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      Michael Boyd, 68, Who Invigorated the Royal Shakespeare Company, Dies

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      He is credited with stabilizing that venerable British troupe while energizing it with ambitious projects, including Broadway’s “Matilda the Musical.” Michael Boyd, who led the Royal Shakespeare Company as artistic director from 2002 to 2012, a decade in which he stabilized the organization while undertaking ambitious projects including a heralded New York residency and the mounting of the un-Shakespearean hit show “Matilda the Musical,” died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 68.His family, in a statement posted on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s website, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Boyd had a distinguished career as a director stretching back to the early 1980s, when he was with the Belgrade Theater in Coventry, England. Work he directed there and in a subsequent stop at the Tron in Glasgow — a gritty urban musical called “Risky City,” a reimagined “Macbeth,” an adaptation of Janice Galloway’s novel “The Trick Is to Keep Breathing” and more — caught the attention of playgoers and critics.And in 1996 it earned him an appointment as an associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he continued to direct well-regarded productions and, in 2002, stepped up to artistic director.He took the job at a time when that venerable company was facing challenges and criticism, including over its recent decision to vacate its longtime home, the Barbican Center in London, and scale back its ensemble work. Michael Billington, a theater critic for The Guardian, had criticized the outgoing director, Adrian Noble, for “attempting to create a revolution within the R.S.C. culture without getting the approval of the theater profession or the public.”Mr. Boyd, during his decade at the helm, brought audiences back; oversaw the renovation of the company’s theater complex at Stratford-upon-Avon; created a reproduction of its classical theater in the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan for a five-play residency in 2011; and set in motion the World Shakespeare Festival of 2012, a multicity celebration involving more than 50 arts organizations.Mr. Boyd, The Guardian said in summarizing his decade of leadership, presided “over a spectacular financial and architectural turnaround.”In announcing in 2011 that he was stepping away, he said the job had begun to wear on him.“I’ve always said it would take 10 years to do something significant towards the life and the spirit of the company,” he told The Birmingham Evening Mail, “though more than 10 years would potentially not be so good for the life and the spirit of the artistic director.”But Mr. Boyd was hardly done. He continued to direct notable productions, including “Tamburlaine, Parts I and II,” the Christopher Marlowe classic, for Theater for a New Audience in New York in 2014. It’s a bloody tale from 1587 about the warrior Tamburlaine, and Mr. Boyd didn’t hold back; the show used 144 gallons of stage blood a week. For one effect, blood was pumped from beneath the stage so that it would creep up the skirt of a particular character.“We’ve designed a costume that’s very absorbent,” Mr. Boyd told The New York Times.Ben Brantley, reviewing the show for The Times, said that “Mr. Boyd manages to balance the distancing effects of a Brechtian epic with the rock ’em-sock ’em thrills of a Michael Bay action flick.”A scene from “Tamburlaine, Parts I and II,” which Mr. Boyd directed for the Theater for a New Audience in New York in 2014. The show used 144 gallons of stage blood a week. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Boyd’s relationship with Theater for a New Audience went back years. Jeffrey Horowitz, the company’s founding artistic director, noted that in 2007 Mr. Boyd had invited the group to bring its “Macbeth” to Royal Shakespeare’s Complete Works Festival, at which all of Shakespeare’s works were presented at Stratford-upon-Avon.“Michael Boyd’s generosity had a huge impact on T.F.A.N.A.,” Mr. Horowitz said by email. As for “Tamburlaine,” the 2014 production, he said, “Michael created an extraordinary sense of community in the acting company, instilling a passion for discovering and communicating what was living in Marlowe’s text now rather than being didactic about meaning.”John Michael Boyd was born on July 6, 1955, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Sheila (Small) Boyd, taught art. Michael was raised in London, but when he was a teenager the family moved to Edinburgh, where the vibrant theater and festival scene grabbed him.“It was massively overwhelming,” he told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2002, “a crash course in all the different things that theater could be.”After earning a degree in English at the University of Edinburgh, Mr. Boyd won a fellowship to spend a year studying theater in Moscow under Anatoly V. Efros, a leading Soviet director.“What I loved about Efros,” he told The Telegraph, “was his combination of bold visual flair with a complex understanding of humanity” — attributes that described much of Mr. Boyd’s work in the ensuing years.Some of his earliest directorial work was at the theater in Coventry, a fast-paced, adventurous house.“It was a mad time,” he told The Coventry Evening Telegraph in 2002. “I remember doing 10 productions in one year, but it was also a very fruitful time for me.”A scene in 2013 from “Matilda the Musical,” a treatment of the Roald Dahl story, as staged on Broadway by the R.S.C. under Mr. Boyd. It ran for almost four years.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBy 1986 he was at the Tron, another buzzing theater. For his “Macbeth” there in 1993, he surprised audiences right from the start, opening not with the usual witches’ prologue but with three cellists playing a dirge while corpses were stacked in an open grave.“It is a brilliant opening which demands an immediate reorientation of the responses of the audience,” John Linklater wrote in a review in The Herald of Glasgow. “The physical and moral geography of the play is drastically rearranged.”Just before he was named artistic director at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was founded in 1961 by the director Peter Hall, Mr. Boyd won an Olivier Award, the British version of the Tony, for directing the company’s history play cycle, “Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3” and “Richard III.”His marriage to Marcella Evaristi in 1982 ended in divorce. He and Caroline Hall, who had been his partner since 1991, married in 2004. She survives him, along with a daughter from their marriage, Rachael; two children from his first marriage, Daniel and Gabriella; a sister, Susan; and a grandson.One of Mr. Boyd’s bolder moves during his decade as artistic director was overseeing “Matilda the Musical,” a treatment of the Roald Dahl story.The company had long been buoyed by revenue from “Les Misérables,” which it had produced in the 1980s and which ran on Broadway for 16 years in its initial incarnation, but Mr. Boyd knew that a fresh income stream from a popular show was needed. His gamble on “Matilda” paid off: It was a hit in England in 2010 and later ran for almost four years on Broadway.Mr. Brantley, reviewing the Broadway opening for The Times, called it “the most satisfying and subversive musical ever to come out of Britain.” More

