Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Richard Roundtree, Star of ‘Shaft,’ Dies at 81

      by

      Richard Roundtree, the actor who redefined African American masculinity in the movies when he played the title role in “Shaft,” one of the first Black action heroes, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.His manager, Patrick McMinn, said the cause was pancreatic cancer, which had been diagnosed two months ago.“Shaft,” which was released in 1971, was among the first of the so-called blaxploitation movies, and it made Mr. Roundtree a movie star at 29.The character John Shaft is his own man, a private detective who jaywalks confidently through moving Times Square traffic in a handsome brown leather coat with the collar turned up; sports a robust, dark mustache somewhere between walrus-style and a downturned handlebar; and keeps a pearl-handled revolver in the fridge in his Greenwich Village duplex apartment. As Mr. Roundtree observed in a 1972 article in The New York Times, he is “a Black man who is for once a winner.”In addition to catapulting Mr. Roundtree to fame, the movie drew attention to its theme song, written and performed by Isaac Hayes, which won the 1972 Academy Award for best original song. It described Shaft as “a sex machine to all the chicks,” “a bad mother” and “the cat who won’t cop out when there’s danger all about.” Can you dig it? The director Gordon Parks’s gritty urban cinematography served as punctuation.A fictional product of his unenlightened pre-feminist era, Shaft was living the Playboy magazine reader’s dream, with beautiful women available to him as willing, downright grateful, sex partners. And he did not always treat them with respect. Some called him, for better or worse, the Black James Bond.He played the role again in “Shaft’s Big Score!” (1972), which bumped up the chase scenes to include speedboats and helicopters and the sexy women to include exotic dancers and other men’s mistresses. In that movie, Shaft investigated the murder of a numbers runner, using bigger guns and ignoring one crook’s friendly advice to “keep the hell out of Queens.”In “Shaft in Africa” (1973), filmed largely in Ethiopia, the character posed as an Indigenous man to expose a crime ring that exploited immigrants being smuggled into Europe. The second sequel lost money and led to a CBS series that lasted only seven weeks.But the films had made their impact. As the film critic Maurice Peterson observed in Essence magazine, “Shaft” was “the first picture to show a Black man who leads a life free from racial torment.”Mr. Roundtree in a scene from the 1972 movie “Shaft’s Big Score,” the first of two sequels.Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty ImageRichard Arnold Roundtree was born on July 9, 1942 (some sources say 1937), in New Rochelle, N.Y., the son of John and Kathryn (Watkins) Roundtree, who were identified in the 1940 census as a butler and a cook in the same household.Richard played on New Rochelle High School’s undefeated football team and, after graduating in 1961, attended Southern Illinois University on a football scholarship. But he dropped out of college in 1963 after he spent a summer as a model with the Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling presentation sponsored by a leading news and culture magazine for Black readers.He moved back to New York, worked a number of jobs and soon began his theater career, joining the Negro Ensemble Company. His first role was in a 1967 production of “The Great White Hope,” starring as a fictionalized version of Jack Johnson, the early 20th century’s first Black heavyweight boxing champion. A Broadway production starring James Earl Jones opened the next year and won three major Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.After “Shaft,” Mr. Roundtree made varied choices in movie roles. He was in the all-star ensemble cast, which also included Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, of the 1974 disaster movie “Earthquake.” He played the title role in “Man Friday” (1975), a vibrant, generous, ultimately more civilized partner to Peter O’Toole’s 17th-century explorer Robinson Crusoe.In “Inchon” (1981), which Vincent Canby of The Times described as looking like “the most expensive B movie ever made,” he was an Army officer on the staff of Gen. Douglas MacArthur (Laurence Olivier) in Korea. He starred with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds in “City Heat” (1984) and with a giant flying lizard in “Q” (1982).On the small screen he played Sam Bennett, the raffish carriage driver who courted Kizzie (Leslie Uggams), in the acclaimed mini-series “Roots” (1977). That show was transformational, Mr. Roundtree said in an ABC special celebrating its 25th anniversary: “You got a sense of white Americans saying, ‘Damn, that really happened.’”Richard Roundtree in 2019. He remained busy as an actor for more than four decades after his first big role.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesMr. Roundtree’s name remained associated with the 1970s, but he was just as busy during the next four decades.He was an amoral private detective in a five-episode story arc of “Desperate Housewives” (2004); appeared in 60 episodes of the soap opera “Generations” (1990); and played Booker T. Washington in the 1999 television movie “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years.” He was a big-city district attorney in the film “Seven” (1995) and a strong-willed Mississippi iceman in “Once Upon a Time … When We Were Colored” (1996).After the year 2000, when he was pushing 60, he made appearances in more than 25 small-screen series (he was a cast member of or had recurring roles in nine of them — including “Heroes,” “Being Mary Jane” and “Family Reunion”) and was seen in half a dozen television movies and more than 20 feature films.In 2020, he starred as a fishing boat’s gray-bearded captain in “Haunting of the Mary Celeste,” a supernatural maritime movie mystery. In 2022, he acted in an episode of “Cherish the Day,” Ava DuVernay’s romantic drama series.Mr. Roundtree married Mary Jane Grant in 1963. They had two children before divorcing in 1973. In 1980, he married Karen M. Cierna. They had three children and divorced in 1998.Mr. Roundtree is survived by four daughters, Kelli, Nicole, Taylor and Morgan; a son, John; and at least one grandchild.The Shaft character, created by Ernest Tidyman in a series of 1970s novels, endured — with Hollywood alterations. Samuel L. Jackson starred as a character with the same name, supposedly the first John Shaft’s nephew, in a 2000 sequel titled “Shaft.”In 2019, another “Shaft” was released, also starring Mr. Jackson (now said to be the original character’s son) and Jessie T. Usher as his son, J.J. Shaft, an M.I.T.-educated cybersecurity expert. The film felt something like a buddy-cops comedy, but the smartest thing it did, Owen Gleiberman of Variety noted in a review, was to take Mr. Roundtree, “bald, with a snowy-white beard,” and “turn him into a character who’s hotter, and cooler, than anyone around him” and whose “spirit is spry, and tougher than leather.”Orlando Mayorquin More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Natalie Zemon Davis, Historian of the Marginalized, Dies at 94

