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      in Television

      Michael Stone, Psychiatrist and Scholar Who Studied Evil, Dies at 90

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      He attempted to define evil by plumbing the biographies and motivations of hundreds of violent felons who had committed heinous crimes.Dr. Michael H. Stone, a psychiatrist and scholar who sought to define evil and to differentiate its manifestations from the typical behavior of people who are mentally ill, died on Dec. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.The cause was complications of a stroke he had in January, his son David said.Dr. Stone was best known to the public as the author of the book “The Anatomy of Evil” (2009) and as the host from 2006 to 2008 of the television program “Most Evil,” for which he interviewed people imprisoned for murder to determine what motivated them to engage in an evil criminal act.He ranked the acts on a 22-category scale of his creation. Modeled on Dante’s nine circles of hell, his taxonomic scale ranged from justifiable homicide to murders committed by people whose primary motivation was to torture their victims.Only human beings are capable of evil, Dr. Stone wrote in “The Anatomy of Evil,” although evil is not a characteristic that people are born with. He acknowledged that while acts of evil were difficult to define, the word “evil” was derived from “over” or “beyond,” and could apply to “certain acts done by people who clearly intended to hurt or to kill others in an excruciatingly painful way.”For an act to be evil, he wrote, it must be “breathtakingly horrible” and premeditated, inflict “wildly excessive” suffering and “appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.”“Mike’s major contribution to psychiatry was sharpening the distinction between mental illness and evil,” Dr. Allen Frances. a former student of Dr. Stone’s who is now chairman emeritus of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., said in a phone interview.“The problem,” Dr. Frances said, “is that with every mass murderer, every crazy politician, every serial killer, the first tendency in the public mind and the media is that he’s mentally ill.” Dr. Stone, he said, helped to change that default position.Dr. Stone became known for his book “The Anatomy of Evil” and for hosting the TV program “Most Evil.”Prometheus BooksAnalyzing the biographies of more than 600 violent criminals, Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits: narcissism, to the point of having little or no ability to care about their victims; and aggression, in terms of exerting power over another person to inflict humiliation, suffering and death.In “The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime” (2019), a sequel to Dr. Stone’s 2009 book, he and Dr. Gary Brucato warned that since the 1960s there had been an “undeniable intensification and diversification” of evil acts committed mostly by criminals who “are not ‘sick’ in the psychiatric and legal sense, as much as psychopathic and morally depraved.”The reasons, they wrote, included greater civilian access to military weaponry; the diminution of both individual and personal responsibility, as preached by fascist and communist governments earlier in the 20th century; sexual liberation, which unleashed other inhibitions; the ease of communication on cellphones and the internet; the rise of moral relativism; and a backlash against feminism.In 2000, Dr. Stone figured in a sensational murder trial that tested the limits of doctor-patient confidentiality. He wanted to testify in the murder trial of Robert Bierenbaum, a plastic surgeon and former patient of his who was accused of killing his wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum, in 1985.Dr. Stone had written a letter to his patient’s wife two years before her death, advising her to live apart from her husband for her own safety. He had asked that she sign and return it, but she never did. He had also contacted Dr. Bierenbaum’s parents, with his permission.The judge ultimately excluded Dr. Stone’s testimony from the trial on the basis of professional confidentiality. But the testimony of several other witnesses about the letter contributed to Dr. Bierenbaum’s conviction.Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits in those who commit evil acts: narcissism and aggression.Librado Romero/The New York TimesMichael Howard Stone was born on Oct. 27, 1933, in Syracuse, N.Y., the grandson of Eastern European immigrants. His father, Moses Howard Stone, owned a wholesale paper business. His mother, Corinne (Gittleman) Stone, was a homemaker.A prodigy who learned Latin and Greek as a child, he was only 10 years old when he began seventh grade. As the youngest and smallest student in the school, as well as the only Jewish one, he formed an alliance with a 17-year-old classmate who was a boxer, his son David said: Mike would do the classmate’s homework, and the classmate would protect him from local antisemitic bullies.He entered Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he was 16, enrolling in a premedical curriculum but double-majoring in classics in case he was rejected by medical schools that had already met their quota of Jewish students. He enrolled in Cornell Medical School in Manhattan after graduating from Cornell in 1954 and received his medical degree in 1958.He originally studied hematology and cancer chemotherapy at Sloan Kettering Institute in Manhattan, but his mother’s chronic pain disorder prompted him to switch to neurology and then, eventually, to psychiatry. He did his residency at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he met Dr. Clarice Kestenbaum, whom he married in 1965.He is survived by two sons, David and John Stone, from that marriage, which ended in divorce in 1978; his wife, Beth Eichstaedt; his stepchildren, Wendy Turner and Thomas Penders; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.Dr. Stone spoke 16 languages and, like a vestige from another era, customarily wore three-piece suits. He was known for his impish sense of humor: His latest book, “The Funny Bone,” published this year, is a collection of his cartoons, jokes and poems.An amateur carpenter, he built the shelves that housed his library of 11,000 books. His collection included about 60 books on Hitler — further evidence, like his memories of childhood bullying, of his yearning to define evil.As a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and for many years a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Stone also conducted a long-term study of patients with borderline personality disorders, including those who had contemplated suicide. He concluded that, often as a result of therapy and other treatment, the condition of about two-thirds of them had improved appreciably some 25 years later.In “The New Evil,” Dr. Stone and Dr. Brucato offered a possible explanation for why “particularly heinous and spectacular crimes,” especially those committed in America and by men, had been on the rise since the 1960s. They warned against “the rise of a sort of ‘false compassion,’ in which the most relentless, psychopathic persons are sometimes viewed as ‘victims.’”The two concluded by invoking a familiar metaphor: A frog dropped in a pot of boiling water will immediately try to escape; but, if placed in cold water that is gradually heated, the frog will remain complacent until it’s too late.“It is our ardent hope that, after a period of terrible growing pains, our culture will eventually learn that true power and control come only after a lifelong process of mastering and inhibiting the self,” they wrote. “Perhaps, as a first step, we should admit that the water in our collective pot is growing disquietingly warmer, day by day.” More