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      Leny Andrade, ‘First Lady of Brazilian Jazz,’ Dies at 80

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      With her soulful, cigarette-tinged contralto and emotive “bossa-jazz” stylings, she mesmerized audiences and critics alike.Leny Andrade, the Brazilian singer who earned an international following with her soulful fusion of samba, bossa nova and American jazz and whom Tony Bennett once called the Ella Fitzgerald of Brazil, died on July 24 in Rio de Janeiro. She was 80.Her death, in a hospital, from pneumonia, was confirmed in a statement by a Rio retirement home for artists where she was living. She had also been treated for Lewy body dementia.Often referred to as “the first lady of Brazilian jazz,” Ms. Andrade (pronounced ahn-DRAH-jay) rose from the clubs of Rio, where she performed as a teenager, to forge a six-decade career, recording more than 35 albums as a pioneer of what she came to call bossa-jazz.In 2007, Ms. Andrade won a Latin Grammy Award for “Ao Vivo,” a live album with the celebrated Brazilian pianist César Camargo Mariano.“Leny is one of the greatest improvisers in the world,” Mr. Bennett, who died last month, once said. “I love the way she sings. She is an original.”Singing largely in Portuguese, Ms. Andrade brought a richness and emotional depth to icily cool bossa nova tracks, pulse-quickening sambas and soulful ballads, which she infused with a world-weary sultriness.In a review of her American debut in 1983 at the Blue Note jazz club in New York, John S. Wilson of The New York Times praised the emotive power she brought to “Cantador,” a ballad in the intense Edith Piaf tradition. “Miss Andrade sings it in a darker, softer voice than Piaf’s,” he wrote, “with a dramatic effect that comes through even to a listener who doesn’t understand Portuguese.”Ms. Andrade’s career took off in the United States in 1993 after she moved to New York, where she became a popular draw, performing at Birdland and other clubs, sometimes with Mr. Bennett and Liza Minnelli in the audience. The following year, she played at Lincoln Center as well as the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.Her voice, a deep, woody contralto with a seen-it-all air, carried a hint of a rasp from her long love affair with cigarettes. The overall effect could be mesmerizing.“To describe Ms. Andrade as both the Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald of bossa nova only goes so far in evoking a performer whose voice seems to contain the body and soul of Brazil,” Stephen Holden wrote when reviewing a 2008 New York club performance in The Times.“You may think you know ‘The Girl From Ipanema,’” he continued, but “you haven’t really absorbed it until you’ve heard Ms. Andrade sing it in Portuguese; disgorge might be a better word than sing, since, like everything else she performs, it seems to well up from the center of the earth.”For Ms. Andrade, singing brought sustenance. “My soul is everything I can offer the public,” she said in a 2013 interview with the Brazilian music site Esquina Musical. “When I open my mouth, any pain goes away. I sing without fear. My friends and enemies embrace me.”“When I sing,” she added, “I embark on a magic carpet out of here. I travel to Mars.”Leny de Andrade Lima was born in Rio on Jan. 26, 1943. Her father, Luiz de Oliveira Lima, and mother, Ruth Couto de Andrade, divorced when Leny was young. She grew up in Méier, a neighborhood in the city’s North Zone, a hotbed of samba.Mr. Andrade’s debut album, from 1961, drew from a moody samba sound of an earlier era. RCA VictorAt the urging of her mother, Ms. Andrade studied classical piano and singing starting at age 6. She earned a scholarship to the Brazilian Conservatory of Music. Beethoven and Brahms, however, were not her destiny.She became entranced with bossa nova (“new wave” in Portuguese), which fused traditional Brazilian rhythms with American jazz, as it emerged from the beaches of Brazil in the late 1950s. She was also influenced by the samba stylings of the popular Brazilian singer Dolores Durán.“I showed my piano diploma to my mother,” she said in a 2013 interview on Brazilian television, and told her, “‘Forget about opera, classical music. I will sing popular music — because of Dolores Durán.’”Her professional career began at 15, performing at dances with the bandleader Perminio Goncalves, chaperoned by her stepfather, Gustavo Paulo da Silva, since she was still a minor.She later sang with the Sérgio Mendes Trio, a jazz combo, before Mr. Mendes took his detour to international pop stardom with his band Brasil 66. “He said he hated samba; he didn’t play it,” Ms. Andrade told Esquina Musical. “And I said the same about jazz. But we ended up giving in and mixing the two.”She came to embrace jazz and its improvisational wordless singing style known as scat. (In his 1983 Times review, Mr. Wilson praised her scatting “agility that approaches Ella Fitzgerald.”)In 1961, Ms. Andrade released her first album, “A Sensação,” for RCA, moodily drawing from the samba of an earlier era. She hit her stride two years later, fusing bossa nova with traditional jazz on “A Arte Maior de Leny Andrade,” on Polydor.She was married briefly when she was younger and never had children. Information about survivors was not immediately available.As a jazz singer, Ms. Andrade never enjoyed roaring commercial success, but that fact did not disturb her. “I don’t make music for the masses,” she told Esquina Musical. “They don’t have the ability to understand my work. Bad stuff is not in my repertoire.”Flávia Milhorance contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro More

