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      in Music

      Gianna Rolandi, Spirited Soprano With a Radiant Voice, Dies at 68

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      Ms. Rolandi, an acclaimed Vixen and Lucia, made her mark at the New York City Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.Gianna Rolandi, an American soprano who brought effortless coloratura technique, bright sound and a vibrant stage presence to diverse roles over a 20-year international career, died on Sunday in Chicago. She was 68.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Ms. Rolandi had earlier been the director of the company’s Ryan Opera Center, a training program. No cause was specified.Her husband was the renowned British conductor Andrew Davis, who will step down on June 30 after nearly 21 years as music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera.Ms. Rolandi’s auspicious 1975 debut at the New York City Opera, as Olympia in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” came when she was 23 and just out of the conservatory. She took over the role on short notice when the scheduled soprano withdrew. (Three days later she made what was to have been her official debut, as Zerbinetta in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”)She quickly won attention for the agility and radiance of her singing — and for, when it was called for, a beguiling sassiness. Beverly Sills, City Opera’s greatest star, became a crucial mentor to Ms. Rolandi in the 1980s, when Ms. Sills retired from singing to become the company’s general director.Along with career guidance, Ms. Sills gave Ms. Rolandi insight into roles she herself had performed to acclaim, among them the title role in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” and Cleopatra in Handel’s “Giulio Cesare.”Reviewing her feisty performance as Zerbinetta with the company in 1982, The New York Times’s Donal Henahan wrote that “in Gianna Rolandi the City Opera had a Zerbinetta capable of creating pandemonium in any opera house anywhere.”Her “deft and virtually unflawed handing of her big, florid aria, one of opera’s most feared obstacle courses for coloratura soprano,” he added, “brought the performance to a halt for as extended an ovation as this reviewer has heard at either of our opera houses this season.”Ms. Rolandi starred in two notable “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts of City Opera productions: “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1982, and, the next year, the title role in Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” an enchanting folk-tale opera centering on a community of forest animals and a few humans.Ms. Rolandi in the title role in the 1981 City Opera production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.” Beth Bergman“The Cunning Little Vixen” was largely unfamiliar to American audiences when City Opera introduced its colorful production in 1981. It was performed in an English translation of the Czech libretto, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and directed by Frank Corsaro, with sets and costumes realized from designs by Maurice Sendak.Ms. Rolandi was cast as the bushy-tailed, impish Vixen. It was “one of Ms. Rolandi’s finest roles to date,” the critic Thor Eckert Jr. wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, adding that she acted “with feline grace and an occasional touch of crudity just right for the role.”Her Metropolitan Opera debut came as Sophie in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” in 1979. But despite some acclaimed performances at that house, including the title role of the Nightingale in Stravinsky’s “Le Rossignol” in 1984 and Zerbinetta in 1984-85 (with Jessye Norman as Ariadne), she made just 17 appearances with the Met over six years.Even while appearing with major houses in America and Europe, Ms. Rolandi was content to call City Opera her base.“I feel like I’ve grown up here,” she said in a 1982 interview with The Times. The company “is a blessing for me,” she added. “You get exposure and you don’t have to leave home.”Carol Jane Rolandi was born on Aug. 16, 1952, in Manhattan. Her mother, Jane Frazier, from Winston-Salem, N.C., was a successful soprano who met Dr. Enrico Rolandi, an Italian obstetrician and gynecologist, while performing in Italy. They married and settled in New York.In 1955, when Ms. Rolandi was not yet 3, her father died in an automobile accident. Her mother moved with her and her brother, Walter, to the South, began teaching, and had a 30-year career as a professor of voice at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., where Ms. Rolandi grew up.Though drawn early to the violin, Ms. Rolandi kept listening to opera recordings and was increasingly captivated by singing. She studied both violin and voice at the Brevard Music Center, a prestigious summer music institute and festival in North Carolina. She continued her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.Her City Opera debut came shortly after her graduation from Curtis. She went on to sing major roles in more than 30 operas with the company, including the American premiere of the Israeli composer Josef Tal’s “Ashmedai” in 1976 and the world premiere of Dominick Argento’s “Miss Havisham’s Fire” in 1979.Overall, though, she was not drawn to contemporary opera, as she acknowledged in a 1993 interview with Bruce Duffie, later broadcast on the Chicago radio station WNIB. It’s crucial for composers to “make the vocal part singable so you can make a line,” she said, and she did not like pieces that were “all over the place.”“The old guys had it right,” she said: “a nice line.”Ms. Rolandi and her husband, the conductor Andrew Davis, in 2005. The couple moved to Chicago when Mr. Davis became music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera there.Cheri EisenbergAfter an earlier marriage to Howard Hensel, a tenor (who appeared with City Opera) and actor, Ms. Rolandi met Mr. Davis in 1984 when she sang Zerbinetta at the Met, a production he was conducting. “We didn’t hit it off particularly well then,” she recalled in a 2006 interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.They later met again at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. “This time it was different,” she said in that interview, “and the fireworks started to happen.” They married in 1989 and lived for some years in England.In addition to her husband, Ms. Rolandi is survived by their son, Ed Frazier Davis, a composer, baritone and conductor, and her brother.Ms. Rolandi retired from the stage in 1994 and focused on teaching. She and her husband moved to Chicago after Mr. Davis’s tenure with the Lyric Opera began in 2000. The next year she was appointed director of vocal studies at the company’s opera center; in 2006 she was promoted to director of the program, a position she held until 2013. Among the notable singers who worked with her in the program were Nicole Cabell, Quinn Kelsey, Stacey Tappan, Erin Wall and Roger Honeywell.Ms. Rolandi always cited the mentoring she received from Beverly Sills as her main inspiration for wanting to nurture young singers. Ms. Sills was “my teacher, my coach, my psychiatrist and finally my friend,” she told the critic Heidi Waleson in an interview for “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias,” Ms. Waleson’s 2018 book about City Opera.She was, Ms. Rolandi said, “my biggest cheerleader and fiercest critic.” More

