agent.Laurie Sparham/Focus FeaturesDialect, Ms. Washington said, was not just about mimicry, about reading a script with an accent. It had to be built into the core of a performance.“A dialect coach must be there from the start,” she told the British newspaper The Independent in 1991. “Otherwise the bad habits are set; it becomes just a bandaging job. There’s enough undoing as it is.”Ms. Washington was something of a performer herself, though never onstage or onscreen. She could instantly adopt whatever dialect she was teaching, and she claimed to have mastery over 124 vowel sounds — just six shy of what Professor Higgins boasted.Though she was born and raised in Scotland, Ms. Washington employed a standard English accent when teaching Americans. She said they brought too many assumptions about what “proper” English sounds like and might be confused by her natural Scottish elocution.“The problem for Americans doing English is that they pronounce their consonants too precisely, which makes it sound rather acquired and middle class,” she said in a 1986 interview with The Sunday Telegraph. “The grander we are, the less we rely on consonants.”Ms. Washington came about her talent thorough research. Before working with actors, she had taught standard English pronunciation at the Royal College of Nursing, whose students arrived from all over Britain and the Commonwealth. Her recordings of their accents formed the basis of a vast library of tapes she kept as reference.She interviewed and recorded older Britons to capture what Liverpudlian or Geordie — an accent from Tyneside, in northeast England — might have sounded like decades ago. To show what English sounded like in the 1910s, she relied on recordings of British prisoners made by Germans during World War I.Her instructional methods were intense. She would often begin by interviewing performers to gauge what they thought a Boston Brahmin or a Warsaw Pole might sound like. She took notes, reams of them, and then handed them to the actors along with copies of her tapes.Over a series of sessions, she would tweak Rs, adjust inflections and suppress unwanted sibilants until an American actress like Emma Stone sounded like an authentic 18th-century English courtier, as she did in the 2018 film “The Favourite.”Barbra Streisand in “Yentl” (1983), the first film on which Ms. Washington worked. She taught Ms. Streisand how to speak like an Ashkenazi Jew in early-20th-century Poland.MGMMs. Washington always worked freelance, but she was most closely associated with the Royal National Theater, where she worked on more than 70 shows. Her first film was “Yentl” (1983), for which she taught the star and director, Barbra Streisand, how to speak like an Ashkenazi Jew in early-20th-century Poland.Ms. Washington had her own theories about accents and where they came from. She said that Britain’s plethora of dialects and accents, all crammed onto a medium-size island, derived from its varying geography and climate.“Cornish is harder and more nasal than Devon because it’s a windy peninsula,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “If you’ve got the wind in your face, you’ve got to speak without giving much away.”Joan Geddie was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1946. Her father, John, was a doctor, and her mother, Maggie (Cook) Geddie, was a nurse.When she was 18 she moved to London to attend the Central School of Speech and Drama. After graduating, she taught speech, first at a reform school for girls and then at the Royal College of Nursing.In 1969 she married Keith Washington; they later divorced. Along with Mr. Grant, she is survived by her son, Tom Washington; her daughter, Olivia Grant; and her brother, David Geddie.While teaching, Ms. Washington also picked up side jobs as a dialect coach. In the class-conscious England of the postwar decades, millions of Britain’s expanding middle class sought to erase any trace of their proletarian origins, starting with their accents, which provided her with an abundance of work.Her clients included doctors and clergymen as well as actors — the only ones, she said, who went the opposite direction, seeking instruction on how to sound less posh.She was teaching at the Actors Center in London in 1982 when she met Mr. Grant, who had been born and raised in Swaziland (now Eswatini), in Africa, and was taking her class to sound more like a native Englishman.Mr. Grant was smitten, he later recalled, and he asked if she could give him private lessons. She said yes, at £20 an hour — about $43 in today’s dollars.“But I can only afford £12,” he replied.“All right,” she said, “but you’ll have to repay me if you ever ‘make it.’”The two married in 1986, a year before Mr. Grant made his film debut in “Withnail and I,” which overnight made him one of Britain’s most in-demand actors. He later won acclaim for his performances in movies like “Gosford Park” (2001) and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (2018), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.Ms. Washington learned she had lung cancer late last year, and the disease advanced quickly. She did have one final assignment, though: Mr. Grant had been cast to play Loco Chanelle, a drag queen, in the film version of the stage musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” and he needed help with his character’s Sheffield accent.A few days after her death, Mr. Grant posted a video on Twitter that Ms. Washington had made of him practicing for the role, with her, offscreen, giving instructions. More