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      in Movies

      Michel Ciment, Eminent French Film Critic, Is Dead at 85

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      He helped define cinema as high art for generations of moviegoers and filmmakers in France and beyond, even if he irked some of them with his passion for Hollywood.Michel Ciment, a French film critic whose passion for cinema helped define it as serious art for generations of French moviegoers, directors and producers, even while irking some of them with his unabashed love of American film, died on Nov. 13 in Paris. He was 85.His death was confirmed by the film magazine Positif, for which he had long served as editor in chief, and by the Cannes Film Festival, which called him “a free spirit with an insatiable curiosity” and “the embodiment of cinephilia.”Mr. Ciment (pronounced SEE-mah) derived his authority from just that: his unbounded love of movies and an encyclopedic knowledge of film that sprang from it. He was an adept of the uniquely French cult of movies as high art, and of the great director as genius. But that was counterbalanced by an embrace of “all types of cinema,” the Cannes festival said, a passion born in his childhood addiction to American westerns and gangster movies.Mr. Ciment was an unabashed Americanophile in a French cultural environment in which checking the anti-American box is often a prerequisite to being taken seriously. He was sometimes reproached for it, his son Gilles recalled; in later years he became a senior lecturer in American Civilization at the University of Paris.He communicated his enthusiasm for film, beginning with his first critical forays in the early 1960s, in a torrent of books, reviews, interviews and radio broadcasts. (His status in the world of film criticism was such that he was often interviewed by other critics.)Mr. Ciment celebrated the great directors of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in books on Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan and Francesco Rosi, each thick with probing interviews in which critic startles director with his detailed knowledge of their films.These directors trusted him and opened up to him because, he told the Toronto Film Review in 2020, “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”His son recalled: “They would say that an exchange with Michel Ciment was like nothing else. With him, he really knows your film, he remembers the characters’ names. And then he would put your film in relation to the history of cinema.”For his book “Kazan on Kazan” (1973), Mr. Ciment spent 10 days with the director and conducted 40 hours of interviews. That was typical of his methods. He favored those who believed, like him, that “all the arts are found in cinema,” as he put it to an interviewer this year with the radio channel France Culture. For him, the superior film combined visual, aural and literary greatness.A 2009 book by Mr. Ciment compiling interviews he conducted with many movie directors. They opened up to him, he said, because “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”Berg Publishers“All the great directors I hung out with — whether it was Losey, Kubrick, Kazan — they had a generalized culture,” Mr. Ciment said in the radio interview. “These were people who had read an enormous amount, who listened to music, who had seen lots of paintings.”He criticized contemporary directors like Quentin Tarantino, who, he said, work in a cruder idiom and have “encouraged the young toward an absence of culture.”The son of a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant tailor who narrowly escaped being rounded up with other Jews in Paris by Nazi collaborators during World War II, Mr. Ciment traced his pro-American views to childhood memories of the liberation of France in 1944.“At 6, to see the Americans disembark, pitching cans of food, chewing gum — it’s thanks to them we regained our liberty,” he told France Culture.In contrast to the sometimes doctrinaire impulses of that other pole of French film criticism, the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, where directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut propagated theories of cinema that they went on to put into practice, Mr. Ciment’s instinct at Positif was free-form.“Always a bit anarchist, libertarian, we couldn’t have cared less about fashions,” he told the Toronto Film Review. “We said what we thought about films, what we loved about films, without preconceptions.”His serious approach to film is evident in his book about the politically oriented realist Italian director Francesco Rosi, who made films about the mafia, corruption, injustice and war. Implicit in the book is the idea that film is as worthy of close analysis as serious literature, a view Mr. Ciment gained from his early studies with two postwar French masters of literary and philosophical criticism, Paul Benichou and Gilles Deleuze.Mr. Ciment praised Mr. Rosi for “hunting down the lie, cornering it in its hide-out,” for a “close engagement with reality in which the smallest false step would have been a betrayal,” and for being “conscious of the impossibility of reaching the truth.”Even in this early book, Mr. Ciment’s attention to detail in film is evident: At one point, referring to Mr. Rosi’s antiwar film “Many Wars Ago” (1970), he asks the director why “the night battle sequence is predominantly blue in color.”Mr. Ciment, second from left, with fellow members of the jury for the 1978 International Film Festival in Cannes, France. The American director Alan J. Pakula is third from left, and the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann is next to him. Jean Jacques Levy/Associated PressMichel Jean Ciment was born on May 26, 1938, in Paris to Alexander and Helene Cziment. His father “Frenchified” the name after the war, Gilles Ciment said. Michel’s father, who had immigrated from Hungary in the early 1920s, was a tailor for the great French fashion houses, and his wife worked with him.One morning in July 1942, the police came by the house to warn Helene that her husband had best not come home that evening: It was the eve of the great roundup of Paris Jews known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, named after the stadium where they were taken. Some 13,000 Jews were seized and subsequently sent to the death camp at Auschwitz.The elder Mr. Ciment escaped to Normandy and was hidden by peasants there for the duration of the war. His son followed him there, and his wife went back and forth from Paris.The family regrouped in Paris after the Liberation, and Michel Ciment went on to study at two prestigious secondary schools, the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and the Lycée Condorcet. It was as a student that he discovered, in the intense Paris film culture of the day, the great silent films of Erich von Stroheim, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.He later studied at the Sorbonne and received a Fulbright Scholarship in the early 1960s, allowing him to study at Amherst College in Massachusetts. “It was American education that completely confirmed me in my tastes,” Mr. Ciment told France Culture.He made his debut as a critic with a defense of Orson Welles in Positif in 1963. He later joined its staff and went on to become editor in chief.From the 1970s on he published a stream of books. Besides the ones on Kazan and Rosi, there were others on American cinema, Losey, Stanley Kubrick and Theo Angelopoulos as well as “Passport to Hollywood,” a book of interviews with directors, including Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Wim Wenders.In addition to his son, he is survived by his second wife, Evelyne Hazan-Ciment. His first wife, Jeannine Ciment, who worked with him at Positif, died in 1986.Mr. Ciment’s passion for film never flagged. As Jérôme Garcin, his colleague on the popular French public radio cultural review “Le Masque et La Plume,” said of him in the French magazine L’Obs, “At 85, he remained, when the lights went out and the magic lantern began to dispense onscreen its dream-colors, a child in wonderment.” More

