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      in Theater

      Robert Brustein, Passionate Force in Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 96

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      A critic and dramatist himself, he started repertory companies at Yale and Harvard and fiercely defended the art form, even if it meant feuding with playwrights.Robert Brustein, an erudite and contentious advocate for profit-indifferent theater, in the service of which he wore many hats — critic, teacher, producer, director, playwright and even actor — died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his wife, Doreen Beinart.Mr. Brustein was dean of the drama school at Yale and founded and ran the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, producing well over 100 plays and securing them in the regional theater firmament. He also taught at Yale as well as at Harvard.A prolific writer with the zeal of an environmentalist and the moral certainty of a martyr, he reviewed stage productions for The New Republic for more than 50 years. In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, nonpandering theater, and worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive.Mr. Brustein was a passionate defender of the resident, nonprofit theaters whose ranks expanded across the United States in the last decades of the 20th century, and as such he was perpetually concerned that they not be corrupted by commercial interests. The Broadway megahit “A Chorus Line,” in one instance — originally produced in 1975 by the Public Theater in New York — had made it clear that a hit show could funnel many years of economic fuel back to the source.“The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”A public intellectual and supporter of the arts, Mr. Brustein delivered opinions that were often respectfully received but that just as often incited exasperation or outrage. Theater people, after all, are not especially fond of being called sellouts. When Frank Rich left his post as chief drama critic for The Times in 1994, his valedictory essay singled out Mr. Brustein:“I rarely had ugly confrontations with anyone in the theater, and my mail from theater people, even at its angriest, was civilized,” Mr. Rich wrote. “In 13 years the few significant exceptions invariably involved Robert Brustein.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      in Theater