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      in Theater

      Jean-Claude van Itallie, ‘America Hurrah’ Playwright, Dies at 85

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      He was a central figure in the experimental theater movement for decades. His best-known work, a trilogy of one-acts, opened in 1966 and ran for more than 630 performances.Jean-Claude van Itallie, a playwright, director and performer who was a mainstay of the experimental theater world and who was especially known for “America Hurrah,” a form-bending trio of one-acts that opened in 1966 in the East Village and ran for more than 630 performances, died on Sept. 9 in Manhattan. He was 85.His brother, Michael, said the cause was pneumonia.Beginning in the late 1950s, Mr. van Itallie immersed himself in the vibrant Off Off Broadway scene, where playwrights and performers were challenging theatrical conventions. He joined Joseph Chaikin’s newly formed Open Theater in 1963, and his first produced play, “War,” was staged in the West Village. He was a favorite of Ellen Stewart, who had founded La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in 1961.Mr. van Itallie’s early works, including components of what became “America Hurrah,” were generally performed in lofts and other small spaces, but for the full-fledged production of “America Hurrah,” in November 1966, he moved up to the Pocket Theater on Third Avenue. The work caused a sensation.“I think you’ll be neglecting a whisper in the wind if you don’t look in on ‘America Hurrah,’” Walter Kerr began his rave review in The New York Times. “There’s something afoot here.”The first play in the trilogy, “Interview,” looked at the dehumanizing process of job hunting. In the second, “TV,” a commentary on mass media’s ability to trivialize, three people in a television ratings company watch a variety of shows; gradually the ones they’re watching take over the stage, and the three “real” people are absorbed into them.The third piece was “Motel,” which was first performed in 1965 at La MaMa E.T.C. and which the script describes as “a masque for three dolls.” (Robert Wilson, still early in his groundbreaking career, designed the original set.) Writing about a London production of “America Hurrah” for The Times in 1967, Charles Marowitz called it “a short but stunning masterpiece.”In it, a monstrous doll, the “Motel-keeper,” presides over a motel room and emits a stream of increasingly arcane patter. Two other dolls arrive at the room and proceed to trash it, scrawling vulgar graffiti on the wall and eventually dismantling the Motel-keeper.In 1993, when the Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, mounted a revival of “America Hurrah,” Marianne Evett, theater critic for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, reflected on its original impact.“When it opened,” she wrote, “it rocketed to fame, announcing that a new kind of American theater had arrived — deliberately experimental, savagely funny, politically aware and critical of standard American life, its institutions and values.”Mr. van Itallie continued making new work for more than half a century, and also founded Shantigar, a retreat in western Massachusetts, where he nurtured aspiring theater artists. Just two years ago, La MaMa staged the premiere of his new play, “The Fat Lady Sings,” about an evangelical family.“Jean-Claude van Itallie was an artist who was constantly questioning and digging into the deeper realms of our human existence and spirit,” Mia Yoo, artistic director of La MaMa, said by email. “In this moment of change it is artists like Jean-Claude whom we must look to.”Mr. van Itallie in 1999 in his one-man show, “War, Sex and Dreams,” at La Mama E.T.C. It related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. Peter MacDonald/La MamaJean-Claude van Itallie was born on May 25, 1936, in Brussels to Hugo and Marthe (Levy) van Itallie. The family left Belgium as the Nazis advanced on the country in 1940, and by the end of the year they had reached the United States. They settled in Great Neck, on Long Island. Hugo van Itallie had been a stockbroker in Brussels and resumed that career on Wall Street.Jean-Claude’s parents spoke French at home, something that influenced his later approach to theater, he said.“I had the good fortune to grow up in a couple of languages,” he said, “and I think that makes you realize that no single language contains reality, that words are always an approximation of reality, that language and even thought are perspectives on reality, not reality itself.”He was active in the drama club at Great Neck High School and in student productions at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he spent his senior year. In 1954, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he continued to study theater and wrote his first one-act plays before graduating in 1958. His honors thesis was titled “The Pessimism of Jean Anouilh,” the French dramatist.Mr. van Itallie settled in Greenwich Village. He worked for several years adapting and writing scripts for television, particularly for “Look Up and Live,” a Sunday morning anthology program on religious themes broadcast on CBS. It was a period when many TV shows had corporate sponsors that had to be appeased, but his wasn’t one of them; “Look Up and Live” gave the writers a measure of freedom.“All you had to do was please God and CBS,” he said.He was continuing to write plays on his own. “Motel,” the third piece of the “America Hurrah” trilogy, was actually the first to be written, in 1961 or ’62.“I was about three years out of Harvard, living in Greenwich Village and knocking on the door of Broadway theater,” he told The Plain Dealer decades later. “And I wasn’t getting in. I think that ‘Motel’ grew out of my anger — partly at that situation, but probably a much deeper anger at the way my mind had been conventionalized and conditioned. It just rose up out of me.”The success of “America Hurrah” in New York spawned other productions, though they sometimes ran into resistance, including in London, where the graffiti scrawled in “Motel” offended censors. In Mobile, Ala., a production by the University of South Alabama at a city-owned theater in 1968 was shut down by the mayor, Lambert C. Mims, after two performances.“It is filth, pure and simple,” the mayor said, “and I think it is a crying shame that Alabama taxpayers’ money has been used to produce such degrading trash.”Among Mr. van Itallie’s other works with Open Theater was “The Serpent,” a collaborative piece inspired by the book of Genesis that he shaped into a script. It was first performed in Rome during a European tour in 1968 and later staged in New York.In the 1970s Mr. van Itallie became known for translations.“I did my work as a playwright backwards,” he once said, “creating new theatrical forms in the ’60s, and in the ’70s going back to study masters like Chekhov.”Later still he did some acting, including performing a one-man autobiographical play called “War, Sex and Dreams,” which related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. D.J.R. Bruckner reviewed a performance of the work at the Cafe at La MaMa in 1999 for The Times, calling it the “often amusing and often sad confession of a man in his 60s whose heart is lonely and who teases one into wondering what, despite his remarkable candor, he is leaving out.”Mr. van Itallie split his time between a home in Manhattan and the farm in Rowe, Mass., which is home to his Shantigar Foundation. In addition to his brother, he is survived by his stepmother, Christine van Itallie.In remembering Mr. van Itallie, Ms. Yoo called to mind her predecessor, Ms. Stewart, who died in 2011.“I think of Ellen Stewart and him looking down at us and insisting that we move and make change,” she said. More