      by

      She wrote of peasants, unsung women, border crossers and, most popularly, Martin Guerre, a 16th-century village impostor recalled in a 1980s movie.Natalie Zemon Davis, a social and cultural historian whose imaginative and deeply researched investigations of the lives of marginalized figures — peasants, long-forgotten women, border crossers of all sorts — profoundly influenced the discipline, died on Saturday at her home in Toronto. She was 94.The cause was cancer, Aaron Davis, her son, said.Drawing on insights from anthropology and literary criticism, as well as meticulous archival digging, Professor Davis both represented and inspired an emerging approach to history in the second half of the 20th century, often by filling in gaps in the historical record with informed speculations based on deep immersion in the period under study.Her best-known book was “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1983), based on the tale of a 16th-century peasant in Languedoc, France, who for several years successfully impersonated a man from a rural village who had abandoned his family.Her book was a kind of follow-up to a 1982 movie by the same title, which was directed by Daniel Vigne and starred Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye. Professor Davis, who had published a groundbreaking collection of essays, “Society and Culture in Early Modern France” (1975), was the historical adviser to Mr. Vigne and the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière while they were working on the film.But with the release of “Le Retour de Martin Guerre” in theaters in France and elsewhere (it had its U.S. premiere in 1983), Professor Davis recognized that the movie could not convey the nuances of the story and so decided to give “this arresting tale,” as she put it in a preface to the book, “its first full-scale historical treatment, using every scrap of paper left me by the past.”Professor Davis’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” is based on the tale of a 16th-century peasant in Languedoc, France, who successfully impersonated a man from a rural village who had abandoned his family.Harvard University PressThe book was warmly received. In The New York Review of Books, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called it a “major work of historical reconstruction.”Most earlier accounts focused on Arnaud du Tilh, the Gascon peasant who passed himself off as Martin Guerre. Those accounts assumed that Guerre’s abandoned wife, Bertrande de Rols, had been fooled by the false Martin. They made Arnaud du Tilh “the inventive figure in the tale,” Professor Davis wrote.For her, though, Bertrande was central to the story. “By the time she had received him in her bed,” Professor Davis wrote of the impostor, “she must have realized the difference.” Bertrande, in Professor Davis’s telling, “knew the truth” and colluded in the masquerade until it became impossible to sustain.In the book’s introduction, Professor Davis wrote that “what I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.”A scene from the 1982 movie “The Return of Martin Guerre,” starring Gérard Depardieu (in the doorway). The director, Daniel Vigne, is second from right. Professor Davis was the film’s historical adviser. European International, via Everett CollectionHer next book, “Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France” (1987), examined stories that common people accused of homicide told in order to secure a pardon from the king. After 1990, her work embraced outsiders and border-crossers around the world.“Women on the Margins” (1995) presented the lives of three 17th-century women of different religions — Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — who came from different regions: Germany, Canada and Suriname. In The New York Times Book Review, the historian Arthur Quinn called the book “a stylishly sketched 17th- and 18th-century biographical triptych” that was “yet another exploration of how the modest in early modern Europe strove to fashion identities for themselves.”Professor Davis published two books in 2000. “The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France” is an anthropological look at how gift-giving and reciprocal obligation helped structure society, and “Slaves on Screen” examined the portrayal of slavery, and resistance to it, in five movies, from “Spartacus” (1960), set in ancient Rome, to “Beloved” (1980), an adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel rooted in the American South. Professor Davis said history films offered “thought experiments” about the past, but she criticized their use of fictions that misled viewers.Professor Davis’s 1995 book presented the lives of three 17th-century women of different religions — Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — who came from different regions: Germany, Canada and Suriname.Harvard University PressAfter 2001, Professor Davis turned her attention to researching a 16th-century diplomat for the sultan of Fez, al-Hasan al-Wazzan al-Gharnati al-Fasi, who was kidnapped by Christian pirates in 1518 and taken to Rome. He converted to Christianity and lived there for nine years, writing books for Europeans in Italian and Latin about North Africa and Islam, most familiarly under the name Leo Africanus. He was best known as the author of the first geography of