      Joanna Merlin, Known for Her Work Both Onstage and Off, Dies at 92

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      Soon after appearing in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” she began a new career as a prominent casting director.Joanna Merlin, who, after originating the role of Tzeitel, the eldest daughter, in the hit Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” became a renowned casting director, notably for Stephen Sondheim musicals including “Into the Woods” and “Follies,” died on Oct. 15 at her younger daughter’s home in Los Angeles. She was 92.Her older daughter, Rachel Dretzin, said the cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease.The idea of becoming a casting director came from Hal Prince, the powerful producer of “Fiddler,” after she had left “Fiddler” to raise her two young daughters. He had interviewed several candidates and told Ms. Merlin that most of them “just didn’t like actors,” she told Backstage magazine.“He felt that since I was an actor and a mother, that I might be a good choice,” she added. “He understood that I was raising children and told me that he didn’t care what hours I put in, just as long as I got the work done.”She set to work in 1970, casting replacement actors in “Fiddler” during its last two years on Broadway. For the next two decades, she cast six musicals that were composed by Sondheim and produced (and usually directed) by Mr. Prince on Broadway: “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Side by Side by Sondheim” and “Merrily We Roll Along.”From left, Ms. Merlin, the composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the director Harold Prince and the playwright George Furth during a casting session for the 1981 Broadway musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsHer casting credits also include two other Sondheim musicals, “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods”; Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Evita”; and “On the Twentieth Century,” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Cy Coleman. All those shows except “Into the Woods” were directed by Mr. Prince.“What I found so interesting with Joanna,” James Lapine, who directed “Into the Woods” and wrote its book, based on the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, said in a phone interview, “was her determination to pursue nontraditional casting in the theater, which for me, at a young age, was something I hadn’t thought much about.”Ms. Merlin’s pursuit of diverse casting led Mr. Lapine to choose a Black actress, Terry Burrell, to replace the white one who had played one of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, and Phylicia Rashad, who is Black, as a replacement for Bernadette Peters in the leading role of the Witch.In 1986, Ms. Merlin was a founder of the Non-Traditional Casting Project (now the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts), which seeks more opportunities for actors of color and actors with disabilities.Ms. Merlin, noting that there were many talented, nonwhite actors, told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1990. “The reason they should be cast is because they’re good,”Ms. Merlin also cast six films, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” (1987), for which she won the Casting Society of America’s Artios Award. She also won an Artios for “Into the Woods.”Ms. Merlin, far right, with Zero Mostel, center, and three other “Fiddler on the Roof” cast members (from left, Maria Karnilova, Tanya Everett and Julia Migenes) backstage after the show’s opening night in 1964. Associated PressJo Ann Dolores Ratner was born on July 15, 1931, in Chicago. Her parents were Russian immigrants: Her father, Harry, owned a grocery store, and her mother, Toni (Merlin) Ratner, helped in the store and became a sculptor in her 60s.She moved to Los Angeles with her parents and her sister when she was 15.She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year in the early 1950s and, after acting in plays in the Los Angeles area in the early and mid-1950s, appeared in her first movie role, a small part in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956).After some more screen work and roles in Off and Off Off Broadway plays, Ms. Merlin made her Broadway debut in 1961 in Jean Anouilh’s “Becket,” as Gwendolen, the mistress of Thomas Becket, one of Britain’s most powerful figures in the 12th century, who was played by Laurence Olivier. Later that year, she returned to Broadway to portray Sigmund Freud’s wife in Henry Denker’s “A Far Country.”After four unsuccessful auditions for a role in Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which was staged by Jerome Robbins, she auditioned eight times for Mr. Robbins when he was casting “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964. Although she lacked a strong singing voice, she was cast as Tzeitel, the oldest daughter of Tevye the milkman, the show’s principal character.The syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons wrote that when Ms. Merlin was pregnant in 1965 with her daughter Rachel, Zero Mostel, who played Tevye, told the stage manager: “Joanna’s baby just kicked. Send baby a note — not to kick.”She left the show in 1965 after Rachel was born, returned as Tzeitel a year later, and departed again in 1967 when she was replaced by her understudy, Bette Midler (who was also Rachel’s babysitter). After Julie’s birth in 1968, Mr. Prince made his offer.She continued to act, mostly in films and on television. Her roles included the dance teacher in “Fame” (1980), Julia Roberts’s mother in “Mystic Pizza” (1988) and an old Jewish woman in a short film, “Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn” (2008), which she and Ragnar Freidank adapted from a one-woman play by Ellen Cassedy.TV viewers might be most familiar with Ms. Merlin’s recurring role in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” She played Judge Lena Petrovsky 43 times from 2000 to 2011. No other actor has played a jurist more often in the “Law & Order” franchise. She also appeared, as two different defense lawyers, in five episodes of “Law & Order.”Ms. Merlin as a lawyer in a 1994 episode of “Law & Order.” She also played a judge in 43 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” setting a record for the franchise.Jessica Burstein/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesHer career as an acting teacher began in 1998 at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a year later she began holding workshops dedicated to the acting technique of her teacher, Michael Chekhov.In the foreword to her book, “Auditioning: An Actor-Friendly Guide” (2001), Mr. Prince wrote: “Her taste is impeccable. In no instance can I remember her recommending anyone less than interesting for a role.”In addition to her daughter Rachel, a documentary filmmaker, and her daughter Julie Dretzin, an actress, Ms. Merlin is survived by five grandchildren. Her first marriage, to Marty Lubner, ended in divorce. Her marriage to David Dretzin ended with his death in 2006 after a car accident in which he suffered a traumatic brain injury. Her sister, Harriet Glickman, died in 2020.For “Pacific Overtures,” which takes place in Japan after Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s visit in 1853 and which had an all-Asian cast, Ms. Merlin engaged in “what may be one of the most poignant talent searches undertaken for a Broadway show,” according to a 1976 article in The New York Times.Racism and economics often forced Asian actors out of the profession at the time. So when she had no luck finding actors in New York, she worked with Asian community and theater groups, Asian newspapers and the State Department to fill the roles. A third of those ultimately signed for the production were nonprofessionals.Among them was the actor Gedde Watanabe, who was a young street singer in San Francisco when she approached him and invited him to audition.“I didn’t believe her,” Mr. Watanabe said. More