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      in Television

      Norm Macdonald, ‘Saturday Night Live’ Comedian, Dies at 61

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      Acerbic and sometimes controversial, he became familiar to millions as the show’s “Weekend Update” anchor from 1994 to 1998.Norm Macdonald, the acerbic, sometimes controversial comedian familiar to millions as the “Weekend Update” anchor on “Saturday Night Live” from 1994 to 1998, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 61.His manager, Marc Gurvitz, confirmed the death. Lori Jo Hoekstra, his longtime producing partner, told the entertainment news outlet Deadline that the cause was cancer, something he had been dealing with for some time but had kept largely private.Mr. Macdonald had a deadpan style honed on the stand-up circuit, first in his native Canada and then in the United States. By 1990 he was doing his routine on “Late Night With David Letterman” and other shows. Then, in 1993, came his big break: an interview with Lorne Michaels, a fellow Canadian, for a job on “Saturday Night Live.”“I knew that even though we hailed from the same nation, we were worlds apart,” Mr. Macdonald wrote in “Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir” (2016), a fictional work with occasional hints of biography mixed in. “He was a cosmopolite from Toronto, worldly, the kinda guy who’d be comfortable around the Queen of England herself. Me, I was a hick, born to the barren, rocky soil of the Ottawa Valley, where the richest man in town was the barber.”In any case, he got the job, and by the next year he was in the anchor chair for the “Weekend Update” segment. In sketches, he impersonated Burt Reynolds and Bob Dole and played other characters.Mr. Michaels, in a telephone interview on Tuesday, said that Jim Downey, the show’s head writer at the time, had first brought Mr. Macdonald to his attention.“Jim just liked the intelligence behind the jokes,” he recalled.And Mr. Michaels saw it, too.“There’s something in his comedy — there’s just a toughness to it,” he said. “Also, he’s incredibly patient. He can wait” — that is, wait for a punchline.That, Mr. Michaels said, made Mr. Macdonald different stylistically from other “Weekend Update” anchors.“I think it took some getting used to for the audience,” Mr. Michaels said. “It wasn’t instantly a hit. But he just grew on them.”In early 1998, however, Mr. Macdonald was booted from the anchor chair, reportedly at the behest of Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC Entertainment, West Coast, who was said to have been annoyed by Mr. Macdonald’s relentless mocking of his friend O.J. Simpson.Mr. Macdonald as the anchor of “Weekend Update” in 1995. He got the anchor job 1994, a year after joining “Saturday Night Live,” and lost it in 1998.Al Levine/NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesMr. Macdonald stayed on for a few more episodes but didn’t return for the 1998-99 season. His post-“S.N.L.” television ventures were a mixed bag. “Norm” (originally called “The Norm Show”), a comedy about a former hockey player, ran from 1999 to 2001 on ABC. “Sports Show With Norm Macdonald,” on Comedy Central, lasted only a few months, in 2011. “The dedicated fan will identify two patterns in his television work,” Dan Brooks wrote in a 2018 article about him in The New York Times Magazine. “It is invariably funny, and it is invariably canceled.”But Mr. Macdonald said he didn’t think of himself first as a TV performer, and he continued to work as a comedian throughout his career.“In my mind, I’m just a stand-up,” he told Mr. Brooks. “But other people don’t think that. They go, oh, the guy from ‘S.N.L.’ is doing stand-up now.”Though known for “Weekend Update,” Mr. Macdonald did not do much topical material in his own routines. He liked jokes that would still be funny years in the future. Among his most famous is one he told on “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien” in 2009, about a moth that goes to a podiatrist. After a setup that rambled on for minutes, in which the moth pours out various emotional troubles, the podiatrist asks the insect why it came to a podiatrist rather than a psychiatrist. Mr. Macdonald’s punchline: “And then the moth said, ‘Because the light was on.’”Mr. Macdonald’s sense of humor sometimes got him in hot water. In 2018, for instance, he drew criticism for remarks that seemed to defend the comedian Louis C.K., who had been accused of sexual misconduct, and Roseanne Barr, who was under fire for a racist Twitter post. (Louis C.K. had written the foreword to Mr. Macdonald’s 2016 book, and Ms. Barr had hired him as a writer on her 1990s sitcom, “Roseanne.”) In apologizing for those comments, Mr. Macdonald made a remark that mocked people with Down syndrome.Missteps aside, Mr. Macdonald was always good for an unpredictable few minutes, or more, on a late-night talk show.“I’ve been interviewing Norm for 18 years, and he has consistently broken every talk-show rule,” Mr. O’Brien told The Times in 2011. “He tells anecdotes that are blatantly false. His stories have always been repurposed farmer’s daughter routines that he swears happened to him.”Mr. O’Brien added, “When Norm steps out from behind the curtain, I honestly don’t know what is going to happen, and that electrical charge comes through the television.”Mr. Macdonald in a scene from his sitcom “The Norm Show” (later called simply “Norm) in 1999. With him were Laurie Metcalf and Max Wright.Robert Votes/ABCNorman Gene Macdonald was born on Oct. 17, 1959, in Quebec City, according to IMDB.In 1998, his brother Neil told The Record of Ontario that Norm had had a flirtation with the newspaper business as a young man but that he had deliberately botched an interview for a job as a copyboy because he wasn’t that serious about the profession.“He once said he was interested in discovering the truth, but he hoped it would be within walking distance,” Neil Macdonald told the newspaper.He also recalled finding his brother hyperventilating in the washroom at Yuk Yuk’s, an Ottawa comedy club, before going onstage for his first stand-up gig. But he got it together and, as comedians say, killed.By 1984, Mr. Macdonald was skilled enough to spend four months opening for the comedian Sam Kinison. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, and in 1992 he was hired as a writer on “The Dennis Miller Show” and then “Roseanne.”“I never wanted fame at all, I just wanted to do stand-up,” he told The Ottawa Citizen in 2010. “I found when I came to Los Angeles to do more stand-up comedy that people wanted me to do other things, which I really didn’t want to.”“Stand-up,” he added, “is an odd kind of job where, if you’re good at it, they figure you’ll be good at other stuff in show business, which is usually not the case.”Mr. Macdonald wrote the 1998 film “Dirty Work,” in which he starred with Don Rickles, Chevy Chase and others. Among his other credits were the “Dr. Doolittle” movies, in which he provided the voice of a dog named Lucky.His survivors include his mother, a son and two brothers, his manager said. “He was an original,” Mr. Michaels said, “and he didn’t compromise in a business that’s based on compromise — show business.”Dave Itzkoff More