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      in Television

      Frank Bonner, Brash Salesman on ‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ Dies at 79

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      He played the memorably obnoxious Herb Tarlek for all four seasons of the popular sitcom set at a radio station, and reprised the role on a sequel show a decade later.Frank Bonner, the actor best known for playing Herb Tarlek, the brash salesman with an affection for plaid polyester suits, on the popular television comedy “WKRP in Cincinnati,” died on Wednesday at his home in Laguna Niguel, Calif., south of Los Angeles. He was 79.His daughter, Desiree Boers-Kort, said the cause was complications of Lewy body dementia. He had learned he had the disease, which leads to worsening mental and physical complications, about three years ago.“WKRP in Cincinnati,” seen on CBS from 1978 to 1982, was set at a struggling radio station trying to reinvent itself with a rock format. The cast included Gary Sandy as the embattled station manager and Tim Reid and Howard Hesseman as disc jockeys. Mr. Bonner’s character, the station’s sales manager, was known for his obnoxious behavior, his general incompetence and his garish wardrobe.Loni Anderson, who played Jennifer Marlowe, the station’s super-efficient receptionist — and the frequent object of Herb’s heavy-handed flirting — said in a statement that Mr. Bonner was “one of the funniest men I had the pleasure of working with” and “the nicest man I have ever known.”Ms. Boers-Kort said that Mr. Bonner valued his time acting on “WKRP in Cincinnati” in part because it led him toward the career he preferred: directing. After serving as the director of six episodes of “WKRP,” he went on to direct episodes of more than a dozen other shows in the 1980s and ’90s, including “Who’s the Boss?,” “Saved by the Bell: The New Class” and “Just the Ten of Us” (on which he also had a recurring role).Mr. Bonner reprised the role of Herb on the syndicated sequel “The New WKRP in Cincinnati” in the early 1990s. He was also seen on “Scarecrow and Mrs. King,” “Night Court” and many other shows.Frank Bonner was born Frank Woodrow Boers Jr. on Feb. 28, 1942, in Little Rock, Ark., to Frank and Grace (Delahoussay) Boers, and raised in the city of Malvern. His Hollywood career began in 1967 and picked up steam in 1970 with roles in the film “Equinox” and on the TV series “The Young Lawyers” and “Nancy.” He appeared on “Mannix,” “Police Woman,” “Fantasy Island” and other shows before landing the career-defining role of Herb Tarlek.In addition to Ms. Boers-Kort, his daughter, Mr. Bonner is survived by his wife, Gayle Hardage Bonner. She had been his high school sweetheart in Malvern, his daughter said, and they reunited and eventually wed four decades later. His four previous marriages ended in divorce.His survivors also include two sons, Matthew and Justin; a stepdaughter, DeAndra Freed; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandchild. Another son, Michael, died before Mr. Bonner.Mr. Bonner got a kick out of Herb’s ill-advised wardrobe, his daughter said, because he knew that the character’s style was “one of the things that people loved about him.” She said he kept some of Herb’s distinctive white belts when the show ended.The New York Times contributed reporting. More