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      in Television

      Mark Margolis, Scene-Stealing Actor in ‘Breaking Bad,’ Dies at 83

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      His character, an ex-drug lord in a wheelchair, was unable to speak, but Mr. Margolis, who also appeared in “Better Call Saul,” didn’t need dialogue to wield fearsome power.Mark Margolis, the prolific actor whose simmering air of menace as the fearsome former drug lord Hector Salamanca in “Breaking Bad” transformed the innocent ding of a bellhop bell into a harbinger of doom, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 83.His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital following a brief illness, was confirmed in a statement on Friday by his son, Morgan Margolis. Mr. Margolis lived in Manhattan.Mr. Margolis notched more than 160 credits in movies and on television, gaining particular notice with memorable roles in Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” (1983), playing opposite Al Pacino as a cocaine-syndicate henchman, and in the Jim Carrey comedy “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” (1994), in which he played Ventura’s aggrieved landlord with delicious malevolence.He also became a go-to actor for the director Darren Aronofsky, appearing in his films “Pi” (1998), “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), “The Fountain” (2006), “The Wrestler” (2008), “Black Swan” (2010) and “Noah” (2014).But no role made him as instantly recognizable to millions of viewers as Hector in Vince Gilligan’s critically acclaimed series “Breaking Bad,” which ran for five seasons on AMC, starting in 2008, starring Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Anna Gunn, and in its prequel, “Better Call Saul,” which ran for six seasons starting in 2015, starring Bob Odenkirk and Giancarlo Esposito — two of the many actors who appeared in both shows — as well as Rhea Seehorn.The role, in “Breaking Bad,” brought Mr. Margolis an Emmy nomination in 2012 for outstanding guest actor in a dramatic series.An aging former drug cartel don from Mexico, Hector, also known as Tio, had come to live in a New Mexico nursing home, unable to speak or walk following a stroke but still firmly in control of his power as a rival to Walter White (Mr. Cranston), a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher who evolves into a coldhearted kingpin in the crystal methedrine trade.Despite his lack of dialogue in “Breaking Bad,” Mr. Margolis proved a scene stealer from his wheelchair, his eyes bulging, his face trembling with rage, despite the nasal cannula pumping oxygen up his nose and his palm furiously banging his bell, taped to an arm of the chair, whenever he needed attention.“Everybody says, ‘My God it must be difficult to work without words,’” he said in a 2012 interview with Fast Company. “My joke is, ‘No. I’m already grounded in the fact that I’ve been acting without hair for years, and that’s not a problem. So, now I’m acting without words.’”As a young actor, he added, he had trained to communicate emotions without dialogue. He also borrowed mannerisms, including a tobacco-chewing motion with the side of his mouth, from his mother-in-law, who had been confined to a Florida nursing home after a stroke.As viewers discovered in “Better Call Saul,” which featured Mr. Margolis as an ambulatory and verbose Hector, the character had wound up in a wheelchair after a defector in his organization switched his medication to incapacitate him, leading to the stroke.Despite the character’s broken moral compass and hair-trigger rage, Mr. Margolis managed to evoke Hector’s complexity — his humanity, even.“You don’t play villains like they are villains,” he said in a 2012 interview with The Forward, the Jewish newspaper. “You play them like you know exactly where they are coming from. Which hopefully you do.”Mark Margolis was born on Nov. 26, 1939, in Philadelphia to Isidore and Fanya (Fried) Margolis. He attended Temple University briefly before moving to New York, where at 19 he got a job as a personal assistant to the method acting guru Stella Adler. He also took a class with Lee Strasberg at his famed Actors Studio.After making brief appearances on television shows like “Kojak” and in movies like the Dudley Moore comedy “Arthur” and Mr. De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” (both from 1981), Mr. Margolis got his first taste of renown in “Scarface,” playing Alberto the Shadow, a bodyguard and hit man for Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar), the Bolivian drug boss who shows Mr. Pacino’s Tony the ropes in the cocaine business.Mr. Margolis, left, played a bodyguard and hit man for a mobster (Paul Shenar, right) in Brian De Palma’s movie “Scarface,” from 1983.Universal/courtesy Everett CollectionIn one slyly comic moment in “Breaking Bad,” Hector is seen watching on television a famous scene from “Scarface” in which Tony spontaneously shoots Alberto in the head when he learns that Alberto’s planned car-bomb murder of a nosy journalist would also kill the journalist’s wife and children.Despite his turns as a Latin heavy, Mr. Margolis, who was Jewish, did not speak Spanish, a point that earned him no shortage of derision from native speakers.“I’ve lived in Mexico,” he said in 2016 interview with Vulture, New York magazine’s culture site. “I know enough of the grammar of it, and I’m pretty good with the accent of it. If I get a good tutor, I can lock into it pretty quickly.”In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife of 61 years, Jacqueline Margolis; a brother, Jerome; and three grandchildren.In the years between “Scarface” and “Breaking Bad,” Mr. Margolis’s prodigious output made him a known actor, if not a famous one. “People will often come up to me and say, ‘You’re that wonderful character actor,’” he told The Forward, apparently half seriously. “But I’m not a character actor. I’m a weird-looking romantic lead.”Unlike most romantic leads, though, Mr. Margolis struggled at times to make a living. Fans, he told The New York Observer in 2012, “think that I’m some sort of rich guy, that everyone in the movies is making the kind of money Angelina Jolie is making.”He and his wife had lived in the same apartment in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood since 1975.At least his turn as Hector provided him with a dash of supplemental income at the show’s peak, after a messaging app called Dingbel appropriated Hector’s simplest bell command — one ding for yes, two for no. Dingbel hired him as a spokesman.As Mr. Margolis told Vulture: “I tell people I’m the second-most famous bell ringer after Quasimodo.” More