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      in Music

      George Wein, Newport Jazz Festival Trailblazer, Is Dead at 95

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      He brought jazz (and later folk music) to Rhode Island, and made festivals as important as nightclubs and concert halls on jazz musicians’ itineraries.George Wein, the impresario who almost single-handedly turned the jazz festival into a worldwide phenomenon, died on Monday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 95. His death was announced by a spokeswoman, Carolyn McClair.Jazz festivals were not an entirely new idea when Mr. Wein (pronounced ween) was approached about presenting a weekend of jazz in the open air in Newport, R.I., in 1954. There had been sporadic attempts at such events, notably in both Paris and Nice in 1948. But there had been nothing as ambitious as the festival Mr. Wein staged that July on the grounds of the Newport Casino, an athletic complex near the historic mansions of Bellevue Avenue.With a lineup including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and other stars, the inaugural Newport Jazz Festival drew thousands of paying customers over two days and attracted the attention of the news media. It barely broke even; Mr. Wein later recalled that it made a profit of $142.50, and that it ended up in the black only because he waived his $5,000 producer’s fee.But it was successful enough to merit a return engagement, and before long the Newport festival had established itself as a jazz institution — and as a template for how to present music in the open air on a grand scale.By the middle 1960s, festivals had become as important as nightclubs and concert halls on the itinerary of virtually every major jazz performer, and Mr. Wein had come to dominate the festival landscape.He did not have the field to himself: Major events like the Monterey Jazz Festival in California, which began in 1958, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, which began in 1967, were the work of other promoters. But for half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.At the height of his success, Mr. Wein was producing events in Warsaw, Paris, Seoul and elsewhere overseas, as well as all over the United States.Where Jazz History Was MadeNewport remained his flagship, and it quickly became known as a place where jazz history was made. Miles Davis was signed to Columbia Records on the strength of his inspired playing at the 1955 festival. Duke Ellington’s career, which had been in decline, was reinvigorated a year later when his rousing performance at Newport landed him on the cover of Time magazine. The 1958 festival was captured on film by the photographer Bert Stern in the documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” one of the most celebrated jazz movies ever made.Mr. Wein’s empire extended beyond jazz. It included the Newport Folk Festival, which played a vital role in the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many other performers. (It was at Newport that Mr. Dylan sent shock waves through the folk world by performing with an electric band in 1965.) He also produced the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which showcased a broad range of vernacular music as well as the culture and cuisine of New Orleans, and staged festivals devoted to blues, soul, country and even comedy.The Newport Folk Festival, which Mr. Wein also produced, played a vital role in the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many others; it was at Newport that Mr. Dylan sent shock waves through the folk world by performing with an electric band in 1965. But jazz was always Mr. Wein’s first love.Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHis one venture into the world of rock was not a happy experience. Gate-crashers disrupted the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, whose bill for the first time included rock bands, among them Led Zeppelin and Sly and the Family Stone. The Newport city fathers issued a ban on such acts the next summer; when both rock (the Allman Brothers) and the gate-crashers returned in 1971, Mr. Wein was not invited back. (The Newport Folk Festival, which had not been held in 1970 but was scheduled for later in the summer of 1971, was canceled.)He was not discouraged. In 1972 he moved the Newport Jazz Festival to New York City, where it became a less bucolic but more grandiose affair, with concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall and other locations around town. Under various names and corporate sponsors, the New York event continued to thrive for almost 40 years. In addition, the jazz festival returned to Newport in 1981 and the folk festival in 1985, both once again under Mr. Wein’s auspices. Mr. Wein’s success in presenting jazz and folk at Newport helped pave the way for the phenomenon of Woodstock and the profusion of rock festivals in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But jazz was always his first love.Playing and PromotingHe was a jazz musician before he was a jazz entrepreneur. He began playing piano professionally as a teenager and continued into his 80s, leading small groups, usually billed as the Newport All-Stars, at his festivals and elsewhere. (He performed in public for the first time in several years at Newport in 2019. It was, he announced, “my last performance as a jazz musician.”) He was a good player, in the relaxed, melodic vein of the great swing pianist Teddy Wilson, with whom he briefly studied. But he determined early on that playing jazz would be a precarious way for him to make a living, and he became more focused on presenting it.The success of Mr. Wein’s Boston nightclub, Storyville, named after the red-light district of New Orleans where legend has it jazz was born, led Elaine Lorillard, a wealthy Newport resident, to approach him about producing what became the first Newport Jazz Festival, which she and her husband, Louis, financed. And the success of that festival determined the direction his career would take.The crowd at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1967. The festival became known as a place where jazz history was made.Associated PressGeorge Theodore Wein was born on Oct. 3, 1925, in Lynn, Mass., near Boston, and grew up in the nearby town of Newton. His father, Barnet, was a doctor. His mother, Ruth, was an amateur pianist. Both his parents, he recalled, loved show business and encouraged his interest in music, although they did not necessarily see it as a career option.Mr. Wein took his first piano lessons at age 8 and discovered jazz while in high school. By the time he entered Northeastern University in Boston, he was beginning to think seriously about a career in jazz.He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, spending some time overseas but not seeing combat, and enrolled in Boston University after being discharged. Before graduating with a degree in history in 1950, he was working steadily as a jazz pianist around