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      in Theater

      Michael Blakemore, a Single-Season Double Tony Winner for Directing, Dies at 95

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      Acclaimed in Britain, he had the unique distinction of winning awards for best musical and best play in 2000, for his Broadway revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Copenhagen.”Michael Blakemore, an acclaimed stage director in Britain and the only one in Broadway history to win Tony Awards for both best play and best musical in the same season, died on Sunday. He was 95.His death was announced by his agents on Tuesday. It did not say where he died.Mr. Blakemore was nominated seven times for Tonys, notably for his productions of Peter Nichols’s “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” in 1968 and Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off” in 1983.But it was the flair and care he brought to a revival of “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter show about a troupe of players presenting a musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and to a later Frayn play, “Copenhagen,” that won him the unique double of best direction of a musical and best direction of a play in 2000. (“Kiss Me, Kate” garnered five Tonys altogether, including for best revival of a musical and for best actor in a musical, given to Brian Stokes Mitchell.)Mr. Blakemore was born in Sydney, Australia, but built his career in Britain, first as an actor and later as one of Laurence Olivier’s associate directors at the National Theater in London.A scene from Mr. Blakemore’s 2009 Broadway production of Noël Coward’s comedy “Blithe Spirit.” From left were Deborah Rush, Rupert Everett, Angela Lansbury, Jayne Atkinson and Simon Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere, he staged some highly successful productions: “The National Health,” Mr. Nichols’s sardonic portrayal of British hospitals, and revivals of “The Front Page,” Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s satire of newspaper journalism, and Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in which he directed Olivier.It had been widely thought that Mr. Blakemore would succeed Olivier, who stepped down as the National’s artistic director in 1973. Instead, the theater appointed Peter Hall, who had directed Mr. Blakemore in Stratford-upon-Avon during his acting years and with whom he had an intense rivalry. Their relationship soured, and Mr. Blakemore resigned in 1976.But he went on to prosper as a freelance director. He staged Mr. Nichols’s “Privates on Parade,” a burlesque musical comedy set in post-World War II Malaysia, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he began a long association with Mr. Frayn in 1980 when he directed his drama “Make and Break,” about a businessman who loses his soul.Then came Mr. Frayn’s “Noises Off,” an inventive farce about second-rate provincial stage actors performing a slapstick sex farce of their own. It transferred from London to Broadway in 1983 and ran for 553 performances there.“‘Noises Off’ couldn’t have arrived in New York a moment too soon,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times. The show, he said, was “as cleverly conceived and adroitly performed a farce as Broadway has seen in an age.”It was a triumph that, Mr. Blakemore later said, left him feeling that he had at long last ended “the bad dream the National had become.”Mr. Blakemore in London in 1983 during a production of Michael Frayn’s farce “Noises Off,” which transferred to Broadway that year.Peter Kevin Solness/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesMichael Howell Blakemore was born on June 18, 1928, in Sydney to Conrad Howell Blakemore, an eminent eye surgeon, and Una Mary (Litchfield) Blakemore. He said he was a descendant of John Quincy Adams through his American grandmother, who supported Michael’s artistic leanings while his father discouraged them. In the first of two memoirs, “Arguments With England” (2004), Mr. Blakemore described his father as an “unpredictable adversary” who disliked “scruffy bohemians and longhaired intellectuals.”Mr. Blakemore survived what he remembered as the “martinet discipline” of a boarding school, but not a course of study in medicine that his father had persuaded him to take at the University of Sydney. “I solved the problem of how not to be a doctor by failing all my third-year examinations,” he said.He was more fascinated with theater and film, especially American movies of the 1930s and ’40s, but it was seeing Olivier as Richard III in Sydney that inspired him to go to London to become an actor. He achieved that ambition thanks to another touring British actor, Robert Morley, who befriended the stage-struck Mr. Blakemore, employed him as his publicist and arranged for him to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1950.After graduating in 1952, Mr. Blakemore was cast in a series of regional repertory productions. Before long he was