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      in Movies

      Jess Search, a Force in the Documentary Genre, Dies at 54

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      As one of the leaders of Doc Society, she supported countless filmmakers, with an emphasis on underrepresented groups and unconventional stories.Jess Search, a producer on dozens of important documentaries and a catalyst on many more as one of the directors of Doc Society, a nonprofit organization she helped found in 2005 that supports documentary filmmakers, died on July 31 in London. She was 54.Doc Society said in a statement that the death, in a hospital, was caused by brain cancer. Search had announced last month that she was stepping away from the organization because of her illness.Search had been a central figure in the documentary scene in Britain and beyond for years. She was gender nonconforming (she used the pronouns “she” and “her” but preferred not to use the gendered courtesy title Ms.), and she had a special interest in promoting work by filmmakers from underrepresented populations or that dealt with out-of-the-mainstream subjects.She was a producer or executive producer on some of those films, like Matthew Barbato’s “Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother” (2007), about a sex reassignment surgery, and Agniia Galdanova’s “Queendom,” which was released earlier this year and is about a queer Russian performance artist.Her family and colleagues said she was even more devoted to her work at Doc Society, which she led with several other directors and which describes itself as “committed to enabling great documentary films and connecting them to audiences globally.” Since its founding, it has backed hundreds of documentary projects, supporting emerging filmmakers financially and with expert input.“Jess was a builder,” Laura Poitras, director of the Oscar-winning “Citizenfour” (2014), about Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified information, said by email. “A builder of communities, infrastructures (material and immaterial), and imaginations.”That film had support from Doc Society, which at the time was called the Britdoc Foundation. (The name changed in 2017 to better reflect the organization’s global focus.) So did “While We Watched” (2022), about the travails of independent television journalism in India, on which Search is credited as an executive producer. Vinay Shukla, its director, called Search “ragingly courageous and resolutely funny.”“It was an impossible film,” he said by email, “and I’d wake up to find new holes in our boat everyday. I would spin and spiral. And then I’d get on a call with Jess and everything would be all right. She would read me poems over Zoom while figuring out my legal strategy. She was always 10 steps ahead.”Tabitha Jackson, who was director of the documentary film program at the Sundance Institute for years and was the Sundance Film Festival director from 2020 to 2022, said Search invigorated the entire genre.A poster for “While We Watched,” about the travails of independent television journalism in India. Search was an executive producer.MetFilm Distribution/Courtesy Everett Collection“In her championing of the field of independent film, and the art of impact and the impact of art, Jess often said that ‘If you are going to move people to act, first you have to move them,’” she said by email, “and that was apparent in the many independent films she was deeply involved in.”“But beyond individual films,” she added, “her strategic laser focus and abundant kinetic energy evangelized and galvanized a collective that could turn a moment into a movement and a challenge into an opportunity for transformation.”Jess Search was born on May 15, 1969, in Waterlooville, England, near Portsmouth, to Phil and Henrietta Search. She grew up in Sevenoaks, southeast of London, and attended Tonbridge Grammar School before earning a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. In 2008 she added a master’s degree from Cass (now Bayes) Business School.In an interview at the 2021 BFI London Film Festival, Search said she had no particular career aspirations after earning her undergraduate degree but chose her path for an unusual reason.“I knew I was gender nonconforming,” she said, “and at that time, leaving university at the very beginning of the ’90s, I knew that I couldn’t work anywhere that had any kind of formal or informal dress code.”Being a lawyer or management consultant was out, she said, “because I’ll have to turn up every day wearing clothes I don’t want to wear.”“So,” she added, “I was like, ‘I think I’d better go into the media,’ because that seemed like a space where it was less formal.”An uncle working in television hired her as his assistant. That led to a job as a commissioning editor for independent film and video at Britain’s Channel 4, which at the time was programming a wide variety of documentaries. In the BFI interview, she expressed a particular fondness for “the Box,” a cardboard box where unsolicited films and ideas for films were collected.“This box was full of amazing, crazy stuff that people just sent in to us,” she recalled in the interview. The channel programmed mainstream documentaries as well, she said, but the Box provided “that sense that anything might happen, that anything might be in there, and you might hear from anyone around the world with something to say.”In 1998 Search was one of the founders of Shooting People, a networking organization for people in the documentary world. In late 2004 Channel 4 shut down its independent film and video department, prompting her and others to start what became Doc Society.Search is survived by her wife, the producer and director Beadie Finzi, and their children, Ella Wilson and Ben Wilson.The outpouring of tributes to Search on social media and elsewhere after her death included a statement from Joanna Natasegara, an Oscar-winning producer who had worked with her.“She believed documentaries could change the world,” she said, “and she spent much of her life lifting up others and proving her thesis.” More