Boston.In his autobiography, “Myself Among Others: A Life in Music” (2003), written with Nate Chinen, he said that he knew by then that “music was a crucial part of my being,” but that he also knew that he “had neither the confidence nor the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” By the fall of 1950 he was a full-time nightclub owner; by the summer of 1954 he was a festival promoter.Rough PatchesMr. Wein encountered some rough times in the early years of the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1960 the bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach, protesting what they called Mr. Wein’s overly commercial booking policy, staged a smaller “rebel” festival in another part of Newport in direct competition. But both events were overshadowed when throngs of drunken youths, unable to get tickets to Mr. Wein’s festival, descended on the city, throwing rocks and breaking store windows. City officials shut the Newport Jazz Festival down, although the Mingus-Roach event was allowed to continue.As a result of the rioting, Mr. Wein’s permit was revoked, and he did not return to Newport in 1961. A festival billed as Music at Newport, staged by another promoter and featuring a range of music including some jazz, was presented in its place but was not successful. Mr. Wein was allowed back the next year, and the festival continued without incident until the end of the decade.Coverage of Mr. Wein in the jazz press grew more negative over time, and the criticism would persist for the rest of his career. In 1959, the critic Nat Hentoff called the Newport Jazz Festival a “sideshow” that had “nothing to do with the future of jazz.” (Mr. Hentoff later changed his tune: In 2001 he wrote that Mr. Wein had “expanded the audience for jazz more than any other promoter in the music’s history.”)Mr. Wein was sometimes attacked as exploitive, money-hungry, unimaginative in his programming and too willing to present non-jazz artists at his jazz festivals — criticism first heard when he booked Chuck Berry at Newport in 1958, and heard again when he booked the likes of Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and even the folk group the Kingston Trio (who performed at both the folk and jazz festivals in 1959). He professed to take the criticism in stride, but in his autobiography he left no doubt that he had forgotten none of it, quoting many of his worst notices and patiently explaining why they were wrong.Mr. Wein in 1970. For half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.David Redfern/Getty ImageThe two Newport festivals had been established as nonprofit ventures, but in 1960 Mr. Wein formed a corporation, Festival Productions, to run what soon became a worldwide empire. At the company’s height it was producing festivals and tours in some 50 cities worldwide. Over the years he also tried his hand at personal management and record production.After years of, by his account, struggling to break even, Mr. Wein became a pioneer in corporate sponsorship in the late 1960s and ’70s, enlisting beer, tobacco and audio equipment companies to underwrite his festivals and tours. There was the Schlitz Salute to Jazz, the Kool Jazz Festival and, most enduringly, a partnership with the Japanese electronics giant JVC, which began in 1984 and lasted until 2008.“I never realized that you could make money until sponsors came along,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “The credibility we’d been working on all those years always brought media notice. And then the opportunity for media notice was picked up by sponsors.”In 1959, Mr. Wein married Joyce Alexander, who worked alongside him as a vice president of Festival Productions for four decades. She died in 2005. He is survived. by his partner, Dr. Glory Van Scott.Presidential HonorsOver the years Mr. Wein received numerous honors and accolades. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2005 and inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1991. He was honored by two presidents, Jimmy Carter in 1978 and Bill Clinton in 1993, at all-star White House jazz concerts celebrating the anniversary of the first Newport Jazz Festival. In 2015, the Recording Academy gave him a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement.In 2007, nine years after a deal to sell 80 percent of Festival Productions to Black Entertainment Television fell through, the company was acquired by a newly formed company, the Festival Network. Mr. Wein remained involved, but as an employee — a kind of producer emeritus — and not the boss.Things changed again in 2009, when the Festival Network ran into financial problems and Mr. Wein regained control of the handful of festivals left in what had once been a vast empire. (At first he was legally prevented from using the names Newport Jazz Festival and Newport Folk Festival because they belonged to the Festival Network, but he reacquired the rights in 2010.)He also found new sponsors for the Newport Jazz Festival — first a medical equipment company and later an asset management firm, Natixis — to replace his longtime corporate partner, JVC. The folk festival, whose sponsors in recent years had included Ben & Jerry’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, had by then been without sponsorship for several years; both festivals were later partly sponsored by the jewelry company Alex and Ani.Mr. Wein at his home in 2004, the year the Newport Jazz Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary. He knew from an early age, he said, that “music was a crucial part of my being,” but he also knew that he “had neither the confidence nor the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” Associated PressIn 2011 Mr. Wein announced that both Newport festivals, the only events he was still producing, would become part of a new nonprofit organization, the Newport Festivals Foundation.He eventually handed over the reins of both festivals, although he remained involved until the end. Jay Sweet became producer of the folk festival in 2009 and six years later was named executive producer of the Newport Festivals Foundation. In 2016 Danny Melnick was promoted from associate producer to producer of the jazz festival, and the jazz bassist and bandleader Christian McBride, who had performed at Newport numerous times since 1991, was named artistic director. (Mr. Melnick left the company in 2017.)The coronavirus pandemic caused the cancellation of both festivals in 2020, but they were back the next year. Mr. Wein had planned to attend the 2021 jazz festival, but on July 28, just two days before it was scheduled to begin, he announced on social media that he would not be there. (He did participate remotely, introducing the singers Mavis Staples, by phone, and Andra Day, via FaceTime.)“At my age of 95, making the trip will be too difficult for me,” he wrote. “I am heartbroken to miss seeing all my friends.” But, he added, with a new team in place to run both festivals, “I can see that my legacy is in good hands.” More