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      in Movies

      Eva Sereny, Who Photographed Film Stars at Work, Dies at 86

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      She captured De Niro, Streep, Eastwood and many others, often in unguarded moments. Working with directors like Fellini and Spielberg inspired her to make movies herself.In 1972, Eva Sereny was in Rome photographing rehearsals for “The Assassination of Trotsky,” starring Richard Burton as the Russian revolutionary, when his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who was not in the movie, visited the set.One of Ms. Sereny’s shots captured a moment in the celebrated stars’ famously turbulent marriage, which would soon end: the two staring icily at each other, as if they were re-enacting the tensions between their characters in the 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”“It was obvious something was going on,” she told The Guardian in 2018. “You could feel it — there was no great love between them. I don’t remember them even noticing the shot, which was taken at a distance from below. If it had been a close-up of their faces, it would have just been two people looking not very nicely at each other. The body language brings it all together.”“You could feel it — there was no great love between them,” Ms. Sereny said of her 1972 photograph of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of “The Assassination of Trotsky.”Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesThe Taylor-Burton picture was one of many notable images in Ms. Sereny’s decades-long career as a photographer, principally on hundreds of movie sets around the world. She took portraits, candid shots and publicity photos of stars like Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Robert De Niro, Jacqueline Bisset, Clint Eastwood, Audrey Hepburn, Sean Connery and Harrison Ford.Ms. Sereny died on May 25 in a hospital near her home in London. She was 86.The cause was complications of a massive stroke, said Carrie Kania, the creative director of Iconic Images, which handles Ms. Sereny’s archive and, with ACC Art Books, published “Through Her Lens: The Stories Behind the Photography of Eva Sereny” in 2018.Ms. Sereny was on location for the first three Indiana Jones films and snapped a widely known portrait of Mr. Ford, who played Jones, and Mr. Connery, who played his father, on the set of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). She was on the island of Mykonos for the filming of “The Greek Tycoon” in 1978 when she photographed Anthony Quinn dancing on the edge of the Aegean Sea.And on the set of Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), she overcame Brando’s distrust of photographers and took pictures of him laughing, lighting Mr. Bertolucci’s cigarette and talking to his co-star, Maria Schneider.Ms. Sereny was on the island of Mykonos for the filming of “The Greek Tycoon” in 1978 when she photographed Anthony Quinn dancing on the edge of the Aegean Sea.Eva Sereny/Iconic Images“There was something very considerate about the way he spoke to me,” she said in “Through Her Lens.” She recalled that she told him taking photos in unposed moments produced “the most interesting images,” and that “he sympathized with my take and said, ‘Well, look, all right.’”Eva Olga Martha Sereny was born in Zurich on May 19, 1935, to Hungarian-born parents. Her father, Richard, was a chemist; her mother, also named Eva, was an actress before they married.When her father traveled to England on business soon after the start of World War II, he was unable to return to Switzerland; Eva and her mother joined him in 1940. After the war, Mrs. Sereny opened a flower shop in the Burlington Arcade in London.Ms. Sereny was on location for the first three Indiana Jones films and snapped a widely known portrait of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery as father and son on the set of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989).Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesEva’s photography career did not start until well after she moved to Italy when she was 20. There she married Vincio Delleani, an engineer, and had two sons, Riccardo and Alessandro. When her husband was in a car accident in 1966, she thought about a career.“I remember sitting beside him in the hospital thinking, ‘My God, but for a few seconds I would be a widow,’” she told The Guardian. “‘I’ve got to do something. I’m quite artistic, though I can’t draw. What about photography?’”Her husband set up a darkroom in the basement of their house, and she started working with his Rolleiflex camera. A friend of hers, who ran the Italian Olympic committee, asked her to take pictures of young athletes in training. She then took a chance and flew to London, where she pitched her work to The Times of London.Soon after she showed her photos of the athletes to the paper’s picture editor, The Times printed several of them.With help from a film publicist in Rome, Ms. Sereny spent two weeks on the set of Mike Nichols’s “Catch-22” (1970). It was the first of hundreds of movie set assignments, which would lead to the publication of her pictures in outlets like Elle, Paris Match, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Time and Newsweek over the next 34 years.One of her frequent subjects was Ms. Bisset, whom she photographed first during the filming of Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” (1973) and then on the sets of “The Deep” (1977), “Inchon” (1981) and “The Greek Tycoon.”Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset on the set of “The Deep” (1977). “She could be argumentative,” Ms. Bisset said of Ms. Sereny, who photographed her on the set on four movies, “and she could make me laugh.”Eva Sereny/Iconic Images“She was refined in a very feminine way, and enjoyed her work,” Ms. Bisset said by phone. “When we started, she was bossy because I wasn’t doing what she wanted, but we became friends. She could be argumentative and she could make me laugh.“One day, she jolted me when she said, ‘Be sexy,’ and I’d say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was such an impossible command, and I’d ask, ‘What do you want me to do? Be more specific.’”Ms. Sereny’s work on movie sets enabled her to study the technique of directors like Nichols, Truffaut, Bertolucci, Federico Fellini (“Casanova”), Steven Spielberg (“Always” and the Indiana Jones films) and Werner Herzog (“Nosferatu the Vampyre”).In 1984 she directed a film of her own: “The Dress,” a 30-minute short starring Michael Palin, about a man who purchases a dress for his mistress. It won the BAFTA award — the British equivalent of the Oscar — for best short film. A decade later, she directed a feature, “Foreign Student,” about a French exchange student (Marco Hofschneider) at a Virginia university who falls in love with a young Black grammar-school teacher (Robin Givens) in racially sensitive 1956.Reviewing that film for The Chicago Tribune, John Petrakis called it “a deftly handled look at forbidden love that also finds time between kisses to examine cultural differences in this classic fish-out-of-water tale.”Frustrated with the limited opportunities for female directors, especially those who were not young, Ms. Sereny did not make any other films. She retired from photography in 2004.Ms. Sereny and Steven Spielberg in 1984.Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesMs. Sereny is survived by her sons; her partner, Frank Charnock; and four grandchildren. Her husband died in 2007.In 1973, Ms. Sereny was on the set of “The Last of Sheila,” a murder mystery set on a yacht, and given approval by the director, Herbert Ross, to photograph the cast as it rehearsed. But the sound of her shutter annoyed one of the film’s stars, Raquel Welch, who angrily demanded that Ms. Sereny leave because she had not been informed of her presence.Years later, she was assigned again to photograph Ms. Welch.“I just hoped and prayed she wouldn’t recognize or remember me,” Ms. Sereny said in “Through the Lens.” “Just pretend it never happened!”“From the moment we met again,” she added, “everything was perfect.” More