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      in Television

      Richard Moll, Towering Bailiff on ‘Night Court,’ Dies at 80

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      In a career that spanned more than four decades, the actor was best known for playing the imposing but lovable Bull Shannon on the NBC sitcom.Richard Moll, the 6-foot-8 actor who delighted television audiences with a childlike charm in his role as the hulking bailiff on the NBC sitcom “Night Court,” died on Thursday at his home in Big Bear Lake, Calif. He was 80.His death was confirmed on Friday by his publicist, Jeff Sanderson. No cause was given by the family.In a career of more than four decades, Mr. Moll played a variety of roles on television shows and in films. But he was best known for portraying the baldheaded, wide-eyed Aristotle Nostradamus (Bull) Shannon on all nine seasons of “Night Court,” which ran from 1984 to 1992 and competed with other hit television sitcoms like “The Cosby Show” and “The Golden Girls.”Mr. Moll worked as an actor and voice-over artist as late as 2018.Kathy Hutchins/Hutchins Photo Agency, via Associated PressBull Shannon’s dimwitted persona offered an air of lighthearted innocence on the series, which was set inside a fictional municipal night court in Manhattan and starred Harry Anderson, who played Judge Harry Stone and died in 2018, and John Larroquette as the prosecutor, Dan Fielding.Mr. Moll was “larger than life and taller too,” Mr. Larroquette, said Friday in a post on X.Richard Charles Moll was born on Jan. 13, 1943, in Pasadena, Calif. to Harry and Violet Moll. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, with a degree in history and passed over his father’s wishes that he pursue a law career, to take up acting.He started with theater work, performing in Shakespeare plays in California. His first television and film roles came in the late 1970s, and included a part in the 1977 movie “Brigham” and an appearance in an episode of the television series “Welcome Back, Kotter” in 1978.“Probably auditioning for ‘Night Court’ would be my first big break,” Mr. Moll said in a 2010 interview with MaximoTV. He noted that he had been asked if he was willing to shave his head for the part.“I said ‘Are you kidding?’ ” he recalled. “‘I’ll shave my legs for the part. I’ll shave my armpits. I don’t care.’”After “Night Court” ended in 1992, Mr. Moll went on to do voice-over work on various cartoons, including roles as Two-Face, a disturbed villain with a disfigured mug on the “Adventures of Batman & Robin” on Fox, and as Scorpion, one of the many adversaries on “Spider-Man: The Animated Series,” on the same network.Richard Moll, far right, with the cast of Night Court in 1988.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesThough largely known for his comedic work, including in movies such as “Scary Movie 2” and “But I’m a Cheerleader,” Mr. Moll was also featured in horror and science-fiction films. His first major movie roles included the 1985 horror feature “House” and the 1986 indie fantasy “The Dungeonmaster.”Mr. Moll worked as an actor and voice-over artist as late as 2018, according to IMDb. His final notable appearance was in the 2010 live-action film “Scooby-Doo: Curse of the Lake Monster,” in which he played the mysterious lighthouse keeper Elmer Uggins.Mr. Moll retired to Big Bear Lake in the Southern Californian mountains, where, according to his family, he reveled in the idyllic scenery and exercised his love of bird-watching.He is survived by a daughter, Chloe Moll; a son, Mason Moll; his ex-wife, Susan Moll; and two stepchildren, Cassandra Card and Morgan Ostling. More