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      Art Metrano, Actor and Comic Once Felled by an Accident, Dies at 84

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      He had built a career in stand-up comedy and in film and TV, but a fall from a ladder left him with a personal struggle.Art Metrano, a comedian and actor who appeared in more than 120 television shows and films, including the “Police Academy” movies, before a fall from a ladder left him severely injured, an ordeal he turned into a one-man show he performed all over the country, died on Sept. 8 at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 84.His son Harry confirmed his death. The cause was not given.Mr. Metrano first gained attention with a spoof magic act. Introduced as the Amazing Metrano or with some equally grandiose appellation, he would come out and perform a series of tricks that weren’t really tricks. He’d present each hand to the audience, index finger raised, then bang his hands together behind his back and present them again — now, two fingers on one hand would be raised, none on the other.The schtick got him appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and assorted other programs in the early 1970s. By then he was also building an acting career, having landed small parts on “Mannix,” “Bewitched” and other series in the late ’60s; that run continued in the ’70s with “Barney Miller,” “Movin’ On,” “Starsky and Hutch” and dozens of other shows.The 1980s brought more acting work, including a recurring role on “Joanie Loves Chachi” and, in 1985, a part in “Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment,” a follow-up to the hit 1984 comedy. He played Mauser, a career-driven officer who becomes a captain and is the butt of jokes; in one scene, he shampoos his hair with epoxy resin. He reprised the role in 1986 in “Police Academy 3: Back in Training.”Carol Rosegg/Everett CollectionBut Mr. Metrano’s career was interrupted one September day in 1989. He and his wife at the time had put a house up for sale, and he stopped by to check on it in advance of a showing by a real estate agent. They had work done on the pool, and he noticed that as a result there was gray cement spray all over the back walls and balcony. He decided to hose the gunk off.“I grabbed the ladder that was leaning against the wall and set it firmly against the balcony,” he wrote in a memoir, “Twice Blessed” (with Cynthia Lee, 1994, later retitled “Metrano’s Accidental Comedy”).Something went wrong, and Mr. Metrano fell from the ladder, hitting the ground head first and snapping his neck. He couldn’t move. He lay there, imagining the scene if he were still lying there when the real estate agent showed up.“I’d look up and say, ‘Hi, I’m the owner,’” he wrote in his book. “‘I just broke my neck, but not to worry. House looks great, eh? Nice gourmet kitchen!’”The humor was characteristic of the way he later told the story in print and onstage (a neighbor eventually came to his aid before the real estate agent arrived), but the injury was serious. He had broken several vertebrae, and permanent paralysis was a possibility.“When you’re lying paralyzed in a hospital bed,” he said during the stage show, “your past becomes your constant companion because your future is a question mark.”At first he could neither move nor speak, but he was eventually able to talk again, and to walk, sometimes with the help of a crutch. Within a few years he was telling his story in a one-man show written with Ms. Lee that was performed, under various names, across the country.When it played in Manhattan in 1996 at the Union Square Theater under the title “The Amazing Metrano: An Accidental Comedy,” Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, said that Mr. Metrano “gives new meaning to the term stand-up comedy: it isn’t the comedy that amazes, but the fact that Mr. Metrano is standing up.”“‘The Amazing Metrano’ is therapeutic, inspirational theater,” Mr. Canby wrote. “Mr. Metrano is now publicly working through his trauma, finding resources in himself he never knew he possessed.”Arthur Mesistrano was born on Sept. 22, 1936, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Bensonhurst section of that borough. His father, Aaron, worked in the garment industry, and his mother, Rebecca (Russo) Mesistrano, was a homemaker.He played football at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn and attended the College of the Pacific in California on a football scholarship, but left college to return to New York to study acting and work on his stand-up comedy. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting in 1958.In his book, he told of trying to worm his way into show business by taking a job selling a phone system that enabled busy people to speed-dial numbers; that got him onto studio lots.“That was the plan,” he wrote, “sell the product, make some money, meet producers and directors, and then show them my 8×10 glossy and phony résumé.”It appeared to work, because by 1960 he was getting small roles. In 1971, he landed a leading role in a CBS sitcom, “The Chicago Teddy Bears,” though the show was short-lived. He had another leading role in a 1986 sitcom, “Tough Cookies,” but that show too didn’t last, either.Mr. Metrano in a publicity photo with the actor Craig T. Nelson in 2001. Mr. Metrano was a guest star on the CBS crime drama “The District,” starring Mr. Nelson. Tony Esparza/CBSAfter his accident, he continued to get occasional TV roles, including on “L.A. Law,” “The District” and “Party of Five.”Mr. Metrano married Rebecca Chute in 1972; they divorced in 2005. His survivors include his wife, Jamie Golder Metrano; two children from his first marriage, Harry and Zoe Bella Metrano; a daughter from an earlier relationship, Roxanne Elena Metrano; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.In 1977, Mr. Metrano reached out to a son he had fathered when younger but who had been given up for adoption. That son, Howard Bald, now a rabbi, performed a memorial service for him over the weekend in Florida. More