Africa published in Europe, in 1550.Her resulting book, “Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds,” was published in 2006.Africanus, Professor Davis said, had a “double identity and vision, a Muslim curious about Christianity, a North African interested in exploring the world of Rome and Italy.” But hard documentation about him was sparse; to figure him out, she said, she had to develop “a plausible life story from materials of the time.” As she had in the case of Martin Guerre, she speculated about Africanus’s behavior based on the practices in the world from which he came.Natalie Zemon was born in Detroit on Nov. 8, 1928, to Julian and Helen (Lamport) Zemon, both American-born children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Her father worked in the textile business, and her mother was a homemaker. Natalie was one of only a few Jews at Cranbrook Kingswood, a girls’ finishing school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Although she was popular and successful there, she felt like an outsider, by her account. Enrolling at Smith College in Massachusetts, she became involved in left-wing politics, participating in a Marxist study group and protesting racial discrimination. In 1948, she met Chandler Davis, a mathematics graduate student. They married six weeks later. After pursuing studies in social and cultural history, Ms. Davis graduated from Smith with a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and pursued a master’s at Radcliffe, where she was exposed to the research techniques of social history.She worked on her doctorate at the University of Michigan after her husband was offered a job there in 1950. But after he was held on charges of distributing Communist literature, the government seized their passports in 1952, preventing her for a time from going to France to pursue her chosen area of concentration, 16th-century French society.In 1954, after refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee on First Amendment grounds, Mr. Davis was cited for contempt. He was fired by Michigan and blacklisted. Afterward, the couple, who by then had three children, eked out a living through part-time teaching and journal editing. Professor Davis did not receive her Ph.D. until 1959.Her career, like those of most academic women of her generation, was shaped in part, and stalled, by her husband’s. She and her family moved again, in 1962, when Mr. Davis obtained a teaching job at the University of Toronto.But while teaching part-time, she continued her research, publishing the results in essays and papers and presenting her work at conferences. (“Sometimes I typed with a child on my lap,” she said.) She held a faculty position at Toronto from 1963 to 1971.In 1971, she and a colleague, Jill Ker Conway, shook up Toronto’s conservative history department by teaching a course on the history of women and gender, one of the first in North America. (Dr. Conway went on to become the first woman to be named president of Smith College.)President Barack Obama presented Professor Davis with the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2013. Pete Marovich/Getty ImagesThat same year, at 42, Professor Davis landed her first tenure-track teaching post, at the University of California, Berkeley; she was the first woman in the university’s history department. Four years later, she published her first book, “Society and Culture in Early Modern France.” This strikingly original collection of essays reflected her “remarkable breadth of learning,” one reviewer wrote.Professor Davis moved to Princeton in 1978 and stayed for 18 years, succeeding Lawrence Stone as director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. In 1996, she retired as the Henry Charles Lea professor of history. She had helped found women’s studies programs at both Princeton and Berkeley.Returning to Canada, she was named a professor emerita in the University of Toronto’s history department.Professor Davis became president of the American Historical Association in 1987, only the second woman to hold that position. She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2012 and was presented with the 2012 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.Chandler Davis died of a stroke last year. In addition to her son, Professor Davis is survived two daughters, Hannah Taïeb and Simone Davis; a brother, Stanley Zemon; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Professor Davis was a charismatic teacher well loved in the profession. “At conferences and round tables, Dr. Davis is usually the most senior and well-known face in the room,” an article about her in a University of Toronto magazine said, “yet she’ll often pull aside grad students to ask about their work — and how they’re juggling it with family.”In a speech to the American Council of Learned Societies, Professor Davis told of how her years of study had given her confidence in the resilience and adaptability of societies.“No matter how bleak and constrained the situation,” she said, “some forms of improvisation and coping take place. No matter what happens, people go on telling stories about it and bequeath them to the future.” She added, “The past reminds us that change can occur.”Alex Traub More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Alan Eisenberg, Longtime Actors’ Union Head, Dies at 88