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      Myron Goldfinger, 90, Architect of Monumental Modernist Homes, Dies

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      His houses, which dot the Hamptons and other parts of the New York region, include a residence featured in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”Myron Goldfinger, whose monumental modernist homes around New York made him a favorite architect of the city’s rich and powerful during the 1980s, died on July 20 in Westchester County, N.Y. He was 90.His daughter Thira Goldfinger and his wife, June Goldfinger, said the death, at a hospital, was from liver cancer.Mr. Goldfinger designed his homes by amassing basic shapes — half-circles, blocks, triangles — into dramatic sculptural statements that seem both modern and ancient, as if a Roman palace had lost all its ornamentation but otherwise escaped the wear of time.He first gained prominence with his own weekend retreat, which he built in 1970 in Waccabuc, a hamlet in northern Westchester. Its plan was simple: A rectangular block topped by two perpendicular triangles. But the structure, four stories tall, was full of surprises, like a hidden rooftop patio where the triangles intersected.Like the architect Louis Kahn, who had been his mentor at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Goldfinger sought to fuse modern styles with features found in vernacular Mediterranean architecture: barrel vaults, interior courtyards, vast blank walls.“All architecture must eventually fade and return to dust,” he wrote in the introduction to “Myron Goldfinger: Architect,” a 1992 compendium of his work. “The fashion of the moment is so temporary. Only the timeless basic geometry repeats in time.”Millennium House, designed by Mr. Goldfinger and built in Montague, N.J., in 1978. His expansive, theatrical designs fit perfectly with the lavish ethos of the era. Norman McGrathHis success came not only from his timelessness but also his timeliness. His expansive, theatrical designs fit perfectly with the lavish ethos of the 1980s. His giant walls accommodated massive works of art; his wide picture windows allowed c-suite clients to imagine that they were, indeed, masters of the universe.His homes dot the suburban landscape from northern New Jersey to southwest Connecticut, but his best-known projects lie in the wealthier enclaves that stretch east from New York City on the Long Island shore — above all in the Hamptons, where an influx of luxury buyers were looking for something different than the area’s traditional shingle-style homes.“He was a complete original,” Timothy Godbold, an interior designer and the founder of Hamptons 20th Century Modern, a preservation group, said in a phone interview. “He was completely pure in his aesthetic, which was geometry.”Mr. Goldfinger’s interiors were likewise spectacular. Fitted out by his wife, an interior designer, they included bridges, conversation pits and intimate hallways that led to living rooms with double-height ceilings. They were at once trophies to be displayed and cozy escape pods from the bustle of Manhattan.In 1981 he designed a home for Fred Jaroslow, the chief operating officer of Weight Watchers, in Sands Point, on Long Island’s North Shore. A pile of blocks, cylinders and vaults, it has an almost completely windowless facade, save for a kitchen aperture, a concession to Mr. Jaroslow’s wife.The back is the opposite: Double-height windows, a pool and a broad lawn opening to the water make it an inviting space for entertaining. The house gained prominence when Martin Scorsese used it as the setting for a debauched party hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio’s corrupt broker in the 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street.”Myron Goldfinger in 1965. He designed his homes by amassing basic shapes — half-circles, blocks, triangles — into dramatic sculptural statements.The New York TimesMyron Henry Goldfinger was born on Feb. 17, 1933, in Atlantic City, N.J., to William and Bertha (Sass) Goldfinger. His father was a mail carrier, his mother a homemaker.As a child growing up working class on the Jersey Shore, Myron gawked at the stately homes in some of his hometown’s more affluent neighbors, like Marven Gardens to the south.“I guess we all search for a certain meaning and understanding of life,” he wrote in the foreword to “Myron Goldfinger: Architect.” “I know I am always building the houses I never lived in as a boy.”He graduated from Penn with a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1955, then served two years in the Army, designing cabinets at the Pentagon. Afterward he spent almost a decade working for large and small design firms in New York, including the office of Karl Linn, a noted landscape architect; the giant Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; and the office of Philip Johnson.In 1966, he decided to go off on his own, opening a firm with June Matkovic, whom he married that same year. Through Mr. Johnson, he also secured a teaching position at the Pratt Institute, a design and engineering university in Brooklyn, where he stayed for a decade.Along with his wife and daughter, he is survived by another daughter, Djerba Goldfinger, and a grandchild.Later in his career, Mr. Goldfinger expanded beyond the New York area, designing luxury villas on the Caribbean island of Anguilla and two homes in the Southwest, including one in Santa Fe, N.M., for himself and his wife.David Michael KennedyMr. Goldfinger wrote two other books, “Villages in the Sun: Mediterranean Community Architecture” (1969) and “Images of the Southwest” (2008), both of which explored vernacular architecture and how it reflected its surrounding landscape, history and culture.“I love the intuitive artistic sense that drove these ancient peoples,” he told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1996. “It was an organic process that used whatever materials were available in a basic, honest fashion.”Later in his career, Mr. Goldfinger expanded somewhat beyond the New York area, designing a series of luxury villas on the Caribbean island of Anguilla and two homes in the American Southwest, including one in Santa Fe, for himself and his wife. They had fallen in love with the region, and amassed a sizable collection of Southwestern art.Today, many critics and preservationists speak of Mr. Goldfinger’s work in the same sentence as that of Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier, two world-renowned modernists who likewise designed homes around New York City.If they are better known, it may be because they also completed high-profile public works — Mr. Gwathmey and his partner, Robert Siegel, renovated the Guggenheim Museum in 1992, and Mr. Meier designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Mr. Goldfinger’s single significant nonresidential work was a synagogue in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.His work also went out of fashion for a time, as postmodernism swept in and clients returned to more traditional styles. But, Mr. Godbold said, the pendulum may be swinging back: On social media, he often sees younger architecture fans fawning over a Goldfinger house.“We’re all going to be loving it in a few years,” he said. More