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      Kaycee Moore, Actress in Black Directors’ Seminal Films, Dies at 77

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      She explored her characters’ inner lives in movies like “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts,” independent works that grew out of the L.A. Rebellion movement.Kaycee Moore, whose nuanced acting documented Black American life in movies by a group of young, Black independent directors in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Aug. 13 at her home in Kansas City, Kan. She was 77.The death was confirmed by the Watkins Heritage Funeral home. No cause was given.Ms. Moore made only a handful of movies, but they had an outsize impact on American cinema. Her portrayals defied the traditional roles for Black women of her era, in action-packed or trauma-filled blockbusters, and instead laid bare the interior lives of her characters.Her debut came in “Killer of Sheep” (1978), the director Charles Burnett’s first feature. (It was his thesis for the film program at the University of California, Los Angeles.) Mr. Burnett was a member of the community of independent filmmakers that would later become known as the L.A. Rebellion.Their movies, unlike many mainstream Hollywood pictures, humanized Black characters and celebrated Black family life, though they did not shy away from hardship. Ms. Moore’s characters in “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” (1983) were both struggling wives who wanted the best for their children and husbands in a system portrayed as designed to keep Black Americans down and out.“Killer of Sheep” follows a Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker whose leading of lambs to their death takes on biblical resonance. Ms. Moore played the worker’s unnamed wife as she raises their family in the blighted Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Critics lauded the film’s stark visual style, and The Sacramento Bee called Ms. Moore’s performance “incandescent.”Upon the film’s rerelease in 2007, the critic Stuart Klawans, writing in The Nation, praised the “profoundly moving” work of Ms. Moore and Henry G. Sanders, who played her husband. “Their lives are denuded in many ways, materially impoverished and spiritually numbed,” he wrote, “but for all that, they have the grandeur of unchallengeable fact.”“Bless Their Little Hearts” came next for Ms. Moore. She played Andais, the wife of the protagonist, Charlie (Nate Hardman). The film, directed by Billy Woodbury and written by Mr. Burnett, charts Charlie’s struggle to find permanent work and the temptations he faces to turn to crime, all set against the backdrop of a newly begun extramarital affair.Looking back at the L.A. Rebellion films in an essay in The New York Times in 2020, the critic Ben Kenigsberg found Ms. Moore’s performance naturalistic. “She is shown in contrasting scenes riding the bus: in one, she nods off from fatigue; later, having discovered that Charlie is having an affair, she is wide-awake,” he wrote. “When the two finally fight about the fling, the scene, staged in a single take, feels utterly extemporaneous.”Acting in “Bless Their Little Hearts” was not always easy for Ms. Moore. She recalled in the production notes for the film that the climactic argument scene, filmed in one take, included actual physical violence. But “for the most part,” she said, “it was a film set that was full of love.”Her acting style, Mr. Woodberry, the director, said in an interview, was not naturalistic but realistic, informed by small expressions and actions and drawn from personal experience. “She’s a person who knew a lot about life,” he said of Ms. Moore, “and she could bring that to the character.”Ms. Moore later joined an ensemble cast of Black actors in Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), which is generally considered the first film by a Black woman to achieve a wide release in the United States. In the film, Ms. Moore played Haagar Peazant, a discontented member of the insular Gullah community in the islands off South Carolina during the Jim Crow era. Ms. Moore imbued the character, who wants to leave the community, with an iron will.“The film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians,” The Times critic Stephen Holden wrote in 1992.L.A. Rebellion movies have entered the pantheon of American film. “Daughters of the Dust” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” were made part of the prestigious Criterion Collection, and “Killer of Sheep” was one of the first 50 films introduced into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1990.Kaycee Collier was born in Kansas City, Kan., on Feb. 24, 1944. Her mother, Angie Mae (Sandifer) Aker, was an activist and advocate for Black Americans with sickle cell disease. Kaycee had seven siblings, two of whom died of sickle cell anemia, inspiring her mother’s devotion to the cause, according to “Kansas City Women of Independent Minds,” a 1992 book by the Kansas City historian Jane Fifield Flynn. Kaycee’s father, Andrew Collier, died shortly after her birth, Ms. Flynn wrote.She married John Moore Jr. in 1959 and later married Stephen Jones. She is survived by the two children of her first marriage, John Moore III and Michelle Moore Swinton; her siblings Margaret Hall, Angie Ruth Wesley, Frances Collier and Jimmie Collier; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.It was in the 1970s that Ms. Moore headed west to audition for Hollywood roles and met Mr. Burnett, the filmmaker who would cast her in “Killer of Sheep.” Her last major film role was in “Ninth Street” (1999), by the writer-director Kevin Willmott.After her mother died in the 1990s, Ms. Moore took over her role as executive director of the Kansas City chapter of the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America. More