      by

      In his 25-year tenure at Actors’ Equity, he helped build Equity Fights AIDS and challenged the casting of the top roles in the hit musical “Miss Saigon.”Alan Eisenberg of Actors’ Equity Association was honored by the Actors Fund of America at a gala in New York in 2006. With him was the actress Lynn Redgrave.Peter Kramer/Getty ImagesAlan Eisenberg, a lawyer who during his 25 years as the top executive of Actors’ Equity Association helped to build its membership and stabilize the finances of its health plan, and also dealt with a highly publicized controversy involving the casting of the hit musical “Miss Saigon,” died on Oct. 7 in Rhinebeck, N.Y. He was 88.His wife, Claire Copley, said he died in a hospital of lung cancer.Mr. Eisenberg had worked at law firms for two decades before he was hired in 1981 as the executive secretary (his title was later changed to executive director) of Actors’ Equity, which represents theatrical actors and stage managers.In the 1980s, the union was confronted with the AIDS crisis, which had a particularly harsh impact on the theatrical community. Mr. Eisenberg was a champion of Equity Fights AIDS, the philanthropic fund formed within Actors’ Equity in 1987 to directly help members in financial need.Tom Viola, the executive director of the nonprofit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (the two organizations merged in 1992), said in a phone interview that Mr. Eisenberg offered “ballast and direction” to the “emotional understanding of what needed to be done” that was provided by the actress Colleen Dewhurst, who was president of Equity Fights AIDS from 1985 until her death in 1991.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Kenneth Force, the ‘Toscanini of Military Marching Bands,’ Dies at 83

      by

      Captain Force was part of the pomp and ceremony at 10 presidential inaugurations, and for 45 years he taught midshipmen to revere traditional military music.Kenneth Force, who as the leader of the Merchant Marine Academy Regimental Band from 1971 to 2016 was one of the nation’s foremost experts in the art of military pomp, died on Oct. 7 in Rye, N.Y. He was 83.A former student of his, Marianne Lepre, said the death, at a long-term nursing facility, was caused by respiratory failure brought on by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Military music arose historically as a means of communicating orders to troops, but it has long since become a ceremonial custom, with trumpet-tooting and drum-rolling tunes like “Hail to the Chief” and “The Red, White and Blue.”A military man might say that Captain Force exerted full-spectrum dominance over this territory.At one time or another, he conducted the U.S. Marine Corps Band, which performs for the president; the band of the Black Watch, a Scottish infantry battalion; the bands, in Britain, of Her Majesty’s Grenadier Guards, Welsh Guards and Royal Marines; and the Dutch Royal Military Band.He performed at 10 presidential inaugurations, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s to George W. Bush’s.“It’s not likely anyone is keeping score,” Peter Applebome of The New York Times wrote in an Our Towns column in 2009, “but there can’t be too many people who have participated in more inaugurations than Captain Force, now 68 and something of a Toscanini of military marching bands.”Captain Force at the Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island in 2009. He lived on its grounds for decades.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe earned that distinction principally as director of music at the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., on Long Island. His band members were not aspiring musicians; they were midshipmen training to receive Bachelor of Science degrees, U.S. Coast Guard licenses and officers’ commissions. At inaugurations, the student musicians got to play while marching past a presidential reviewing stand.“I always tell the midshipmen that you will never forget the memory of passing the president of the United States,” ” Captain Force told The Times.At each inauguration, his band blared the classic 19th-century song of the marines, “A Life on the Ocean Wave.”“What we do doesn’t change,” he said. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age.”Captain Force kept tradition alive in several ways. He rearranged old band tunes for modern instruments — work he compared to repairing antiques — and he composed new political homages, including “First Lady March” and “Presidential Pets March” (which includes barks and meows).Captain Force composed marches of his own, including the “Presidential Pets March,” complete with barks and meows.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe and his band were sought after by organizers of great American events. They played at Miss America pageant parades, atop the Brooklyn Bridge for its 100th anniversary, on the field during World Series, on the courts of the U.S. Open after 9/11, and aboard the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 when it carried World War II veterans to Normandy in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of D-Day.In 1989, The Times credited Captain Force with making his band sound like “a giant walking organ.”Kenneth Richard Force was born on March 24, 1940, in Queens, where he grew up, to Alvina and George Force. His father was a banker.Ken got his musical training playing trumpet in the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, in Broadway pit bands and in the band of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus.His fascination with military music dated to one night in 1959, when he was in the First Army Band, headquartered on Governors Island in New York. His bandmaster instructed the group to play louder than usual, since three British bands were coming to visit. They began blasting away on “Colonel Bogey on Parade.”Over the din, Captain Force clearly heard a British drum major shout, “By the cen-terr! Quick march!”Then a band of Royal Marines appeared in pith helmets, each stomp of their marching feet clearly audible.Captain Force was in awe, he later told The Times. He asked a British band director if he had a manual.“Manual?” the man responded. “It’s 300 years of tradition!”Captain Force received a bandsman’s diploma from the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington in 1958, a bachelor of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 1964, and a master’s degree from the same institution the next year. He wrote his master’s thesis on British military bands.Captain Force in an undated photo. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age,” he said. United States Merchant Marine AcademyOn one occasion, in the late 1990s, he waged a battle that united his passions for military music history, preservation and teaching.He had long considered “Over There,” George M. Cohan’s ode to the American doughboys of World War I, the second-best patriotic song of the 20th century, behind only Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” As it happened, Cohan’s former home, where he had written “Over There,” lay just a few minutes away from the Merchant Marine Academy — but the old mansion was about to be demolished.Captain Force began what Newsday in 1999 called a “zealous campaign” to have Cohan’s home designated a landmark.“If you tear down the house, you’d be tearing down part of the soul of America,” he told The Times the same year.He had the midshipmen play “Over There” in view of people filing into a local landmarks commission hearing, and he inspired his students to show up at meetings to espouse his cause.They saved the property.“Now I can take my kids here someday when I come back for homecoming,” Lester J. Snyder, a senior from Illinois and a midshipman trumpeter, told The Associated Press shortly afterward. “I’ll be able to share this with the next generation, and maybe they will get to know something about the feeling of duty and honor to your country.”Captain Force’s three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a stepson, John Uribe, and two step-grandchildren. He lived on the grounds of the Merchant Marine Academy for decades and in recent years lived in an apartment across Long Island Sound in Port Chester, N.Y.Captain Force generally did not criticize United States leaders in public. But he did make an exception for Jimmy Carter’s decision in 1977 to abjure the traditional pomp of an inauguration parade by walking along Pennsylvania Avenue rather than riding in a limousine.“I know he didn’t want ruffles and flourishes and ‘Hail to the Chief,’” Captain Force told The Times in 2009. “He said it was too pompous. And the country didn’t like that. People think the president deserves special music.“People like ceremony,” he continued, “and no one does it better than a band. When you lose your ceremony, you lose a lot.” More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      The 45 King, Who Produced for Jay-Z and Eminem, Dies at 62