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      in Theater

      Lisa Banes, 'Gone Girl' Actress, Dies at 65 After Hit-and-Run

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      A mainstay of the New York stage, she also acted in films, including “Gone Girl.” She died 10 days after she was struck by a scooter as she was crossing a street in Manhattan.Lisa Banes, a versatile actress who came to prominence on the New York stage in the 1980s and went on to a busy career that also included roles on television and in the films “Cocktail” and “Gone Girl,” died on Monday of head injuries she sustained 10 days earlier when she was struck by a scooter in Manhattan. She was 65.Her death, at Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital, was confirmed by the New York Police Department, which said she had been struck by the scooter on June 4 as she was crossing Amsterdam Avenue near West 64th Street in Manhattan.The operator of the scooter had driven through a red light before crashing into Ms. Banes and then fled, said Sgt. Edward Riley, a police spokesman. Sgt. Riley said on Tuesday that no arrests had been made.Ms. Banes lived in Los Angeles and had been in New York visiting friends, her wife, Kathryn Kranhold, said.Known for her wry humor and confident, elegant presence, Ms. Banes appeared in more than 80 television and film roles, as well as in countless stage productions, including on Broadway.Ms. Banes, as the mother of a missing woman, with Ben Affleck in the 2014 movie “Gone Girl.” Alamy Stock PhotoShe found quick success in the theater after coming east from Colorado Springs in the mid-1970s and studying at the Juilliard School in New York.In 1980, when the Roundabout Theater revived John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” with Malcolm McDowell in the lead role as the angry Jimmy Porter, she played his overstressed wife.“Lisa Banes has a remarkably effective final scene,” Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times, “on her knees in anguish, face stained with failure, arms awkwardly searching for shape and for rest.”The next year, at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., she was in a production of the James M. Barrie comedy “The Admirable Crichton,” playing a daughter in an upper-crust British family that becomes shipwrecked on a deserted island.“As Lady Mary,” Mel Gussow of The Times wrote in his review, “Lisa Banes has a regal disdain. Gracefully, she plays the grande dame, and with matching agility she becomes a kind of Jane of the jungle, swimming rivers and swinging on vines — a rather far-fetched transformation, brought off with panache by this striking young actress.”Off Broadway roles kept coming. Later in 1981 she and Elizabeth McGovern had the lead roles in Wendy Kesselman’s “My Sister in This House” at Second Stage Theater. In 1982, at Manhattan Theater Club, she was the sister Olga in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” part of a starry cast that included Dianne Wiest, Mia Dillon, Jeff Daniels, Christine Ebersole and Sam Waterston.In 1984, when Ms. Banes was in the midst of a run in Wendy Wasserstein’s comedy “Isn’t It Romantic” at Playwrights Horizons, The Times named her one of 15 stage actresses to watch. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her performance in that play. More

