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      Leslie Jordan, ‘Will & Grace’ Actor and Instagram Star, Dies at 67

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      Shows like “Will & Grace” made him a familiar face, then the pandemic brought new fame. He was killed in a car crash in Hollywood.Leslie Jordan, a comic actor who after a late start in his performing career became a recognizable face from roles on numerous television shows, most notably “Will & Grace,” then achieved even more fame during the pandemic when his quirky homemade videos attracted millions of Instagram followers, died on Monday in a car crash in Hollywood, Calif. He was 67.David Shaul of the BRS/Gage Talent Agency, which represented him, confirmed the death. News reports quoting the police said Mr. Jordan’s car crashed into the side of a building after he had apparently experienced a medical emergency. A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that someone driving a BMW collided with a wall in Hollywood at 9:30 a.m. and died, but he declined to identify the victim.“Not only was he a mega-talent and joy to work with,” Mr. Shaul said of Mr. Jordan by email, “but he provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times.”That was a reference to Mr. Jordan’s surprising foray into viral videos during the pandemic. Sitting out Covid-19 in Tennessee, near his family, he began posting vignettes on Instagram — simple, amusing moments from his life — and was surprised to find his number of followers balloon into the millions. He had accumulated more than 130 television and film credits, so he hadn’t been exactly undiscovered, but the Instagram stardom at age 65 was an unexpected treat.“I’ve loved attention, wanted it my whole career,” he told The New York Times in 2020, “and I’ve never gotten this kind of attention.”He also found that he had become a sort of de facto comforter to those fans.“What I love, though,” he said, “are people that pull me aside and say: ‘Listen, I don’t want to bother you, but I’ve had a rough go. I’ve been locked down. I’ve got kids, and I looked forward to your posts and you really, really helped me through this tough time.’ When people tell you things like that, you realize comedy is important.”Mr. Jordan in 2020. The popular home videos he made during the Covid-19 pandemic “provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times,” his agent said.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesComedy came easily to Mr. Jordan, though it took him a while to find his way to a performing career. At under five feet tall, he was small enough that in his 20s he made a stab at becoming a jockey. But in his later 20s he gave up that idea, earned a theater degree and in 1982 took a bus to Hollywood.It was a difficult period for a gay actor like Mr. Jordan to find work, but he began getting jobs, first in commercials.“I was like Flo,” he said in the 2020 interview, a reference to the Progressive Insurance pitchwoman. “People would recognize me. I was the PIP Printing guy. I was the elevator operator to Hamburger Hell for Taco Bell, where you went if you didn’t eat tacos.”He began to get TV roles in 1986 — guests spots on “The Fall Guy,” “Murphy Brown,” “Newhart” and others, then recurring roles on “The People Next Door,” “Top of the Heap,” “Reasonable Doubts,” “Hearts Afire” and more.He made a particular impression on the sitcom “Will & Grace,” about the friendship between a gay lawyer and a straight interior designer sharing a New York City apartment. Mr. Jordan played the tart-tongued socialite Beverley Leslie, appearing both in the original series beginning in 2001 and in the recent reboot.In 2006, he won an Emmy for the role, for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series.Leslie Allen Jordan was born on April 29, 1955, in Memphis to Allen and Peggy Ann Jordan and was raised in Chattanooga, Tenn. His Southern drawl was as distinctive a part of his résumé as his height.Mr. Jordan said he knew from early in life that he was gay — he liked to say that he went directly from his mother’s womb into her high heels and had been “on the prance ever since.”The household was conservative, and his father, who was in the Army and died in a plane crash when Leslie was 11, was concerned enough about Leslie’s effeminate qualities to send his son to an all-boys summer camp one year. As Mr. Jordan told the story to The Times in 2020, at the camp’s parents day, awards were handed out, with the moms and dads looking on.“So here’s one for the best archer, here’s for the best horseback rider, here’s for the best swim person,” he said, “and I didn’t win anything. And my mother said my dad was just sinking lower and lower.”But the staff eventually brought out a trophy, presented it to Leslie, and someone announced: “This is for the best all-around camper. We have this kid who wasn’t actually the best at anything, but boy, he sure did make us laugh.”He loved horses but realized he wasn’t suited to be a jockey.“People think it’s size, or something,” he told The Telegraph of Britain in 2021. “It has nothing to do with that. You have to weigh about 104 pounds, and honey, my ass alone weighs 104.”When he decided to try showbiz, he said, “I had $1,200 that mother pinned into my underpants,” and he had to decide which direction to go from Tennessee, to New York or Hollywood.