      by

      The 62-year-old Bronx native infused a distinctive jazzy flavor in his beats. He contributed tracks to Queen Latifah’s debut album and produced Eminem’s “Stan,” among other hip-hop classics.The 45 King, the influential New York City hip-hop producer who worked with Queen Latifah, Eminem and Jay-Z, died on Thursday. He was 62.Born Mark Howard James, he took the moniker The 45 King because of his fondness for sampling old, obscure records. His death was announced on social media Thursday afternoon by a fellow hip-hop producer, DJ Premier.Information on the cause or place of death were not immediately available. An inquiry sent to James’s manager was not immediately returned.“His sound was unlike any other from his heavy drums and his horns were so distinct on every production,” DJ Premier wrote, referring to James as DJ Mark The 45 King.James, born on Oct. 16, 1961 in the Bronx, was a pioneer in the 1980s New York hip-hop scene and worked with early rap stars like the Funky 4, according to his website. He was known for his jazzy beats, showcased on his first hit track, the highly sampled “The 900 Number,” released in 1987. He slowed down a saxophone solo, “dropped the results over an irresistibly funky break” and the result exploded, according to AllMusic, adding that the horn line was “forever ingrained in the collective hip-hop psyche.”James worked closely with Queen Latifah, a fellow member of the music crew known as the Flavor Unit. James produced the hit song “Wrath of My Madness” on her debut album “All Hail the Queen” in 1989 and also contributed other tracks.“Thank you for teaching me taking me under your wing, teaching me about this thing called hip-hop, and so much more,” Queen Latifah wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.James also produced Eminem’s “Stan,” released on the 2000 album “The Marshall Mathers LP.” The rap tells the story of a perturbed superfan named “Stan” and is set to a throbbing beat sampling Dido’s 1998 track “Thank you.”“I took a first verse and made into an eight-bar hook for Eminem,” James said in a 2021 interview clip posted to social media by Eminem on Thursday.“Legends are never over,” Eminem wrote on X, formerly Twitter.James’s other hits included Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which sampled the musical “Annie” and a remix of Madonna’s “Keep It Together.”James credited much of his success and production style to the time he spent in the 1980s working for DJ Breakout, a Bronx hip-hop luminary.“I like to say I got lucky,” James said in the 2021 interview with the YouTube channel Unique Access Ent. “I was in the right place at the right time.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Vincent Patrick, Chronicler of Hustlers and Mobsters, Dies at 88