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      in Movies

      Vincent Asaro, Mobster Acquitted in Lufthansa Heist, Dies at 86

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      In a stunning verdict, he was found not guilty of participating in the storied 1978 theft, retold in the film “Goodfellas.” Then he went to prison over a road rage incident.Vincent Asaro, a career mobster who was found not guilty of murder and of helping to organize the staggering $6 million Lufthansa heist at John F. Kennedy Airport — one of the biggest cash heists in American history — only to be sentenced to prison when he was 82 over road-rage revenge, died on Sunday in Queens. He was 86.His death was confirmed by Gerald McMahon, a lawyer who successfully represented him in the Lufthansa case. No cause was given.The brazen theft in 1978 of $5 million in cash and $1 million in jewels from a vault at a Lufthansa hangar at Kennedy Airport figured prominently in the book “Wiseguy” (1985) by Nicholas Pileggi and the Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas” (1990).The authorities had suspected the Mafia’s involvement, but the case remained unsolved and the investigation closed until Mr. Asaro was arrested in 2014, linking him and the Bonanno crime family to the robbery.He was also accused of using a dog chain in 1969 to strangle Paul Katz, the owner of a warehouse where Mr. Asaro and James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke, who was suspected of masterminding the Lufthansa theft (and who was portrayed by Robert DeNiro in “Goodfellas”), stored their stolen loot. Mr. Asaro and Mr. Burke had believed that Mr. Katz was an informer after the warehouse was raided by the police.The stolen van that authorities believed was used in the Lufthansa robbery at John F. Kennedy Airport in December 1978.Ken Murray/Associated PressThe indictment implicated Mr. Asaro in a sweeping conspiracy in which he was also accused of robbing FedEx (then Federal Express) of $1.25 million of gold salts, which can be used in medicinal treatments; bullying his way into the pornography business; and seeking, unsuccessfully, to bump off a cousin who had testified about an insurance scam.Mr. Asaro’s 2015 trial was a sensation.Though the robbery had taken place more than three decades earlier, it had been immortalized in the book and film, and even for younger New Yorkers it felt like a coda to the “Godfather” era.Moreover, the key witness against Mr. Asaro was another cousin, Gaspare Valenti, who had been a government informant since 2008 and had secretly recorded Mr. Asaro from 2010 to 2013.Mr. Valenti’s testimony on the stand was a jaw-dropping breach of the Mafia’s code of silence.It also revealed the devolution of a ruthless mobster who in his day job could suggest to customers which fences to buy from his store in Ozone Park, Queens, while in his other life he could impatiently advise a younger mob associate who had asked him how best to collect a debt: “Stab him today.”Mr. Asaro’s acquittal in 2015 was so stunning — not only to the prosecution, but to Mr. Asaro himself — that as he left the courthouse and got into a car, he giddily joked, “Don’t let them see the body in the trunk.”A jubilant Mr. Asaro leaving court in Brooklyn in 2015 after he was acquitted. As he got into a car, he giddily joked: “Don’t let them see the body in the trunk.”Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesIronically, the automobile reference returned to haunt him two years later. He was accused of recruiting a mob associate, who in turn recruited John J. Gotti, the grandson of the former Gambino family boss, to torch the car of a motorist who had cut off Mr. Asaro at a traffic light.The driver was pursued at high speed by Mr. Asaro to no avail. The associate used law enforcement sources to track the license plate, after which Mr. Gotti and two other men located the car in Broad Channel, Queens, doused it with gasoline and set it ablaze. An off-duty police officer parked nearby witnessed the auto-da-fe and pursued the arsonists, but they sped away in a Jaguar.Surprisingly, after a lifetime of denying culpability in crime, Mr. Asaro not only pleaded guilty but also apologized for what he acknowledged was “a stupid thing I did.”He could have been sentenced to 20 years in prison. The prosecution asked for 15, pointing out that although he had “participated in racketeering, murder, robbery, extortion, loan-sharking, gambling and other illegal conduct, he has served less than eight years in jail.”In December 2017, U.S. District Judge Allyne Ross ordered him to serve eight years — which, at 80, Mr. Asaro described as “a death sentence” — and to pay $21,276 in restitution to the owner of the car.“If he had not aged out of a life of crime at the age of 77,” Judge Ross said, referring to his age during the opening phases of the Lufthansa trial, over which she presided, “I have little hope that he will do so.”Two years after the Lufthansa trial, Mr. Asaro was sentenced to eight years in prison over a road rage incident, in which he ordered an associate to torch the car of a motorist who had cut him off at a traffic light.Justin Lane/European Pressphoto AgencyVincent A. Asaro was born on July 10, 1937, in Queens to Joseph and Victoria Asaro, who separated when he was a teenager. His uncle, Michael Zaffarano, owned buildings housing adult theaters, distributed pornography and worked as a bodyguard for Joseph Bonanno, who ran his eponymous crime family for nearly four decades.In 1957, Mr. Asaro married Theresa Myler; they divorced in 2005.Mr. Asaro’s survivors include his son, Jerome. He was arrested with his father in 2014, pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced to seven and a half years’ imprisonment.Mr. Asaro racked up numerous charges and convictions over the course of his life. Among them, he was convicted in federal court in 1970 and 1972 for the theft of an interstate shipment and burglary of a post office. In 1998, he was sentenced in state court in New York to four to 12 years in prison for enterprise corruption and criminal possession of stolen property.Three decades after the notorious Lufthansa heist, the beggarly but still choleric gangster had, according to prosecutors, squandered his $500,000 share of the loot on gambling and depleted whatever he had collected from his unforgiving manner of pursuing delinquent borrowers. He had hocked his jewelry and was seen shopping at a Waldbaum’s supermarket for orzo and lentils.According to a conversation recorded by Mr. Valenti that was played in court in 2015, he was even unwelcome at the local social club where he had celebrated the heist. “People hate me in there,” Mr. Asaro said. “I don’t pay my dues.”Even his estranged son, whom he had initiated into the Mafia and had by then outranked him, rebuffed him when he desperately sought to borrow money, according to another recording.Mr. Asaro had a stroke during his imprisonment for ordering the arson, which left him partly paralyzed. In 2020, he was granted a compassionate release from the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Mo., because of his age and vulnerability to Covid-19.“He obviously had nine lives,” Mr. McMahon said after Mr. Asaro’s death. “But this must have been the tenth.”Joseph Goldstein More