“If I was going to starve, I wanted to starve with a tan,” he said. He headed west.Mr. Jordan in 2010. In recent years he was much in demand, with recurring roles on several TV series.Richard Perry/The New York TimesAs he wrote in his book “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet” (2008), he knew that being gay might not help his prospects in Hollywood.“I decided I was going to make a real effort to ‘butch it up’ and hide any signs that I was a Big Homo,” he wrote. “The funny thing is, I am, without a doubt, the gayest man I know.”Once he began landing roles, they came quickly, but Mr. Jordan also had substance abuse problems.“I tell people: If you want to get sober, try 27 days in the L.A. men’s county jail,” he told The Guardian in 2021. At 42, he kicked his addictions to alcohol and crystal meth.Information on his survivors was not immediately available.Most of Mr. Jordan’s work was in television, but he also took the occasional film role, including in “The Help” (2011). He also had a one-man stage show that he performed frequently, titled, like his first book, “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet.” It was an autobiographical collection of stories.“I am a high school cheerleader stuck in a 55-year-old man’s body,” he confessed in one memorable line. “If you were to cut me open, Hannah Montana would jump out.”David Rooney reviewed it for The Times when the show was presented in New York in 2010.“Many gay rites-of-passage stories are echoed here: hostile small-town environment (Chattanooga, Tenn.); rigidly masculine father; humor as armor against bullies; unrequited loves; drug and alcohol dependency; internal homophobia; weakness for rough trade,” Mr. Rooney wrote. “But Mr. Jordan’s candor gives them a fresh spin.”In recent years Mr. Jordan was much in demand, with recurring roles in the TV series “American Horror Story,” “Call Me Kat,” “The Cool Kids” and “Living the Dream.” In 2021 he published another book, “How Y’All Doing? Misadventures and Mischief From a Life Well Lived.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Geoff Nuttall, First Among Equals in Acclaimed Quartet, Dies at 56

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      With the St. Lawrence Quartet, he played with such enthusiasm that often he swept himself from his seat. At the Spoleto Festival USA, he was a shaping force.Geoff Nuttall, a charismatic musician who played boldly as the first violinist of the acclaimed St. Lawrence String Quartet for more than three decades, and who was widely admired as the leader of the chamber music series at the Spoleto Festival USA, died on Wednesday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 56.The cause was pancreatic cancer, the quartet’s management company, David Rowe Artists, said.Mr. Nuttall founded the St. Lawrence in Toronto in 1989 with the violinist Barry Shiffman, the violist Lesley Robertson and the cellist Marina Hoover. Training with the fabled Tokyo and Emerson quartets and taking first prize at the Banff International String Quartet Competition in Canada in 1992, they came to prominence quickly and distinctively, with Mr. Nuttall first among the group’s equals.“The quartet’s stage manner was hip and casual,” though it had “an unmistakable seriousness of intent,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New York Times after its New York debut at the 92nd Street Y in 1992. “The performance had a dangerous, unchecked edge,” Mr. Ross reflected on a performance of Berg, “I have never heard anything quite like it. In the future, this quartet should make its presence felt.”The St. Lawrence did so. Its repertoire was individual, even quirky, focusing as strongly on new music by the likes of Osvaldo Golijov as on older scores. It recorded pieces by the contemporary composers Jonathan Berger and John Adams with the same intensity as those by Shostakovich, Schumann and Tchaikovsky that it released on the EMI label. (Mr. Adams wrote the St. Lawrence two quartets as well as the quartet-and-orchestra “Absolute Jest.”)If the quartet’s palpable commitment remained characteristic — even as the violinists Scott St. John and Owen Dalby and the cellist Christopher Costanza replaced outgoing members — that was because its brio seemed to emanate bodily from its longstanding first violinist. Mr. Nuttall often played with such enthusiasm that he swept himself from his seat.“Nuttall is the St. Lawrence’s ‘secret weapon,’ as the rest of the group admits,” Mr. Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2001. “His phrasing often upsets the central pulse of a movement, and the others either follow his lead or scramble to restore rhythmic order. As a result, despite the rigorous discipline of the quartet’s rehearsal process, many passages sound riotously improvised.”Mr. Nuttall’s electrifying ability to engage flowed from his deep desire to communicate even at the expense of other, blandly technical virtues, and he was fully aware of the risks of failure; indeed, he welcomed them as imperative to a good performance.Mr. Nuttall, a vinyl collector whose living room held more than 10,000 LPs that offered as much inspiration from Miles Davis as from the Busch Quartet, told American Artscape in 2014: “A string quartet is officially really about being together. You really want to be unified and blended together. And I remember being inspired by ‘Nashville Skyline,’ the Bob Dylan record. He does a duet with Johnny Cash. It’s such a great record, and they’re not together at all. They’re totally doing their own thing, but it’s totally unified and really powerful at the same time.”