      by

      A novelist and screenwriter, he wrote “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and “Family Business” and brought them both to the big screen.Vincent Patrick, an author and screenwriter who set pins at a bowling alley, peddled Bibles door to door and helped start a mechanical engineering firm before finding critical success with his first novel, “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” at 44, died on Oct. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, his son Richard said.The son of a Bronx pool-hall owner and numbers runner, Mr. Patrick was raised in a milieu sprinkled with the grifters, hustlers and mobsters who would eventually become characters in his novels, which also included “Family Business” (1985) and “Smoke Screen” (1999).In manner and accent, Mr. Patrick seemed like a character he might have dreamed up himself. A 1999 profile in The Los Angeles Times noted that “his voice has that subterranean rumble of an accent, a sound that good character actors try to emulate when playing retired cops or tough but fair patriarchs.”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of Charlie, the down-on-his-luck night manager of a Manhattan saloon, whose cousin Paulie sucks him and a locksmith friend into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.“The connective thread is the sad state of their lives, their disenchantment and the curse of being dreamers,” Joe Flaherty wrote in a review in The New York Times. The novel, he added, “mines territory rarely encountered in fiction and, in the vernacular of his tough, streetwise characters, delivers a sweetheart of a book.”“Family Business,” the tale of three generations of hustlers from an ethnically mixed New York family, also explored the psychological allure of the big score. Jessie McMullen, the con-man grandfather; Vito, his son, who is in the wholesale meat business; and Adam, his M.I.T.-educated grandson, all find themselves drawn into a risky caper to swipe a plant cell from a California laboratory and sell it to a rival genetic engineering company.“Mr. Patrick could have drawn these characters with broad strokes, concentrating on the heist, and still have come up with a decent thriller,” Arthur Krystal wrote in The Times. “Instead he chose to provide them with interesting lives and, in the cases of Vito and Adam, with the intelligence and self-doubts of men uncomfortable with their moral upbringing.”Mr. Patrick himself was quoted by The Times: “There’s a colorfulness about their value systems that makes them attractive to a writer,” he said, “a willingness to take risks and an ability to meet life sort of head-on and wrestle with it and not retreat into a very secure position.”Some critics were less kind to the feature film versions of both books, which Mr. Patrick himself adapted. “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, was “less a story than a display of acting mannerisms,” the critic Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.Reviewing “Family Business” (1989), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick, Mr. Canby found a paucity of wit. He also found the idea that three actors so physically dissimilar could be blood relatives to be a stretch.Still, Mr. Patrick understood the compromises required to make it in Hollywood, his son Richard said in a phone interview. His father, he said convinced the producer Scott Rudin that he would not treat his novels as sacrosanct works of literature, telling him, “I have no compunction at all about cannibalizing my own work in order to bring it to the big screen.’”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of a down-on-his-luck saloon night manager who gets sucked into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.Seaview BooksVincent Francis Patrick was born on Jan. 19, 1935, in the Bronx, the middle of three children of Vincent and Angela (Hunt) Patrick. His mother was a legal secretary. Growing up, he dreamed of being a writer, and he churned out short stories during his teens.School, however, was another matter. He chafed at the strict discipline at the Roman Catholic schools he attended, and he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx after his junior year. In order to make ends meet, he set pins at a Bronx bowling alley before taking a job selling Bibles door to door in Bronx apartment buildings.As he recounted in a 1999 performance at the storytelling series staged by the Moth, he abandoned the job after watching his sales partner persuade a housewife to raid her 7-year-old daughter’s piggy bank for the $7 down payment on a fancy leather-embossed Bible. “I didn’t know yet who I was,” he told the audience. “But I knew who I was not.”In 1954 he married Carole Unger, and the couple had two sons. With a family to support, Mr. Patrick earned his high school diploma and put himself through New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and a partner then started a successful firm that designed, among other things, an assembly line for caskets.By his mid-30s, however, the call of a literary career had become too loud to ignore, so he left engineering to take another stab at writing professionally. “I wasn’t really happy, and I knew if I didn’t begin to write something, it wasn’t going to be written,” he told People magazine in 1979.Mr. Patrick hammered out a draft of his first book while working as a bartender at an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where his son said he drew inspiration by rubbing elbows with the underworld types from Little Italy who would hang out there.From left, Mickey Rourke, Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts in the film version of “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), for which Mr. Patrick wrote the screenplay.MGM, via Everett CollectionWhile he was initially drawn to screenwriting as a means to adapt his own work, Richard Patrick said, it soon became a successful side career. Among other projects, he contributed to the script for “The Devil’s Own” (1997), starring Harrison Ford as a police officer and Brad Pitt as an Irish Republican Army member hiding out in Staten Island, and wrote the two-part television movie “To Serve and Protect” (1999).He was also hired to write early treatments for “Beverly Hills Cop” and “The Godfather III,” although both projects ended up in other hands.In addition to his son Richard, Mr. Patrick is survived by his wife; another son, Glen; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Hollywood, Mr. Patrick once said, was both a fabled land of opportunity and a trap. “Once you start,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “it’s hard to get out.” Discussing his third novel, “Smoke Screen,” a thriller involving international terrorism and a deadly virus, he admitted that his screenwriting work had slowed his literary output.“Yeah, this is my third novel in 20 years,” he said. “But I think when you look at it, from the point of sheer craft, I’ve gotten better. And that’s because, Hollywood or not, I write every day. It’s different writing, but it all boils down to plot and characters.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Burt Young, ‘Rocky’ Actor Who Played Complex Tough Guys, Dies at 83