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      in Music

      Karla Burns, Who Broke a ‘British Tonys’ Color Barrier, Dies at 66

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      Her Olivier Award was for her signature role as Queenie in “Show Boat,” a part that once earned a Tony nomination. She later lost her voice in surgery and fought to regain it.Karla Burns, a singer and actor who in 1991 won a Laurence Olivier Award, Britain’s highest stage honor, for her role as the riverboat cook Queenie in a production of “Show Boat,” and who later fought to regain her soulful voice after losing it in an operation to remove a growth in her throat, died on June 4 in Wichita, Kan. She was 66.Her sister, Donna Burns-Revels, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by a series of strokes.A spokeswoman for the Olivier Awards’ sponsoring organization, the Society of London Theater, said it’s believed that Ms. Burns was the first Black performer to win that honor.Her Olivier, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for best supporting performance in a musical, came in 1991 in recognition of her work in a revival of “Show Boat,” co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the West End. Almost a decade earlier she had earned a Tony nomination for playing Queenie on Broadway.Ms. Burns’s musical journey began when she was a girl growing up in Wichita in the 1960s. Her father was a blues and gospel pianist, and every Saturday night she danced beside his piano while he played. On bus rides to school she broke out in song. One day a choir teacher told her, “Kiddo, you can really sing.”After studying music and theater at Wichita State University, Ms. Burns auditioned for the role of Queenie in a regional production of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1927 musical “Show Boat,” about the lives of the performers and crew aboard a floating theater called the Cotton Blossom that travels along the Mississippi River in the segregated South.Ms. Burns landed the role and was soon taking the stage at the Lyric Theater in Oklahoma City. Then she performed as Queenie in an Ohio dinner theater production, belting out “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” nightly. In the early 1980s, she headed to New York to audition for the part for a national tour of “Show Boat” presented by the Houston Grand Opera. She competed for the role against hundreds of other women.“I had no agent and I walked in,” Ms. Burns said in an interview on the “The Merv Griffin Show” in 1982. “Some of them, I knew their faces, I knew they were famous women, and I said, ‘Well, I‘m here, and I’m from Kansas, and I’m going to go out there and do my best.’”She was asked to sing 16 bars of one song, and then the audition ended. After weeks of silence, someone called to apologize for losing her phone number. The part was hers, she was told.The musical, which starred Donald O’Connor and Lonette McKee, toured the country for months and arrived on Broadway in 1983.“There is standout work by Karla Burns,” Frank Rich wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Miss Burns has been handed a sizzling, rarely heard song, ‘Hey, Feller,’ that’s been restored to ‘Show Boat’ for this production.”She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance and won a Drama Desk Award. She later sang on a “Show Boat” studio album, released in 1988.Ms. Burns with Bruce Hubbard in the Broadway revival of “Show Boat” in 1983. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as a riverboat cook.Martha Swope/Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library“Karla was proud to play Queenie,” said Rick Bumgardner, a close friend of hers who directed her in productions of “The Wiz” and “Steel Magnolias.” “When she got the opportunity to put a rag on her head, she didn’t feel she was putting people down. She felt she was portraying strong women and reminding our nation of its past.”In the 1990s, Ms. Burns appeared in “Hi-Hat Hattie,” a touring one-woman musical based on the life of Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American actor to win an Oscar, for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Ms. McDaniel was also a Wichita native and had played Queenie in the 1936 movie version of “Show Boat,” and Ms. Burns had long considered her a kindred spirit. More

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      in Movies

      Ned Beatty, Actor Known for ‘Network’ and ‘Deliverance,’ Dies at 83

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      Mr. Beatty’s career spanned more than four decades and more than 150 roles in movies such as “Superman,” “All the President’s Men,” “Rudy” and “Back to School.”Ned Beatty, who during a prolific acting career that spanned more than four decades earned an Oscar nomination for his role in “Network” and gave a cringe-inducing performance as a weekend outdoorsman assaulted by backwoods brutes in “Deliverance,” died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.His death was confirmed by Deborah Miller, Mr. Beatty’s manager, who did not immediately provide details on the cause. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Beatty appeared in more than 150 movies and television projects over the course of his career, frequently cast in supporting roles. While the beefy actor was not known as a leading man of the screen, he became associated with some of Hollywood’s most enduring films.His credits include “All the President’s Men” (1976), “Superman” (1978), “Rudy” (1993) and “Back to School” (1986).On television, Mr. Beatty played Stanley Bolander, the detective known as “Big Man,” on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” appearing on the television series from 1993 to 1995. He also played Ed Conner, the father of John Goodman’s character Dan Conner, on “Roseanne.”In 1976, Mr. Beatty was cast by Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky in “Network,” the critically acclaimed satire about a television network’s struggling ratings and a tube-obsessed nation. His character, Arthur Jensen, gave a memorable monologue in the movie, earning Mr. Beatty an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.In the scene, Mr. Beatty, playing the mustachioed network boss, summons the character Howard Beale, the anchorman played by Peter Finch, into the corporate boardroom and draws the curtains. With the camera trained on Mr. Beatty, who was standing at the opposite end of a conference table lined with banker lamps, he unleashed a ferocious soliloquy. Mr. Beale had a lot to learn about the ways of the corporate world, Mr. Beatty’s character sermonized.“And you have meddled with the primeval forces of nature, Mr. Beale,” Mr. Beatty said, his voice roaring. “And you will atone.”Mr. Beatty then modulated his delivery.“Am I getting through to you?” he said in a normal speaking voice.In “Mad as Hell: The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies,” a 2014 book written by Dave Itzkoff, a culture reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Beatty said that he had been intimidated by the length of the speech, but excited by the character and the film.To get the filmmakers to commit to giving him the role, Mr. Beatty said, he told them that he had another movie offer for more money.“I was lying like a snake,” Mr. Beatty said. “I think they liked the fact that I was at least trying to be sly. I was doing something that maybe might be in their lexicon.”Mr. Beatty made his film debut in “Deliverance,” the 1972 big screen adaptation of James Dickey’s novel about four friends whose canoeing trip in rural Georgia turns calamitous. Stripped down to white underpants, his character, Bobby, is forced to “squeal like a pig” by a hillbilly before he is raped.The line would go down in movie infamy.“‘Squeal like a pig.’ How many times has that been shouted, said or whispered to me, since then?” Mr. Beatty wrote in a 1989 opinion piece for The New York Times.Mr. Beatty did not distance himself from the scene.“I suppose when someone (invariably a man) shouts this at me I am supposed to duck my head and look embarrassed at being recognized as the actor who suffered this ignominy,” he wrote. “But I feel only pride about being a part of this story, which the director John Boorman turned into a film classic. I think Bill McKinney (who portrayed the attacker) and I played the ‘rape’ scene about as well as it could be played.”Ned Beatty and Jon Voight in “Deliverance” (1972), in which Mr. Beatty made his feature film debut.Warner Bros., via PhotofestBorn on July 6, 1937, in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Beatty spent much of the early part of his acting career in regional theater, including eight years at the Arena Stage in Washington. In a 2003 interview, he told The Times that he averaged 13 to 15 shows per year onstage at the start of his career and spent as many as 300 days performing.In 2003, Mr. Beatty starred as Big Daddy in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” appearing with Jason Patric and Ashley Judd. He was reprising his performance in the role of the Southern plantation owner, for which he had been nominated for an Olivier Award as part of the revival’s original London production.Candidly assessing his co-stars, Mr. Beatty said that Broadway had come to rely too heavily on celebrities, thrusting them into challenging roles they did not have the acting chops to handle.“In theater you want to go from here to there, you want it to be about something,” Mr. Beatty said. “Stage actors learn how to do that. Film actors often don’t even think about it. They do what the director wants them to do, and they never inform their performance with — call it what you wish — through-line, objective.”In “Superman” in 1978, Mr. Beatty played Otis, the bumbling toady of the villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), a role that he reprised in “Superman II” in 1980.In 1986, he was cast in a comedic role as the gushing and unscrupulous Dean Martin of the fictional Grand Lakes University in “Back to School,” offering admission to Thornton Melon, the big and tall clothing tycoon (Rodney Dangerfield), in exchange for donating a building. The head of the business school in the film objected to the quid pro quo.“But I’d just like to say, in all fairness to Mr. Melon here, it was a really big check,” Mr. Beatty’s character retorted.Mr. Beatty delivered another memorable performance in a small role as Daniel Ruettiger, the blue-collar father in “Rudy,” the 1993 movie about a University of Notre Dame walk-on football player who makes the team. As the father enters the stadium for the first time, he is overcome by the moment.“This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen,” Mr. Beatty said. More