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      in Music

      Rock Brynner, 76, Son of Hollywood Royalty Who Cut His Own Path, Dies

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      The only male child of the actor Yul Brynner, he built a peripatetic career as a writer, historian, novelist, playwright — and roadie for the Band.Rock Brynner, whose life as a road manager for the Band, bodyguard for Muhammad Ali, farmer, pilot, street performer, novelist and professor of constitutional history overshadowed what, for a lesser mortal, might be a more than sufficient laurel on which to rest — he was the son of the actor Yul Brynner — died on Oct. 13 in Salisbury, Conn. He was 76.Maria Cuomo Cole, a close friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was complications of multiple myeloma.Like many children of the rich and famous, Mr. Brynner led a charmed life. His father, a Russian émigré, was best known for his starring role in both the stage and screen versions of the musical “The King and I,” and later played lead Hollywood roles as a gunfighter, a Russian general and, in “The Ten Commandments,” Pharaoh Rameses II. A-list glamour encircled the son: Liza Minnelli was a lifelong friend from childhood; Elizabeth Taylor came to all his parties. The French poet and playwright Jean Cocteau was his godfather.But Rock Brynner did more with his silver spoon than most. A gifted student, he attended Yale, Trinity College Dublin and Columbia, where he received a doctorate in American history in 1993 before teaching for over a decade at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.In between his stints on campus, he shifted in and out of various milieus and demimondes. He wrote a one-man play based on Cocteau’s addiction memoir, “Opium,” which he performed briefly on Broadway in 1970. Afterward he traveled around Europe as a mime, a period in which he struggled with his own drug and alcohol problems — a theme that fueled his first novel, “The Ballad of Habit and Accident” (1981).Mr. Brynner, left, with his father, the actor Yul Brynner, and the entrepreneur Isaac Tigrett at the opening of the Hard Rock Cafe in Manhattan in March 1984. When Mr. Tigrett opened the restaurant, he hired the younger Mr. Brynner to be the manager.Mitchell Tapper/Associated PressMr. Brynner had a penchant for falling into celebrity orbits. While still in Europe he joined the entourage of Muhammad Ali, who was on something of a world tour after being stripped of his heavyweight championship title over his antiwar stance. Ali called him his “bodyguard,” even though Mr. Brynner was much shorter and slighter than the deposed champ.“Who’d ever have thunk,” Mr. Brynner recalled Ali joking, “that the son of the pharaoh of Egypt would be protecting a little Black boy from Louisville?”Mr. Brynner was no mere hanger-on: He worked as Ali’s press liaison, and it was in part thanks to him, and his connections in Dublin, that Ali was able to fight a high-profile bout against Al “Blue” Lewis in that city in 1972.After returning to the United States and largely sobering up, Mr. Brynner made friends with Robbie Robertson, the guitarist and chief songwriter for the Band, and for a time drove the group’s tour bus.When Mr. Robertson expressed interest in making a rock documentary, Mr. Brynner, by his account, put him in touch with another friend, the director Martin Scorsese. The result, in 1978, was “The Last Waltz,” widely considered one of the best concert documentaries ever made.Mr. Brynner rarely stayed in a single role for long. One day in the early 1970s he was hanging out at a London hotel bar when he met an entrepreneur named Isaac Tigrett, who had an idea for a rock ’n’ roll-themed restaurant.The two became close friends, and Mr. Brynner and his father became early investors in the Hard Rock Cafe, founded by Mr. Tigrett and Peter Morton, whose father had started the Morton’s steakhouse chain. When Mr. Tigrett expanded to New York in 1984, he hired Mr. Brynner as manager. The restaurant was, for a time, the place to see and be seen in Manhattan, and Mr. Brynner proved more than capable of handling all the boldfaced names angling for a table.“He grew up with celebrities, traveled with celebrities,” Mr. Tigrett said in a phone interview. “He knew this scene well.”Mr. Brynner with Liza Minnelli during a party at a Manhattan restaurant in 1981. They had been friends since childhood.