      by

      A former boxer from the streets of Queens, he became a scene stealer with his portrayals of mobsters, cops and working men with soul.Burt Young, a burly Queens-bred actor who leveraged a weary gravitas and bare-knuckled demeanor to build a prolific career as a Hollywood tough guy in films like “Chinatown,” “Once Upon a Time in America” and, most notably, “Rocky,” for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, died on Oct. 8 in Los Angeles. He was 83.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Morea Steingieser.With his bulldog build and his doleful countenance, Mr. Young amassed more than 160 film and television credits. He often played a mob boss, a street-smart detective or a bedraggled working man.But even when he played a villain, he was no mere heavy. Despite his background as a Marine and a professional boxer, Mr. Young brought layers of complexity to his work. The acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who once coached him, called Mr. Young a “library of emotions.”With his no-nonsense approach, he found a kindred spirit in another Hollywood tough guy, the filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in “The Killer Elite” (1975), starring James Caan, and “Convoy” (1978), starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw.“Both were mavericks and outlaws, with a deep respect for art,” his daughter said in a phone interview. “They understood each other because of the intensity and honesty Peckinpah demanded. He had no tolerance for lack of authenticity.”Throughout the early 1970s, Mr. Young made memorable appearances on television shows like “M*A*S*H” and in movies like the mob comedy “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971) and “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), a drama about a sailor (James Caan) who falls in love with a prostitute (Marsha Mason).He also proved a scene stealer in a powerful, if brief, appearance in “Chinatown” (1974), Roman Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece, as a cuckolded Los Angeles fisherman who becomes entangled in a tale of incest and murder.His true breakout came two years later, with “Rocky,” the story of a low-level hood and club boxer (Sylvester Stallone) who gets an unlikely bout with the heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Mr. Young played the combustible Paulie, a butcher friend of Rocky’s and the brother of Adrian (Talia Shire), the introverted woman who becomes Rocky’s girlfriend.Although “Rocky” would propel Mr. Stallone, who also wrote the screenplay, to stardom, Mr. Young often said that he had been the bigger name in Hollywood before the project began. “I was the only actor that didn’t audition in the first ‘Rocky,’” he said in a 2017 interview with The Rumpus, a culture website. “And I got the most money for it.”Mr. Young remembered his first meeting with Mr. Stallone, in a studio commissary. “He kneels down next to me,” he recalled. “He says, ‘Mr. Young, I’m Sylvester Stallone. I wrote Rocky,’” — and then, Mr. Young said, he added, “You’ve got to do it, please.”“He’s trying to twist my arm,” Mr. Young said.The film, a gritty and often somber human drama directed by John G. Avildsen, was a far cry from its sometimes cartoonish sequels, all but one of them directed by Mr. Stallone, in which Mr. Young also appeared. “It really wasn’t a fighting story, it was a love story, about someone standing up,” he said of the first movie in a 2006 interview with Bright Lights Film Journal. “Not even winning, just standing up.”“Rocky” became a 1970s landmark. It received 10 Academy Award nominations, including Mr. Young’s for best supporting actor, and won three Oscars, including for best picture.“I made him a rough guy with a sensitivity,” Mr. Young later said of Paulie. “He’s really a marshmallow, even though he yells a lot.”Mr. Young as Paulie in the original “Rocky.” The character was prone to volcanic eruptions, which including smashing up his sister’s house with a baseball bat.Everett CollectionBurt Young — he adopted that name as an actor; sources differ on his name at birth — was born on April 30, 1940, in Queens. His father was a sheet-metal worker, an iceman and eventually a high school shop teacher and dean.Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in the Corona section of Queens, Mr. Young got an early taste of the streets. “My dad, trying to make me a gentler kid, sent me to Bryant High School in Astoria, away from my Corona pals,” he wrote in the foreword to “Corona: The Early Years,” (2015), by Jason D. Antos and Constantine E. Theodosiou.“Soon, however, I got thrown out, and it was on to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, getting booted out after one term,” he continued. “Finally, it was the Marines at 16, my pop fibbing my age to get me in.”He started boxing in the Marine Corps and went on to a successful, if relatively brief, professional career under Cus D’Amato, the boxing trainer and manager who shepherded the careers of Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. He had a win-loss record of about 17-1 — his own accounts varied — when he quit the ring.In his late 20s, he was laying carpets and doing other odd jobs when he became infatuated with a woman who tended bar, and who told him that she dreamed of studying acting with Mr. Strasberg. “I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was,” he told Bright Lights. “I thought it was a girl.”Mr. Young set up a meeting for the two of them with Mr. Strasberg, the father of method acting, and ended up studying with him for two years. “Acting had everything I was fishing for,” he recalled. “In my life till then, I’d used tension to hold myself upright. Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”His many other film credits ranged from “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1989), a harrowing adaptation of the scandalous 1964 novel by Hubert Selby Jr. about lost souls from the underside of midcentury Brooklyn, to the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School.” Mr. Young also wrote and starred in “Uncle Joe Shannon” (1978), the story of a jazz trumpeter whose life implodes before he finds redemption.In addition to his daughter, Mr. Young is survived by a brother, Robert, and a grandson. His wife, Gloria, died in 1974.Mr. Young, second from left, performed onstage with Robert De Niro, center, and Ralph Macchio, third from right, in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” which opened at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1986.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Young also had a long career in theater, including a role alongside Robert De Niro and Ralph Macchio in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” a play about a drug dealer and his son that opened at the Off Broadway Public Theater in Manhattan in 1986 and later moved to Broadway.Mel Gussow of The New York Times praised Mr. Young’s humor-laced performance as Mr. De Niro’s partner and lackey. He singled out one scene for praise in which Mr. Young, he wrote, was “sheepishly pulling up the wide waistband of his loud shorts while insisting that he is not fat but has ‘big bones.’”Mr. Young was an avid painter who sold his work, and whose moody portraits showed the influence of Picasso and Matisse. “I don’t think you can put me in a bottle as an actor or an artist,” he said in a 2016 video interview. “Perhaps the acting, I’m a little more structured.”In acting, he added, he zeroed in on precise emotional cues to express, say, greed or anger — to “fatten up” his characters.Little wonder, then, that his Paulie in “Rocky” leaped off the screen with volcanic eruptions — tossing his sister’s Thanksgiving turkey into an alley in a fit of rage, smashing up her house with a baseball bat.“Paulie was a pretty ugly guy many times,” he said. But, he added, “they miscast me.“I’m a lovable son of a gun. It’s just that I go astray here and there.” More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Steven Lutvak, Whose Darkly Comic Show Won a Tony, Dies at 64