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      in Music

      Roger Sprung, Banjo Virtuoso of N.Y.C. Folk Scene, Dies at 92

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      The “godfather” of progressive bluegrass, he grew up in New York, honed his skills in the mountains and flourished in Greenwich Village in the ’60s.Roger Sprung, a banjo virtuoso and key figure in New York’s midcentury folk music revival, whose innovative picking and genre-mashing audacity earned him the unofficial title of the godfather of progressive bluegrass, died on July 22 at his home in Newtown, Conn. He was 92.His death was confirmed by his wife, Nancy Sprung.A New York City native who honed his skills early on by playing mountain music festivals in Virginia and the Carolinas, Mr. Sprung began his career in the parks and folk clubs in and around Greenwich Village and went on to become an inspiration for the modern bluegrass known as newgrass.In the late 1950s, he played with a folk trio, the Shanty Boys, who recorded for Elektra Records. He later performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and made appearances on television in the 1960s backing the popular country and pop singer Kay Starr on programs like “The Jimmy Dean Show.”In 2020, Mr. Sprung was inducted into the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, which cites the Kingston Trio and Béla Fleck as having been influenced by him. Steve Martin, another Hall of Fame member whose banjo prowess was a cornerstone of his early comedy act, has owned a Gibson RB-18 five-string that once belonged to Mr. Sprung.“An argument could be made that Roger Sprung was the first progressive five-string banjoist,” Johnny Baier, the museum’s executive director, wrote when Mr. Sprung was inducted. “While his contemporaries in bluegrass were experimenting in swing in the 1940s and ’50s, Sprung was expanding the acceptable banjo repertoire to include — in addition to swing — ragtime, pop and classical styles as well.”Mr. Sprung, left, and Mr. Wylie performing in Brooklyn in 1972. As a boy he learned bluegrass picking by slowing down 78-r.p.m. records.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesTo Mr. Sprung, musical styles existed to be cross-pollinated.“People say, ‘Do you play bluegrass?’ — and they expect ‘Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms’ and things like that,” he said in a 2006 video interview. “But bluegrass is an instrumentation, and if you do the instrumentation, you can play anything. I got Mozart, I got rags — ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’ Scott Joplin.”In 1970, Mr. Sprung was proclaimed the World’s Champion Banjo Player at the Union Grove Old Time Fiddlers’ Convention in North Carolina. That same year, he drew a rave review from John S. Wilson of The New York Times for a New York concert, backed by the Progressive Bluegrassers, which included a longtime collaborator, the guitarist and singer Hal Wylie.Venturing into a “high register to get sound that resembles a mandolin,” Mr. Wilson wrote, Mr. Sprung “made an interesting use of glissandos, produced by twisting the string pegs, particularly in a schottische” — a traditional country dance — “that required a Hawaiian guitar effect.”Roger Howard Sprung was born on Aug. 29, 1930, in New York City, the younger of two sons of Sam and Ethel Sprung. His father was a lawyer. Roger took piano lessons while growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and was soon laying down boogie-woogie numbers.His musical direction changed one Sunday in 1947, when his brother, George, took him to hear a group of folk musicians jamming in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Before long he bought a banjo and began learning bluegrass picking by slowing down 78-r.p.m. records featuring Earl Scruggs, essentially the king of bluegrass banjo. Mr. Sprung was 20 when he began his annual pilgrimages to the South, where he steeped himself in old-time banjo techniques while playing festivals with the likes of Samantha Bumgarner, a celebrated mountain music banjo player.He also became skilled in the traditional clawhammer banjo style, which involves playing with the back of a finger and a thumb, as opposed to bluegrass style, which employs picks worn on the index and middle fingers and the thumb.He brought those rustic sounds back to his bustling hometown and was eventually credited with helping to introduce Southern bluegrass to New York’s flourishing folk scene. At nearly 6-foot-3-inches tall, with his colorful personality and trademark homburg hat, Mr. Sprung was suddenly an attraction.“I went to Washington Square every Sunday, weather permitting, and the crowd got bigger and bigger,” he said in a 2021 video interview with the American Banjo Museum.In 1963, Mr. Sprung released the first of several albums in collaboration with the bluegrass guitar master Doc Watson on Folkways Records. Folkways RecordsHe soon joined Ms. Starr on tour, and his career was on its way. He formed his first band, the Folksay Trio, in about 1954. In 1963, he released the album “Progressive Bluegrass 1 and Other Instrumentals,” on the Folkways label, with the flat-picking bluegrass guitar master Doc Watson. He also recorded two albums with his first wife, Joan Sprung, whom he divorced in 1972.Along the way, Mr. Sprung was a sought-after banjo instructor. His students included the singer-songwriter Harry Chapin.In addition to his second wife, Nancy, Mr. Sprung is survived by his daughters Jennie and Emily.Though he had made his living off the banjo, Mr. Sprung said later in life that he would not advise younger players to follow in his footsteps. “I wouldn’t make it a career, but playing a banjo is real enjoyment,” he said, adding, “As Kay Starr said, ‘It’s hard to play a sad song on a banjo.’” More