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Brynner managed to stay at the Hard Rock Cafe for a year before becoming restless once more. He had always wanted to own a plane, he told Mr. Tigrett. He and his father used their profits from the restaurant to open a charter air service, based at a small airport in Danbury, Conn., not far from the Westchester farm where Rock was now living in a guesthouse, free of charge in exchange for working its small field of vegetables.By the mid-1980s, with his wild days behind him, Mr. Brynner returned to his intellectual pursuits. He wrote a biography of his father, “Yul: The Man Who Would Be King” (1989), while completing his doctorate in American history at Columbia, with a specialty in constitutional history.The biography, which appeared four years after Yul Brynner’s death at 65, exploded certain myths that his father had told about himself (he did not, as he claimed, descend from Roma stock). But it also painted a portrait of a complicated man, whose immense ego sometimes got in the way of his genuine love for his only son — and of how that son struggled under the weight.“It is a study of how a son models himself on his father,” Rock Brynner said in a 1991 radio interview, “and then must distance himself later in life.”Yul Brynner Jr. was born on Dec. 23, 1946, in Manhattan. His father, still a struggling actor, was away in California looking for stage work, while his mother, Virginia Gilmore — who would also achieve cinematic fame — kept house in a small apartment on East 38th Street, above a dry cleaner’s.There was no question what the boy’s first name would be: “In our family,” Yul Brynner Sr. said, “Yul is not just a name. It is a title.” But he also gave his son the nickname Rock, after the boxer Rocky Graziano, in a bid to toughen him up for the rough streets of New York.Rock lived a wandering childhood, following his father’s career from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles and, finally, to Switzerland, where he attended the International School of Geneva, a famed boarding school.He enrolled at Yale, but after a year transferred to Trinity College Dublin — in part because, he later said, he was enthralled with the work of Samuel Beckett, whom he had met, and that of James Joyce, who might be one of the few 20th-century notables whom he did not.He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1969 and received a master’s in the same subject, also from Trinity, in 1972.Mr. Brynner’s marriage to Linda Ridgway, in 1973, ended in divorce. He married Elisabeth Coleman in 1978; they also later divorced. He is survived by his sisters, Victoria, Mia and Melody Brynner and Lark Bryner, who uses the original spelling of the family name.Mr. Brynner explored his family’s Eastern Russian roots in a 2006 book.via Distinct PressAfter receiving his doctorate, Mr. Brynner taught at Marist and at Western Connecticut State University. He also continued to write. Along with another novel, “The Doomsday Report” (1998), a prophetic satire about climate change, he wrote about the controversial drug thalidomide (“Dark Remedy: The Impact of Thalidomide and Its Revival as a Vital Medicine,” 2001); his family’s roots in eastern Russia (“Empire and Odyssey: The Brynners in Far East Russia and Beyond,” 2006); and, with Andrew Cuomo, the brother of Maria Cuomo Cole, who was governor of New York at the time, state water policy (“Natural Power: The New York Power Authority’s Origins and Path to Clean Energy,” 2016).Thanks to his research on eastern Russia, the State Department sent Mr. Brynner on several lecture tours in the region. There he paid tribute to his family by helping open a Brynner museum and unveil a statue of his father in Vladivostok, where the elder Mr. Brynner was born.“Yes, it’s difficult for the children of iconic figures to establish independent identities,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “But with all the suffering in this world, I wouldn’t shed too many tears for those who had privileged youths.” More

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      in Movies

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

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

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

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

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      in Theater

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

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