      by

      He wrote several musicals without attracting much notice. Then he struck Broadway gold with “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.”Steven Lutvak, a composer and lyricist whose only Broadway show, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” — a black comedy about a killer in London who bumps off the relatives who stand in the way of his becoming a wealthy royal — won the Tony Award for best musical, died on Oct. 9 at his work studio in Manhattan. He was 64.The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said Michael McGowan, his husband.Over the years, Mr. Lutvak wrote several musicals that were staged in regional theaters and Off Off Broadway. But none were nearly as successful as “A Gentleman’s Guide.”Set in Edwardian England, it is the story of Monty Navarro, a poor man who, after learning that he is a distant relative of the rich D’Ysquith clan (and then being denied a claim to its lineage), kills the eight kinfolk (all played by one actor) in the line of succession between him and the head of the family, the Ninth Earl of Highhurst.The show opened in November 2013 and ran for 905 performances over more than two years.In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood said that the score — Mr. Lutvak wrote the music and collaborated on the lyrics with Robert L. Freedman — “establishes itself as one of the most accomplished (and probably the most literate) to be heard on Broadway in the past dozen years or so, since the less rigorous requirements of pop songwriting have taken over.”“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” was nominated for 10 Tonys in 2014 — Mr. Lutvak and Mr. Freedman were nominated for original score — and won for Mr. Freedman’s book, Darko Tresnjak’s direction and Linda Cho’s costume design, as well as for best musical.“Steve was a gifted composer, lyricist and musician, but more than anything he was a born storyteller,” Mr. Freedman said by phone. “I was able to speak to him in my own language about story, plot and characters in a way that not every composer can do.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More