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      Angus Cloud, Actor on ‘Euphoria,’ Dies at 25

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      The cause of death was not released, but his family said that he had “intensely struggled” after the recent death of his father.Angus Cloud, the actor best known for portraying Fezco, a lovable drug dealer on the HBO television show “Euphoria,” died on Monday at his family home in Oakland, Calif. He was 25.The death was confirmed by Cait Bailey, Mr. Cloud’s representative, who shared a statement from his family. The statement did not specify a cause, but said that Mr. Cloud had “intensely struggled” after the recent death of his father, Conor Hickey, whom the family buried last week.“The only comfort we have is knowing Angus is now reunited with his dad, who was his best friend,” the family said. “Angus was open about his battle with mental health and we hope that his passing can be a reminder to others that they are not alone and should not fight this on their own in silence.”We are incredibly saddened to learn of the passing of Angus Cloud. He was immensely talented and a beloved part of the HBO and Euphoria family. We extend our deepest condolences to his friends and family during this difficult time. pic.twitter.com/G92zRWkbfH— HBO (@HBO) July 31, 2023
      Mr. Cloud was born on July 10, 1998, in Oakland and attended the Oakland School for the Arts, according to a 2019 profile in The Wall Street Journal. He built sets and worked on lighting and sound for his high school’s theater department, according to the profile. But before his role on “Euphoria,” he had never performed.Mr. Cloud was discovered in 2018 by a casting agent who saw him walking along Mercer Street in Greenwich Village. Mr. Cloud was working as a waiter in Brooklyn at the time and thought that the approach was a scam, but a friend convinced him to follow through.“Before this, I didn’t have any desire to act,” he said in an interview with The New York Times last year. “I guess I was just at the right place at the right time.”On “Euphoria,” Mr. Cloud quickly became a fan favorite, convincing the show’s creator to keep his character alive beyond his planned death in Season 1, according to a casting agent. Mr. Cloud continued playing Fezco through Season 2.Survivors include his mother, Lisa Cloud Hickey and his two sisters, Molly Hickey and Fiona Hickey. More

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      Paul Reubens, Creator of Pee-wee Herman, Is Dead at 70