touring Europe as a Roman captain in Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” a revival starring Oliver and staged by the British director Peter Brook, who became an inspiration to Mr. Blakemore. Mr. Brook, he wrote, “had that concentration, in which empathy and detachment are somehow combined, that I was beginning to recognize as the mark of the good director.”By 1959 he was in Stratford performing more Shakespeare — as the First Lord in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” in small parts in an Olivier-led “Coriolanus,” and alongside Charles Laughton in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by the fast-rising Mr. Hall.A scene in 2000 from Mr. Blakemore’s Tony-winning Broadway production of Mr. Frayne’s drama “Copenhagen.” Michael Cumpsty, center, played the physicist Werner Heisenberg; Philip Bosco played his fellow physicist Niels Bohr; and Blair Brown, left, played Bohr’s wife, Margrethe.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Blakemore had a difficult relationship from the start with Mr. Hall, who he felt had an overly intellectual approach to directing. He also vied with Mr. Hall for the affections of a company member, Vanessa Redgrave: “Vanessa’s lover was my enemy,” he later wrote. “I would gladly have killed him.” He found himself unwanted when Mr. Hall began to transform Stratford’s summer repertory into the Royal Shakespeare Company.But by then Mr. Blakemore was determined to become a director, and after playing major roles in the Open Air Theater in London’s Regents Park, he was asked to perform and direct at the prestigious Citizens Theater in Glasgow. It was there that he had his first major success, in 1967, with “Joe Egg,” a darkly comic tale of parents coping with a severely disabled child. Mr. Blakemore had helped his friend Mr. Nichols rework the script, which had been rejected elsewhere. The play transferred to London and then to Broadway (with Albert Finney and Zena Walker) to great acclaim.Olivier invited Mr. Blakemore to the National in 1969, and he was appointed an associate director in 1971. When Mr. Hall arrived in 1973, he retained Mr. Blakemore in his position, but trouble soon followed.In his second memoir, “Stage Blood” (2013), Mr. Blakemore gave his version of a conflict that peaked at Mr. Hall’s London apartment, after he had presented a paper to his National colleagues accusing Mr. Hall of failing to consult with his subordinates and taking too much paid work outside the National. He failed to win his colleagues’ support, however, and, after telling Mr. Hall that he was “an extremely greedy man,” Mr. Blakemore resigned. (He later published, in the newspaper The Observer, what he called “The Claudius Diaries,” a satire that cast Olivier as the murdered king in “Hamlet” and Mr. Hall as his killer.)Mr. Blakemore accepting one of the two Tony Awards he won in 2000. He defined directing as “the imposition of harmony on a gathering of divergent talents.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Blakemore was back at the National in 1997 and 2003 (Mr. Hall had stepped down in 1988), staging “Copenhagen” (which opened on Broadway in 2000) and “Democracy” (which transferred in 2004), productions that demonstrated his ability to bring clarity to extremely complex works. “Copenhagen” is centered on a discursive, argumentative conversation that the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had in 1941, in part about the building of an atomic bomb. “Democracy” centers on the West German chancellor Willy Brandt and an East German spy who falls in love with him.Wrestling with complexity was a strength that Mr. Blakemore also brought to “City of Angels,” an intricate Broadway musical with music by Cy Coleman, book by Larry Gelbart and lyrics by David Zippel, in 1989, earning a Tony nomination for his direction.Known for his calmness in the rehearsal room and, in his words, for “getting my way without anyone particularly noticing,” Mr. Blakemore defined directing as “the imposition of harmony on a gathering of divergent talents.”It was an ideal he strove to attain, usually successfully, in other Broadway productions, including the Coleman musical “The Life” in 1997, a belated world premiere for Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?” in 2007 and, in 2009, a revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” with Angela Lansbury at her funniest as the eccentric medium Madame Arcati.Mr. Blakemore was married twice: in 1960 to Shirley Bush, with whom he had a son, and, after their divorce in 1986, to Tanya McCallin, with whom he had two daughters. He and Ms. McCallin later separated, according to the news release that announced Mr. Blakemore’s death. He is survived by Ms. McCallin; his children, Conrad, Beatrice and Clemmie; and three grandchildren.Alex Marshall More

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      in Television

      Andre Braugher, ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ and ‘Homicide’ Actor, Dies at 61