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      Nino Castelnuovo, ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ Star, Dies at 84

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      Mr. Castelnuovo, who brought an incandescent charm to the screen, became famous during a golden age of Italian cinema. But his breakthrough role was in a French film.Nino Castelnuovo, a popular Italian film and television actor who found success beyond his home country when he starred alongside Catherine Deneuve in the soaringly sentimental French New Wave musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” died on Sept. 6 in Rome. He was 84.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his representative, Simone Oppi.Mr. Castelnuovo, who brought an incandescent charm to the screen, became a star during a golden age of Italian cinema. He collaborated with leading directors like Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica and acted alongside greats like Alberto Sordi and Claudia Cardinale.If he achieved international notice with “Umbrellas,” he did not truly attain fame in Italy until 1967, for his role as Renzo in a television series based on Alessandro Manzoni’s 1827 literary epic, “The Betrothed,” which takes place during a plague in the 17th century. Such was that show’s popularity, Mr. Castelnuovo once said, that Pope Paul VI became a fan and requested to meet him. (“Castelnuovo, I wish you to be as good, wise and respectable as your Renzo,” he recalled the pope telling him — to which he said he replied, “Likewise.”)Mr. Castelnuovo became a fixture in Italian living rooms in the 1980s as the athletic middle-aged spokesman for Olio Cuore, a brand of corn oil. In television commercials for the product, he vaulted over a fence to display his good health.“He’s one of the excellent underrated Italian actors,” Antonio Monda, who teaches a course on Italian cinema at New York University and is the artistic director of the Rome Film Festival, said in a phone interview. “He was praised abroad, especially in France, but was somewhat overlooked in Italy. His curse was doing that infamous oil commercial.”Mr. Castelnuovo secured his place in the international film canon for his performance in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” Jacques Demy’s 1964 New Wave romance in which all the dialogue was sung, almost as though it were a cinematic opera. (Michel Legrand wrote the music; Mr. Castelnuovo’s voice was dubbed.) The movie was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and received five Academy Award nominations, including one for best foreign-language film and one for the song “I Will Wait for You.”“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” set in a Normandy port town, recounts the youthful love affair between a garage mechanic named Guy, played by Mr. Castelnuovo, and Geneviève, the daughter of an umbrella shop owner, played by Ms. Deneuve. Their romance ends when Guy is drafted into the Algerian war. Geneviève soon discovers she is pregnant with Guy’s child. When they finally meet again, they have married other people, and their love is a bittersweet memory.Revisiting the film in 2011, The New York Times critic A.O. Scott called it “one of the most romantic films ever made.” “The romance between these young lovers was not meant to be,” he added, “but our romance with this incomparable film will last forever.”Mr. Castelnuovo in Paris in 1966 with Christine Delaroche, his co-star in the Vittorio De Sica film “A New World.”Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesFrancesco Castelnuovo was born on Oct. 28, 1936, in Lecco, Italy. His father, Camillo, worked in a button factory. His mother, Emilia Paola (Sala) Castelnuovo, was a maid.Growing up, Francesco held jobs as a mechanic and a house painter to support himself. He often found refuge in the darkness of movie theaters and idolized Fred Astaire, whose films inspired him to become a gymnast and a dancer in his teens.In 1955, he moved to Milan to study at the Piccolo Teatro repertory theater. He also found work as a mime on a children’s television show about a magician named Zurli. He made his film debut in 1959 with a small part in Pietro Germi’s crime thriller “The Facts of Murder,” and he appeared the next year in Visconti’s acclaimed “Rocco and His Brothers.”Among Mr. Castelnuovo’s other films were “The Hunchback of Rome” (1960), which was notable for featuring the director Pier Paolo Pasolini in an acting role, and De Sica’s 1966 drama, “A New World.” He appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s segment of “Amore e Rabbia” (1969), a series of short stories directed by various cinema luminaries. He reunited with Deneuve in Agnès Varda’s film “The Creatures” in 1966.He is survived by his wife, Maria Cristina Di Nicola; his son, Lorenzo; and his sister, Marinella.In 1996, at the age of 60, Mr. Castelnuovo played the archaeologist D’Agostino in Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient.” He continued acting into his 70s, performing in productions of works by the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni and playing a judge on the television series “Tuscan Passion” from 2013 to 2015. He also worked to raise awareness of glaucoma, from which he had long suffered.In interviews, Mr. Castelnuovo often reflected on the glorious era of Italian cinema that he had witnessed firsthand. He sometimes complained that Italian films had become less, well, Italian.“I come from a cinema that is very different from now,” he said in a Roman television interview in 1999. “It was a time when Italian film was the most respected cinema in the world.”“We’ve decided to follow the Americans and other big nations,” he continued. “We’ve lost sight of just how much talent we Italians have.“We’re a country of marvelous people. Marvelous in the sense that, without our imaginations, we cannot live. We’re not very good realists, which makes us very imaginative people.” More