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      With his bow tie, short drainpipe pants and flattop hairdo, Pee-wee became enshrined in the popular imagination as a symbol of childlike whimsy.Paul Reubens, the comic actor whose bow-tied, childlike alter-ego Pee-wee Herman became an unlikely if almost uncategorizable movie and television sensation in the 1980s, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 70.His death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was confirmed on Monday by his longtime representative, Kelly Bush Novak, who said he had “privately fought cancer for years with his trademark tenacity and wit.”“Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years,” Mr. Reubens said in a statement released with the announcement of his death. “I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”Mr. Reubens had scores of acting credits in a career that began in the 1960s, including roles on “Murphy Brown,” “The Blacklist” and many other television series and in movies like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992), “Batman Returns” (1992) and “Blow” (2001).But Pee-wee, a character he created in the late 1970s as a 10-minute bit when he was a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe the Groundlings, overshadowed all else, morphing into a bizarre and savvy cultural phenomenon, a character aimed (at least in its TV incarnation) at children but tapping into adult sensibilities and ambiguities.After being disappointed after auditioning unsuccessfully for the “Saturday Night Live” cast in 1980, Mr. Reubens set about creating “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” which was billed as a “live onstage TV pilot.” It had its premiere in early 1981 at the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. A national tour followed, and HBO broadcast a version of it as a comedy special in 1981.Pee-wee started turning up on late-night talk shows, especially “Late Night With David Letterman,” where the juxtaposition of the idiosyncratic Pee-wee and the laid-back, somewhat befuddled Mr. Letterman was comedy gold. “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” a feature film directed by Tim Burton, was a hit in 1985.Then, in 1986, came “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” a children-friendly version of the world according to Pee-wee that would air on CBS for five years and carve out an enduring place in the memories of 1980s children and, often, their parents.“Pee-wee’s Playhouse” stands as one of the oddest, most audacious, most unclassifiable shows in television history. The man-boy Pee-wee and a vast collection of human and nonhuman characters — there was, for instance, Chairry, a talking armchair that gave hugs — held forth in each episode about, well, it’s hard to summarize. There was a word of the day. There were bizarre toys. In one episode, Pee-wee married a fruit salad.The show arrived in the midst of Ronald Reagan’s presidential administration and harked back to another button-down era, the one Mr. Reubens lived as a child: the 1950s.‘‘I saw it as very Norman Rockwell,” he told The New York Times in 2016, ‘‘but it was my Norman Rockwell version of the ’50s, which was more all-inclusive.”Laurence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson and other actors of color were in the cast. Gilbert Lewis, who was Black, was the King of Cartoons.“Not just anybody — the king!” Mr. Reubens said. “That came out of growing up in Florida under segregation. I felt really good about that.”Paul Reubens and S. Epatha Merkerson on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” in 1986. Several actors of color were cast on the show. John Kisch Archive/Getty ImagesThe show was a world away from standard educational TV for children — its lessons, if any, were delivered through wackiness rather than didactically, and its presentation was decidedly nonlinear.“I never set out to do a big educational show,” Mr. Reubens told Newsday in 1989. “We’re trying to expose children to as much creativity as we can muster in a half-hour, to be entertaining and to transmit some subliminal messages, like nonconformity isn’t bad.”The show had not been on long before academics and cultural critics were analyzing its appeal with weighty papers and other commentaries, but Mr. Reubens was having none of that.“I’ve been almost paranoid about dissecting it too much,” he said, “because the character always has been a kind of instinctual gut thing. I’m able to turn it on, and it just kind of flows. I do what I want and hope it connects.”The wheels of his career came off in July 1991, when he was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Fla., where he had grown up. The arrest led to a small fine, but the headlines damaged his reputation.“Pee-wee’s Playhouse” was in reruns at the time, and CBS pulled them off the air. There were no more new episodes. Mr. Reubens said later that he had been planning a hiatus from show business anyway.In any case, he took a long break from his alter-ego, but neither Mr. Reubens nor Pee-wee was done.Mr. Reubens continued to act, receiving an Emmy Award nomination for a guest appearance on “Murphy Brown” in 1995. (His character arc on that show continued for five more episodes.) He also weathered a second scandal: In 2002, he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of possessing child pornography as a result of images found by the authorities in his collection of vintage erotica. He was sentenced to probation on a reduced charge of possessing obscene material.“The moment that I realized my name was going to be said in the same sentence as children and sex, that’s really intense,” Mr. Reubens told NBC in 2004. “That’s something I knew from that very moment, whatever happens past that point, something’s out there in the air that is really bad.”Fans in Los Angeles were remembering Mr. Reubens on Monday where his star appears on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThen, about 2008, some producers began suggesting that he revive the Pee-wee character and some version of the 1980s stage show. He was somewhat reluctant.“There were age-related issues to it,” Mr. Reubens told The Times in 2010, since he was by then in his 50s. “There were career-standing issues.”He waffled.“Every two months, I would change my mind,” he told The Chicago Sun Times in 2010. “And then, finally, one day I woke up and decided, ‘This is it, I’m coming back.’”The new version of “The Pee-wee Herman Show” opened at Club Nokia in Los Angeles in January 2010, featuring elements of the original stage show and characters from the TV series. It opened on Broadway that November for a limited run.“Mr. Reubens’s Silly Putty face is a little puttier, but it remains as stretchable as ever,” Charles Isherwood wrote in his review in The Times. “His Popsicle-stick posture retains its comical rigidity; the flapping arms express exasperation and excitement with no loss of tone; the bopping Pee-wee dance is still beach-ball-buoyant. And of course Pee-wee’s restless imagination and childish mood swings are as extravagant as ever.”A new movie, “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” followed in 2016 on Netflix, produced by Mr. Reubens and Judd Apatow. Mr. Reubens told The Times in 2010, when the film was in the early talking stages, that it was no surprise that Pee-wee had endured.“There’s never been anything from the fans other than, please do more,” he said.Paul Rubenfeld was born on Aug. 27, 1952, in Peekskill, N.Y., to Milton and Judy (Rosen) Rubenfeld. His mother was a teacher, and his father had been a pilot who, according to The Forward, helped smuggle fighter planes into Israel in 1948 during its war of independence.The family moved to Sarasota when Paul was 9. His parents ran a lamp store there. Paul had been in school and camp theatrical productions when he graduated to a bigger stage: At 11, he had a key role as the young nephew in a custody dispute in Herb Gardner’s play “A Thousand Clowns,” staged by the Sarasota Players.“The 12-year-old is played with remarkable assurance and stage-wise technique by Paul Rubenfeld, himself only 11 years old, a genuine talent discovery,” Ray Perkins wrote in a review in The Tampa Bay Times.“Young Actor Big Crowd Pleaser” read a headline in the same newspaper a few days later over a feature article about him.He appeared in several other shows with the Sarasota Players and also acted with the Asolo Theater Company (now Asolo Repertory). He spent a year at Boston University after graduating from Sarasota High School in 1970, but then went to the West Coast, studying at the California Institute of the Arts and eventually falling in with the Groundlings, working at a pizza parlor and selling brushes while he developed his comedic skills.Mr. Reubens’s first film role, uncredited, was as a wedding guest in the 1968 drama “The Brotherhood,” and he had a smattering of other roles before Pee-wee took over. The first name of his enduring character, he said, was borrowed from the tiny Pee Wee harmonica brand. The last name, Herman, was inspired by an irritating childhood acquaintance.He is survived by a sister, Abby Rubenfeld, and a brother, Luke Rubenfeld.Just months ago Mr. Reubens said he was working on a memoir and a documentary. And in an interview with The Times around that time, one of his last, he reflected on the longevity of Pee-wee, on the adjustments that were made to keep the character fresh, and on how the creative landscape had changed since Pee-wee first appeared some 40 years ago.“Today, it seems to me, it’s a lot more difficult to stand out,” he said. “You know, if you want to be weird, good luck.”Jesus Jiménez and Melena Ryzik contributed reporting. More