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      in Movies

      Milton Moses Ginsberg, Unconventional Filmmaker, Dies at 85

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      His movies about a psychiatrist’s disintegration and a werewolf working in the White House bombed. But they both drew favorable attention many years later.Milton Moses Ginsberg, who directed two ambitious but eccentric films before falling into obscurity, one about the meltdown of a psychiatrist and the other about a press aide in a Nixon-like administration who becomes a murderous werewolf, died on May 23 in his apartment in Manhattan. He was 85.The cause was cancer, said his wife, Nina Ginsberg.Mr. Ginsberg, a film editor determined to make his own movies, wrote and directed “Coming Apart” (1969), a raw black-and-white film that used a single, almost entirely static camera to document the loveless trysts and psychological disintegration of a psychiatrist, played by Rip Torn, who surreptitiously records his encounters with a camera inside a mirrored box.“Coming Apart” received mixed reviews, at best. But the one that devastated Mr. Ginsberg was from The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris, who wrote that “if everybody in the cast had refused to strip for action or inaction, ‘Coming Apart’ would have crumbled commercially into a half-baked amateur movie incapable of selling enough tickets to fill a phone booth.”Mr. Ginsberg blamed that review for the film’s box-office failure.“That was it,” he told The New York Times in 1998, adding: “I had done everything I wanted to do. And nothing happened.”Rip Torn in Mr. Ginsberg’s “Coming Apart.” The film received mixed reviews at best and failed at the box office when it was released in 1969. Mr. Ginsberg’s disappointment was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened “Coming Apart” in 1998. Kino InternationalHe followed “Coming Apart” in 1973 with another low-budget film: “The Werewolf of Washington,” a campy political parody inspired by the classic horror film “The Wolf Man” (1941), which terrified Mr. Ginsberg as a boy, and by President Richard M. Nixon, who terrified him as a man.In Mr. Ginsberg’s film, released more than a year into the Watergate scandal, Dean Stockwell plays an assistant press secretary who turns into a werewolf at inopportune moments, like when he’s bowling with the president, and murders characters based on Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John N. Mitchell.“The film isn’t advertised as a documentary,” the syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, “but when you think about what’s been going on around this town, you couldn’t tell it from the plot.”In 1975, after Mr. Ginsberg received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he fell into a depression that lifted only after he met and married Nina Posnansky, a painter, in 1983. She and his brother, Arthur, survive him.After the commercial failure of his feature films, Mr. Ginsberg returned to film editing. He worked on various projects, including the Oscar-winning documentaries “Down and Out in America” (1986), about unemployed and homeless people left behind in the economy, which was directed by the actress Lee Grant, and “The Personals” (1998), about a group of older people in a theater group.He was in limbo, he wrote in Film Comment in 1999, for having made “Coming Apart,” which he wryly called “murder on an audience.”“So if oblivion is what you crave, for both yourself and your movie, follow me!” he added.Mr. Ginsberg never made another feature, but in recent years he finished several short video essays, among them “Kron: Along the Avenue of Time” (2011), a phantasmagorical exploration of his life taken through a microscopic journey into intricate watch movements.Mr. Ginsberg in his Manhattan apartment in 1998. “If oblivion is what you crave, for both yourself and your movie,” he wrote in the magazine Film Comment in 1999, “follow me!” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMilton Moses Ginsberg was born on Sept. 22, 1935, in the Bronx. His father, Elias, was a cutter in the garment district, and his mother, Fannie (Weis) Ginsberg, was a homemaker.After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Mr. Ginsberg received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Columbia University. Italian films like Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) inspired him to make movies, but in the 1960s he worked instead as a film editor at NBC News, held a production job with the documentarians Albert and David Maysles, and was an assistant at “Candid Camera,” the popular television series that used concealed cameras to capture people in various situations, which he said influenced the furtive recording of the psychiatrist’s guests in “Coming Apart.”Mr. Ginsberg’s disappointment at the response to his features was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened “Coming Apart” in 1998. But he was too pained by its reception nearly 30 years before to watch it; he did not enter the theater until it ended, when he spoke to the audience. MoMA has shown it a few times since.“It was like nothing I’d ever seen,” Laurence Kardish, the former longtime senior curator of MoMA’s film department, who had seen “Coming Apart” during its original release, said by phone. “It was very explicit and very raw and struck me as an essential New York film, showing a New Yorker’s enthusiasm for self-examination.”When “Coming Apart” was released on video in 2000, an article in The Chicago Tribune called it “stylistically audacious.” And in 2011, the Brooklyn Academy of Music screened both of Mr. Ginsberg’s films. After its associate curator, Jacob Perlin, moved to Metrograph, the repertory theater on the Lower East Side, where he is now the artistic and programming director, he held a 50th-anniversary screening of “Coming Apart” in 2019. Restorations of both of Mr. Ginsberg’s movies have been completed by the film company Kino Lorber.The belated acceptance of his films offered some redemption to Mr. Ginsberg.“In 2011, Milton said that he’s had two afterlives,” Mr. Perlin, who became friends with Mr. Ginsberg, said by phone. “When MoMA showed ‘Coming Apart,’ and 2011, when I showed both his films.” More