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      Mr. Braugher was best known for playing stoic police officers in the two acclaimed television series. He died on Monday after a brief illness, his publicist said.Andre Braugher, an Emmy Award-winning actor best known for playing stoic police officers on the television shows “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” died on Monday. He was 61.His death was confirmed on Tuesday by his longtime publicist Jennifer Allen. She said that Mr. Braugher, who lived in New Jersey, had died after a brief illness. She did not elaborate.Mr. Braugher had a breakout role as an intense cop on “Homicide,” a 1990s Baltimore crime show that chronicled the frustrations of policing a city beset with murders. He spent the last years of his life playing another serious police officer in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” but in a very different register: The series was a sitcom, and he played his role as a police commander for laughs. He also earned plaudits for his portrayal of an openly gay cop who didn’t play to stereotypes.In between, he showed his range by playing parts as diverse as Shakespeare’s Henry V, a car salesman named Owen Thoreau Jr. and an executive editor of The New York Times grappling with the investigative reporting that would kick off the #MeToo era.“I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful actors,” the former Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon, who wrote the book that “Homicide” was based on years before he created the seminal crime drama “The Wire,” said in a post on social media. “I’ll never work with one better.”Mr. Braugher as Detective Frank Pembleton, right, and James Earl Jones in an episode of “Homicide.”Michael Ginsbury/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesAndre Keith Braugher was born in Chicago on July 1, 1962, and grew up on the city’s West Side. His mother, Sally Braugher, worked for the United States Postal Service. His father, Floyd Braugher, was a heavy-equipment operator for the state of Illinois.“We lived in a ghetto,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “I could have pretended I was hard or tough and not a square. I wound up not getting in trouble. I don’t consider myself to be especially wise, but I will say that it’s pretty clear that some people want to get out and some people don’t. I wanted out.”Mr. Braugher attended St. Ignatius College Prep, a prestigious, Jesuit Catholic high school in Chicago, and later earned a scholarship to Stanford University. His father, who wanted his son to be an engineer, was furious when he gravitated to acting instead.“Show me Black actors who are earning a living,” his father told him at the time. “What the hell are you going to do, juggle and travel the country?”After graduating from Stanford with a major in math, Mr. Braugher earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the Juilliard School.One of his first professional acting roles was in “Glory,” an Oscar-winning 1989 film about Black soldiers fighting for the Union during the American Civil War. Its star-studded cast included Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington.“I’d rather not work than do a part I’m ashamed of,” Mr. Braugher told The Times that year. “I can tell you now that my mother will be proud of me when she sees me in this role.”Mr. Braugher, far left, next to Denzel Washington, in “Glory.” It was one of his first professional acting roles.Everett Collection, via Alamy Mr. Braugher, who insisted on living in New Jersey even though he often worked in California, would go on to star in many other films. Among the highlights were “Get on the Bus” (1996), about a group of Black men traveling to Washington for the Million Man March, and “City of Angels” (1998), about an angel (Nicolas Cage) who falls in love with a doctor (Meg Ryan).One of Mr. Braugher’s last film projects was “She Said” (2022), a drama about New York Times reporters’ efforts to document sexual abuse by the film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Mr. Braugher played Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s executive editor at the time.He also performed Shakespearean roles at the New York Shakespeare Festival and other venues. In 2014, he told The Times that he was saving the play “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” for later in life.“I’ve never read it because I’d like to see one Shakespeare play that I don’t know what happens,” he said.Ms. Allen said that Mr. Braugher is survived by his wife, the actress Ami Brabson; his sons Michael, Isaiah and John Wesley; his brother, Charles Jennings; and his mother. His father died in 2011.His most recent project, “The Residence,” a miniseries about a murder in the White House, had been scheduled to resume shooting in January after shutting down because of the Writers Guild of America strike, the entertainment site Deadline reported.As Capt. Raymond Holt in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”FOX Image Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Braugher was best known for his acting on acclaimed television series, which included the lead role of an unorthodox physician on the ABC drama “Gideon’s Crossing” (2000-2001) and the car salesman Owen Thoreau Jr. on the TNT series “Men of a Certain Age” (2009-2011). He also starred in the sixth and final season of the Paramount+ legal drama “The Good Fight” (2017-2022).On “Homicide,” a police procedural that ran from 1993 to 1998, Mr. Braugher played Frank Pembleton, a Baltimore homicide detective. It was a breakout role that earned him an Emmy Award in 1998, along with two Television Critics Association Awards in 1997 and 1998 for best actor in a drama series.In 2006, he won an Emmy for outstanding performance by a lead actor in a miniseries for his starring role as a gang leader in “Thief,” an FX miniseries about crime in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.And on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” a comedy show that aired from 2013 to 2021, Mr. Braugher played Capt. Raymond Holt, a comically stern precinct commander. He received four Emmy nominations and won two Critics Choice Awards for best supporting actor in a comedy series.After the first few episodes of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” aired, he told The New York Times that he saw parallels between that show and “Homicide.”“I don’t want to go way out on a limb about this, you know what I’m saying, and be challenged about it,” he said. “But I think they’re both workplace comedies. In essence it’s taken 20 years to come full circle, but I think they’re in the same place.”Rebecca Carballo More