“And that was a great lesson on ensemble playing,” he continued. “Because if each one of the duet is doing their own thing in a really committed and convincing way, even if you’re saying the same thing, which they were in that case, it can be more powerful.”Mr. Nuttall performing with Livia Sohn in 2010 in a chamber music concert in New York. Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesGeoffrey Winston Nuttall was born on Nov. 22, 1965, in College Station, Texas, to John and Suzanne (Shantz) Nuttall. His mother was a nurse; his father a physics professor who relocated from Texas A&M University to the University of Western Ontario, Canada, when Geoff was 8.He took up the violin shortly after the family moved to London, Ontario, and played in his first quartet at age 10 or 11. He studied with Lorand Fenyves, a renowned former concertmaster of the Israel Philharmonic and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, at the University of Toronto, the school from which he graduated.With the St. Lawrence, Mr. Nuttall was later in residence at the Juilliard School, Yale University, and the Hartt School of Music. He and his colleagues joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1998, leading its chamber music program and making the music of Franz Joseph Haydn — Mr. Nuttall’s favorite composer and one whom he thought was perpetually overlooked — as much a core of their campus activities as of their concert programs.“Arrestingly dynamic teamsmanship among the four players allowed every gesture to be for the moment and every moment to be in your face,” the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote of a 2018 recital of Haydn’s six Op. 20 works, which the St. Lawrence also recorded with gritty drama rather than poised elegance. “The string quartet as theater doesn’t get more exhilarating.”What Haydn’s music demands, Mr. Nuttall said in a presentation at Google in 2017, is “active participation, active listening, following the game.”He had a rare talent for inspiring exactly that with his spirited talks during concerts about what made music worth getting fully involved with. That, along with his eclectic taste in repertoire, made him the ideal frontman to succeed Charles Wadsworth as the director and host of the early-summer Spoleto chamber series in Charleston, S.C., in 2009.Mr. Nuttall performing this year. He was 10 or 11 when he first played in a quartet. Bill StruhsThe St. Lawrence played regularly at Spoleto from 1995, and for Mr. Nuttall, South Carolina became a home away from his Bay Area home.He married Livia Sohn, another violinist, in a Charleston garden in 2000. She survives him along with their two sons, Jack and Ellis, his mother, and his sister, Jenny Nuttall. “It was an inspired choice,” Johanna Keller wrote of the Spoleto appointment in The New York Times in 2013. “Mr. Nuttall turns out to be chamber music’s Jon Stewart,” she continued, a “creatively daring, physically talented performer who can go goofball in a nanosecond, maintaining a veneer of entertainment while educating his base about serious matters.”Mr. Nuttall did not particularly mind the comparison.“Whether you’re 7 years old and have never seen a violin up close or you’re an expert with a doctorate in music, I want you to leave humming, elated, or having felt emotionally put through the ringer,” he explained to the Charleston Magazine in 2019.“Music connects us all. There’s no secret code to understand in order to feel moved.” More

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      Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Dies at 82

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      She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Recording” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.That year, in the interview with The Times, she said that she thought music had the potential to be more emotionally powerful than other art forms, like dance or painting.“There’s something intangible and mysterious about music,” she said. “It can get you more; you can sob more. It’s got a stronger engine.”Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,’‘ she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More

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      Lenny Lipton, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ Lyricist and 3-D Film Pioneer, 82, Dies