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      Douglas Cramer, Producer of TV Hits and Art Aficionado, Dies at 89

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      He had a hand in some of the biggest shows of the 20th century, including “Dynasty” and “The Love Boat.”Douglas S. Cramer, who produced some of the most successful television shows of the 20th century, many — including “The Love Boat” and “Dynasty” — in partnership with Aaron Spelling, and who used his substantial wealth to become a leading art collector, died on Friday at his home on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. He was 89.His husband, Hubert Bush, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Cramer had a long career in television, producing or helping to develop shows including “Peyton Place” in the 1960s, “The Odd Couple” in the 1970s and “Hotel” in the 1980s. In the 1990s he produced a string of television movies based on novels by Danielle Steel.Today, television producing credits are handed out for a variety of reasons, and those given them often have little direct involvement in the show. But in Mr. Cramer’s day the producer was often more like a film director, shaping the cast and look of a series.“I was very hands-on,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2009 for the Television Academy Foundation. “There was nothing I wasn’t involved with. I worried about every performer, every extra, every piece of clothing.”Mr. Cramer joined forces with Mr. Spelling, the most prolific American television producer of the era, in the mid-1970s. “The Love Boat,” which they produced jointly, ran for 250 episodes beginning in 1977 and had a vast, eclectic list of guest stars that reflected Mr. Cramer’s connections and interests — Andy Warhol turned up in a 1985 episode, playing himself.Mr. Cramer, left, in 1984 with his longtime producing partner Aaron Spelling, center, and their fellow producer E. Duke Vincent.Gene Trindl/MPTV ImagesIf that series was a cultural reference point, “Dynasty” was the type of show that helps define a decade. A prime-time soap opera about a rich oil family, the Carrington clan — Blake (John Forsythe), Krystle (Linda Evans), Alexis (Joan Collins) and others — the show ran from 1981 to 1989. It gave a campy gloss to the decade while also occasionally managing to be groundbreaking: It had a prominent gay character and a prominent Black character, both still rare at the time.“We walk a fine line, just this side of camp,” Mr. Cramer told New York magazine in 1985. “Careful calculations are made. We sense that while it might be wonderful for Krystle and Alexis to have a catfight in a koi pond, it would be inappropriate for Joan to smack Linda with a koi.”That series and others, Mr. Spelling, who died in 2006, told The New York Times in 1993, benefited from the distinctive Cramer touch.“Douglas is a very creative man,” he said. “He has immaculate taste in art direction and wardrobe.”He also had immaculate taste in art. He amassed a collection that included both known names and up-and-coming talents, and he made significant gifts to museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, whose director, Glenn D. Lowry cited Mr. Cramer’s donation of “a superb group of paintings and sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly, among others.”Steve Martin, a fellow art aficionado, recalled gatherings at a ranch Mr. Cramer owned in Santa Ynez, Calif.“He would host a yearly ‘hoedown,’ with hay rides, buffets, inviting Hollywood’s and the art world’s glitterati,” Mr. Martin said by email. “One year, the hoedown centered around the opening of his gigantic, multilevel private museum, stuffed with Lichtenstein, Baselitz (as I recall), Ruscha (as I recall), and dozens of other important artists. All the high-level art mingled with guys and gals dressed in gingham and cowboy hats.”“The Love Boat” had a vast, eclectic list of guest stars that reflected Mr. Cramer’s connections and interests. Andy Warhol turned up in a 1985 episode, playing himself.Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesDouglas Schoolfield Cramer Jr. was born on Aug. 22, 1931, in Louisville, Ky. His father was a businessman, and his mother, Pauline (Compton) Cramer, was an interior designer who, after the family moved to Cincinnati when Doug was a boy, started writing a newspaper column, “Polly’s Pointers,” full of home decorating and other tips. She and his grandmother, who owned an antiques shop and would take him on buying trips, “opened my eyes to looking at what was around me,” Mr. Cramer said in the oral history, “which I think had a lot of impact on me as a producer.”Those buying trips with Grandma also spawned his interest in collecting, something he began doing as a child.“I started to collect saltshakers for some bizarre reason,” he told The Courier-Journal of Louisville in 2003. “From saltshakers it went to postcards. I had an enormous collection of postcards of art and posters.”He also developed an early fascination with the theater and New York City. After six months at Northwestern University in Illinois, he left college at 18 and went to live in New York, securing a job as a production assistant at Radio City Music Hall.The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 led him to conclude that “I’d rather be at the University of Cincinnati than fighting in Korea,” as he put it in the oral history; he eventually earned an English degree there.He returned to New York as a graduate student at Columbia University, obtaining a master’s degree and also making a start on a career as a playwright; his drama “Call of Duty” was staged at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village in 1956. The play had a decent run, but his main takeaway from the experience, he said, was the realization that “I really hadn’t lived enough to have anything to write about.”Though the Korean War was over, he was eventually drafted into the Army, spending six months working in communications. He managed a summer playhouse in Cincinnati for several seasons, at the same time teaching at what is now Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.From left, Joan Collins, John Forsythe and Linda Evans in an episode of “Dynasty,” one of the most successful shows with which Mr. Cramer was involved. “We walk a fine line,” he said of “Dynasty,” “just this side of camp.”ABC Photo ArchivesIn the late 1950s and early ’60s, sponsors were particularly influential in television, and Procter & Gamble, headquartered in Cincinnati, was one of the biggest players. Hoping to work his way into the television business, Mr. Cramer went to work there as a supervisor on two of its daytime shows, “As the World Turns” and “The Guiding Light.”After several years there he moved to New York, where in the early 1960s he took a job at ABC. As director of programing planning there, he helped develop “Peyton Place” into a hit series and also was involved in bringing “Batman” to the small screen in 1966.At ABC and throughout his career, Mr. Cramer crossed paths with future Hollywood titans. One was Barry Diller, who would later lead Paramount and 20th Century Fox.“I met Doug Cramer in the parking lot of the Bel Air Hotel as I was leaving my job interview with his boss at ABC,” Mr. Diller said by email. “He gave me the ticket to retrieve his car, thinking I was the parking attendant, and I’ve greatly admired him ever since.”From ABC Mr. Cramer moved to 20th Century Fox, and then to Paramount. There, as executive vice president in charge of production, he had overall authority over its many series, including “Love American Style,” “The Brady Bunch” and “The Odd Couple.” He soon formed his own production company, and in 1974 he produced “QB VII,” based on the Leon Uris novel, a star-studded production often identified as network television’s first mini-series. It won six Emmy Awards.After his run with Mr. Spelling, Mr. Cramer formed a different kind of partnership with Ms. Steel, beginning in 1990 with a TV movie version of her “Kaleidoscope.”“The time that I spent working with Doug Cramer on 21 TV movies and mini-series based on my books,” Ms. Steel said by email, “are among the happiest memories of my career, with fantastic results.”Mr. Cramer’s marriage to the gossip columnist Joyce Haber ended in divorce in the 1970s. A daughter, Courtney, died in 2004, and a son, Douglas III, died in 2015. Mr. Cramer began his relationship with Mr. Bush in 1991, and they married in 2006. A brother, Peyton, also survives him.Mr. Bush said that one of Mr. Cramer’s proudest accomplishments was that quirky casting on “The Love Boat.” In addition to working Warhol into an episode, he would sometimes engineer theme episodes, including one that featured designers like Bob Mackie and Halston. It was a chance, Mr. Bush said, to give Middle America, which loved the show, a look at people they might not otherwise see.“Doug made that accessible to America,” Mr. Bush said. “I think that was important.” More