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      in Music

      Sara Tavares, Portuguese Singer Who Prized Her African Roots, Dies at 45

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      She drew on rhythms from across the African diaspora and sang in Portuguese, English, Cape Verdean Criolo and Angolan slang.Sara Tavares, a Portuguese songwriter, singer and guitarist with a gentle voice and an ear for global pop, died on Nov. 19 in Lisbon. She was 45.Her label, Sony Portugal, announced the death, in a hospital, on social media. She had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2009.Ms. Tavares began her career in the pop mainstream, singing R&B-influenced songs in Portuguese and English. But as she found her own style, she came to embrace her African roots.Her parents were from Cape Verde, a nation of islands off the coast of Senegal, and Ms. Tavares increasingly drew on rhythms from across the African diaspora: Cape Verdean morna, funaná and coladeira, Brazilian samba and bossa nova, and Angolan semba, as well as funk and salsa.She often defined rhythmic fusions with her own intricate guitar picking, and she sang in Portuguese, English, Cape Verdean Creole (known as Criolo) and Angolan slang. In “Balancê,” the title song of her 2005 album and one of her biggest hits, she sang in Portuguese about wanting to share “A new dance/A mix of semba with samba, mambo with rumba.”Sara Alexandra Lima Tavares was born on Feb. 1, 1978, in Lisbon; her parents had moved to Portugal from Cape Verde earlier in the decade. She grew up admiring American singers like Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway; learned English; and delved into gospel music.At 16, she won a nationally televised contest, “Chuva de Estrelas,” singing the Whitney Houston hit “One Moment in Time.” She went on to represent Portugal at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest.Her debut EP, “Sara Tavares & Shout,” released in 1996, emulated American pop-R&B and featured a gospel choir called Shout. Her 1999 album, “Mi Ma Bo” (“You and Me”), was produced by the Paris-based Congolese songwriter Lokua Kanza and dipped into an international assortment of styles. It was certified gold in Portugal.Ms. Tavares fully came into her own with the albums she released in the 2000s, which she produced or co-produced herself: “Balancê” in 2005, “Xinti” (“Feel It”) in 2009 and — after a hiatus following her diagnosis with a brain tumor — “Fitxadu” in 2017, which was nominated for a Latin Grammy Award. (“Fixtadu” is Criolo for the Portuguese “fechado,” which means closed.) Intricate, transparent and seemingly effortless, carried by acoustic guitars and percussion, her songs offered yearning introspection, thoughts about love and socially conscious admonitions.Ms. Tavares in performance in Lisbon in 2018 with the Brazilian hip-hop artists Emicida, left, and Rael.Jose Sena Goulao/Epa-Efe/Rex, via Shutterstock In an interview promoting the release of “Balancê,” she said: “When I walk around with my friends, it’s a very, very interesting community. We speak Portuguese slang, Angolan slang, some words in Cape Verdean Criolo, and of course some English. In Criolo there are already English and French words. This is because slaves from all over the world had to communicate and didn’t speak the same languages.”She added: “I want to be a part of a movement like the African Americans were, like the African Brazilians were. Instead of doing the music of their ancestors, they have created this musical identity of their own. And it is now respected. It is considered whole and authentic and genuine. It will be a long time before the people from my generation do not have to choose between being African or European. I think you shouldn’t have to choose.”Between her own albums, Ms. Tavares collaborated widely, recording with the Angolan electronic group Buraka Som Sistema and the Portuguese rapper and singer Slow J, among others. Her last release, in September, was “Kurtidu,” a single that used electric guitars and programmed beats. Her voice stayed friendly and airborne on every track she sang, sailing above borders.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Tavares received online tributes from the presidents of both Portugal and Cape Verde, where she had won Cabo Verde Music Awards for best female voice in 2011 and for “Fitxadu” in 2018.President José Maria Neves of Cape Verde said on Facebook:“Sara Tavares, through her voice, her smile, her glance, was able to plant peace, friendship and brotherhood among Cape Verdeans, and also between Cape Verdeans and the world.” He added, “Your light will illuminate the path that still lies with us, in this land that temporarily welcomes us.” More

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      in Music

      Zahara, Acclaimed South African Singer and Guitarist, Dies at 36

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      A self-taught musician who sang in English and Xhosa, she was a prominent figure in contemporary Afro-soul known for her heartfelt voice.Zahara, the South African singer-songwriter whose soulful voice and heartfelt ballads earned her platinum-selling albums and multiple accolades in her country, died on Monday in a hospital in Johannesburg. She was 36.Her family confirmed her death on social media but did not cite a cause. Litha Mpondwana, the spokesman for South Africa’s minister of sports, arts and culture, said Zahara had been hospitalized for several weeks.“My deepest condolences to the Mkutukana family and the South African music industry,” Zizi Kodwa, the minister, said on social media, adding that officials had been “with the family for some time now.” He continued, “Zahara and her guitar made an incredible and lasting impact in South African music.”She was born Bulelwa Mkutukana on Nov. 9, 1987, in the village of Phumlani in Eastern Cape, South Africa, and grew up listening to songs her mother played on the radio before discovering a love of singing. She became the lead singer of her Sunday school choir at 6.Zahara began her singing career busking on the streets of her hometown. She said she had never received any formal musical training and had taught herself the guitar.“There’s a difference between a gift and a talent,” she said in an interview in 2021. “I’m gifted, not talented.”Her father gave her the stage name Zahara, which means “blooming flower” in Arabic, she said in the same interview.Beginning with her debut album, “Loliwe,” in 2011, Zahara’s music drew critical acclaim and found success on the music charts. Nelson Mandela invited her to his private residence to perform a bedside concert before his death in 2013. Her most recent album, “Nqaba Yam,” was released in 2021.Zahara, who sang in both English and Xhosa, her native language, was known for her husky and heartfelt voice, often compared to those of Tracy Chapman and India.Arie, and her acoustic instrumentals. Her collaborations with titans of Africa’s music industry, like the singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the musician Robbie Malinga and the Nigerian singer-songwriter 2Baba, cemented her place in contemporary Afro-soul music. She was named one of BBC’s 100 women of 2020.Through her lyrics, she spoke of her faith, her struggles and her dreams. She described her songs as stories of her experiences and thoughts.“I write about my life,” she said in an interview in 2022. “If you want to know mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally where I’m at, where I’m centered, go get my albums.”Zahara’s younger brother, Mbuyiseli Mkutukana, was murdered in 2014, after which she said she went through a period of depression. In 2021, her older sister, Nomonde Mkutukana, died in a car accident. Over the years, she spoke publicly about her struggle with alcohol addiction.Zahara campaigned for female victims of violence in South Africa, which she said she experienced when she was in her 20s. “Prayer has kept me going through this difficult time,” she told the BBC. “Nothing can beat prayer.” More

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      in Movies

      Ryan O’Neal, Who Became a Star With ‘Love Story,’ Dies at 82

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      He was a familiar face on TV before his breakout performance opposite Ali MacGraw in the 1970 blockbuster movie. But it was overshadowed by years of personal problems.Ryan O’Neal, who became an instant movie star in the hit film “Love Story,” the highest-grossing movie of 1970, but who was later known as much for the troubles of his personal life as for his acting in his later career, died on Friday. He was 82. His son Patrick confirmed the death in a post on Instagram. It did not give the cause or say where he died.Mr. O’Neal was a familiar face on both big and small screens for a half-century, but he was never as famous as he was after “Love Story.”He was 29 years old at the time and had spent a decade on television but had made only two other movies when he was chosen to star in Arthur Hiller’s sentimental romance, written by Erich Segal, who turned his screenplay into a best-selling novel. Mr. O’Neal’s performance in “Love Story” as Oliver Barrett IV, a wealthy, golden-haired Harvard hockey player married to a dying woman played by Ali MacGraw, garnered him the only Academy Award nomination of his career.He had played the town rich boy, Rodney Harrington, for five years on the prime-time soap opera “Peyton Place.” But in 1970 Hollywood was not that interested in television actors, and he had been far from the first choice to star in “Love Story.”“Jon Voight turned the part down. Beau Bridges was supposed to do it,” he told a reporter in 1971. “When my name came up through Ali, they all said ‘No.’ Ali said, ‘Please meet him.’”“So we met in one of those conference rooms where everybody sits half a mile away from everybody else,” he continued. “Weeks later, they asked me to test. Then I didn’t hear anything until they finally called and said, ‘Will you give us an extension of a week to make up our minds?’”In the end, Ms. MacGraw persuaded Paramount to cast Mr. O’Neal. He was hired for $25,000 (a little more than $200,000 in today’s currency), and his movie career was ignited.Before he became a movie star, Mr. O’Neal played the town rich boy, Rodney Harrington, for five years on the prime-time soap opera “Peyton Place.”Bettmann/Getty ImagesIt never burned quite as brightly again, although he maintained a high profile throughout the 1970s, appearing in films like “Barry Lyndon” (1975), Stanley Kubrick’s elegantly photographed adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel about a poor 18th-century Irish boy who rises into English society and then falls from those heights; and “A Bridge Too Far” (1977), Richard Attenborough’s epic tale of World War II heroism.He also demonstrated his knack for comedy in three films directed by Peter Bogdanovich. He co-starred with Barbra Streisand in “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a screwball comedy inspired by the 1938 Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn movie “Bringing Up Baby”; with Burt Reynolds in “Nickelodeon” (1976), a valentine to the early days of moviemaking based on the reminiscences of Raoul Walsh and other directors; and, with his 9-year-old daughter, Tatum, in the best known of the three films he made with Mr. Bogdanovich, “Paper Moon” (1973).In “Paper Moon,” set in the Midwest during the Depression, Mr. O’Neal played a small-time swindler hornswoggled by a cigarette-smoking orphan who just might be his illegitimate daughter. Tatum O’Neal won an Academy Award for that performance — she remains the youngest person ever to win one of the four acting Oscars — and for a while it appeared that Mr. O’Neal would become the patriarch of an acting dynasty.When Tatum starred as a Little League pitcher in “The Bad News Bears” (1976), she became the highest-paid child star in history, with a salary of $350,000 (the equivalent of about $1.9 million today) and a percentage of the net profits. Her younger brother Griffin seemed poised for stardom as well when it was announced that he would appear with his father in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1979 remake of “The Champ,” the 1931 tear-jerker about a washed-up former boxer and his son.Mr. O’Neal’s Oscar-winning co-star in Peter Bogdanovich’s period comedy “Paper Moon” (1973) was Tatum O’Neal, his daughter.Everett CollectionBut Mr. Zeffirelli ended up making the film with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder instead, and Griffin O’Neal’s career never got off the ground. He did have one starring role, in the 1982 film “The Escape Artist,” but that film was not a success. When he was next in the public eye, five years later, it was not for his acting but for his involvement in a boating accident that killed his friend Gian-Carlo Coppola, the son of the director Francis Ford Coppola. He was convicted of negligent operation of a boat but acquitted of manslaughter.The O’Neal family would go on to have many more problems with the law, with drugs and with one another.Mr. O’Neal, who was well known in Hollywood for his temper — when he was 18, he spent 51 days in jail for a brawl at a New Year’s Eve party — was charged with assaulting his son Griffin in 2007. Those charges were dropped, but a year later he and Redmond O’Neal, his son with the actress Farrah Fawcett, were arrested on a drug charge. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to undergo counseling, while Redmond entered rehabilitation but continued to struggle with addiction.Tatum O’Neal had her own highly publicized drug problems and was estranged for many years from her father, who she said physically abused her when she was a child.Mr. O’Neal’s fame was beginning to slip by 1978, when Paramount offered him $3 million to star in “Oliver’s Story,” a sequel to “Love Story.” He accepted, even though his distaste for the project was clear.“There’s something cheap about sequels,” he told a reporter, “and this one’s a complete rip-off.” When the movie was released, the critics agreed.Mr. O’Neal with Farrah Fawcett in 1981. They began their highly publicized on-again, off-again relationship when she was still married to the actor Lee Majors.Steve Sands/Associated PressHis days as an A-list star were soon over, although he continued to work steadily in the 1980s and ’90s. His more memorable movies in this period included “Partners” (1982), in which he played a heterosexual police detective who goes under cover with a gay partner, played by John Hurt; “Irreconcilable Differences” (1984), as a successful Hollywood director whose 10-year-old daughter, played by Drew Barrymore, sues him for divorce; and “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (1987), a crime drama written and directed by Norman Mailer. He also co-starred with Ms. Fawcett in the short-lived 1991 television series “Good Sports.”Most of Mr. O’Neal’s later work was on television, including a recurring role on the series “Bones.”Patrick Ryan O’Neal was born in Los Angeles on April 20, 1941, the elder son of Charles O’Neal, a screenwriter, and Patricia Callaghan O’Neal, an actress. At 17 he joined his nomadic parents in Germany and got his first taste of show business as a stunt man on the television series “Tales of the Vikings.”He never took an acting lesson, but his striking good looks, as well as the anger that seemed to boil just below the surface, helped win him roles on television not long after he returned to Los Angeles.Mr. O’Neal in 2015. The last major role he played, four years earlier, was himself, on the reality show “Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals.”Ryan Stone for The New York TimesHis marriages to the actresses Joanna Moore and Leigh Taylor-Young ended in divorce. Ms. Taylor-Young, his co-star on “Peyton Place,” told an interviewer that their marriage never recovered from the success of “Love Story,” which she said brought “a type of life which is not suitable for Ryan’s personality.”Mr. O’Neal was romantically linked with many actresses, but it was his on-again, off-again relationship with Ms. Fawcett, which began when she was still married to the actor Lee Majors, that garnered the most attention. The couple never married but were together for almost 20 years before they separated in 1997. They later reconciled and were living together when Ms. Fawcett died of cancer in 2009. In 2012 he published a book about their relationship, “Both of Us: My Life With Farrah.”Besides his daughter, Tatum, and his son Patrick, a sportscaster, complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.In 2012, Mr. O’Neal revealed that he was being treated for prostate cancer. That diagnosis came 11 years after he contracted chronic myelogenous leukemia, which eventually went into remission. The last major role Mr. O’Neal played was himself. In the summer of 2011, he and his daughter starred in a reality show, “Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals,” on Oprah Winfrey’s cable channel, OWN. The series left the impression that the two had ended their long estrangement, but Mr. O’Neal later told an interviewer that it painted a false picture.“We’re further apart now than we were when we started the show,” he said.Peter Keepnews More

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      in Television

      Ellen Holly, Trailblazing Star in ‘One Life to Live,’ Dies at 92

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      Ms. Holly was the first Black performer to play a lead role on daytime television.Ellen Holly, whose star turn in the soap opera “One Life to Live” made her the first Black actor to play a lead role in daytime TV, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 92.Her publicist, Cheryl L. Duncan, confirmed her death in a statement. No cause was given.Ms. Holly was born in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1931, and grew up in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. Her parents were William Garnet Holly, a chemical engineer, and Grayce Holly, a writer. Relatives included several prominent figures in the civil rights movement.After graduating from Hunter College, she debuted on Broadway in 1956 in “Too Late the Phalarope,” then went on to perform in several other Broadway productions.In 1968, Ms. Holly wrote in The New York Times about the difficulty of finding roles as a Black woman with lighter skin. The column caught the attention of a television producer, Agnes Nixon, who gave Ms. Holly the groundbreaking role of Carla that would catapult her to fame after “One Life to Live” launched on ABC. She played the role from 1968 to 1980 and 1983-’85.The character for a time passed as white, before revealing that she was Black, amid a love triangle with two doctors: one white and the other Black. When her character appeared to be in an interracial relationship with a Black man, a station in Texas canceled the show, and Ms. Nixon, the producer, received hate mail, she said in an interview in 1997.“A white woman falling in love with a Black man,” Ms. Holly said in a 2018 interview, “people started looking at that soap opera because they were saying, ‘This is something new, we better see where this is going.’”She wrote about her experience in a New York Times column in 1969, writing that she found the storyline of a Black woman passing as white “fascinating.”“I felt that the unique format of a soap would enable people to examine their prejudices in a way no other format possibly could,” she wrote, because unlike a play or movie, viewers would follow the character for months.“The emotional investment they made in her as a human being would be infinitely greater,” she wrote, “and when the switch came, their involvement would be real rather than superficial. A lot of whites who think they aren’t prejudiced — are. It seemed like a marvelous opportunity to confront their own prejudices.”Ms. Holly wrote that while she called herself Black, she also had French, English and Shinnecock ancestry.Ms. Holly wrote an autobiography, “One Life: The Autobiography of an African American Actress,” which was published in 1996. Over the years, she wrote opinion columns for The New York Times about the arts, race and civil rights.After retiring from acting, she became a librarian in the 1990s, working at the White Plains Public Library for years.Ms. Holly, who never married or had children, is survived by several grand-nieces, cousins and other family members. More