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      He used the royalties earned from the hit folk song, based on a poem he wrote in college, to fund decades of research into stereoscopic projection.Lenny Lipton, who as a college freshman wrote the lyrics to the classic folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then used the song’s bountiful royalties to fund years of pioneering research in 3-D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82.His wife, Julia Lipton, said the cause was brain cancer.Few people leave much of a mark on popular culture; Mr. Lipton was among the few who got to leave two, and in such wildly divergent corners as folk music and cinema technology.He was a 19-year-old student at Cornell when he sat down at the typewriter of his friend and fellow physics major Peter Yarrow. He had just read a 1936 poem by Ogden Nash titled “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” and felt inspired to write his own.Some time later, Mr. Yarrow found the poem, still in his typewriter, and felt a similar inspiration. He put the poem to music, and in 1963 he and his folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, released it as “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It begins: “Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea / And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.”Mr. Yarrow tracked down Mr. Lipton, who was working as a journalist in Manhattan, and gave him credit as a co-writer. (As Mr. Lipton told reporters repeatedly, despite persistent rumors, “Puff” had nothing to do with marijuana.)The song was such an immediate and lasting hit — Mr. Lipton called it his “MacArthur ‘genius’ grant” — that it allowed him to leave his job and move to California. In the Bay Area, he fell in with a circle of independent filmmakers and made several short films of his own.He received even more royalty income from his book “Independent Filmmaking” (1972), which became a niche but durable success, giving him enough of a financial cushion to explore yet another abiding interest: stereoscopy, the technical name for 3-D technology.Mr. Lipton had fallen for it as a boy in early 1950s Brooklyn when the first wave of 3-D films arrived in theaters. He saw them all: “House of Wax,” “Bwana Devil,” “The Maze.” And while the craze passed — the technology was crude, the projectors were hard to synchronize, the cheap eyeglasses that had to be worn to see images in 3-D were clunky — his belief that 3-D was the future of film did not, and in California he began tinkering with ideas to make that belief a reality.“‘Puff’ gave me a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2021 interview with Moving Images, a YouTube channel. “I didn’t have to get a job. I spent years in my little lab in Point Richmond developing my stereoscopic inventions.”Mr. Lipton accumulated some 70 patents related to 3-D technology, among them a screen that switches rapidly between left- and right-eye images, and a companion pair of eyeglasses fitted with shutters that open and close in sync with the screen.He developed that technology, which he called CrystalEyes, in the early 1980s. It soon found applications far beyond the movie theater: Versions were used by the military for aerial mapping, by scientists for molecular modeling, and by NASA for driving Mars rovers.CrystalEyes equipment developed by Mr. Lipton. He had some 70 patents related to 3-D technology.CrystalEyes and other advances devised by Mr. Lipton seeded the emergence of a new generation of stereoscopic filmmaking, used in 3-D versions of movies like “Avatar,” “Chicken Little” and “Coraline.” Today, some 30,000 movie screens across the United States use 3-D techniques that evolved from his innovations.Mr. Lipton “changed the paradigm of the audience’s experience in cinema culture entirely,” Sujin Kim, assistant professor of 3-D animation at Arizona State University, said in an email.Leonard Lipschitz was born on May 18, 1940, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, owned a soda shop and died when Leonard was 12. His mother, Carrie (Hibel), a teletype operator, later changed their surname to Lipton.His mother inspired his love for film by taking him to some of Brooklyn’s many grand old movie palaces, like the Ambassador and the Paramount, while his father inspired his love for filmmaking by bringing home a toy film projector. Leonard soon assembled his own, using aluminum foil, a toilet-paper roll and a magnifying glass.He entered Cornell intending to study electrical engineering but quickly switched to physics, where he felt more freedom to experiment.After graduating in 1962, he got a job at Time magazine in New York, then became an editor at Popular Photography. After work he would head to a small theater in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, where he and some friends presented the latest movies to emerge from the city’s underground film scene.He did much the same in California, though without the need for a day job. He wrote a weekly film column for The Berkeley Barb, an alternative newspaper, and made several short documentaries shot on 16 mm film, including “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” about the clashes surrounding People’s Park in Berkeley, and “Children of the Golden West,” a rambling, touching portrait of his countercultural friends.In addition to “Independent Filmmaking,” Mr. Lipton wrote several other books, among them “The Super 8 Book” (1975), “Lipton on Filmmaking” (1979) and, in 2021, “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era,” an 800-page opus on the history of movie making.Along with his wife, he is survived by his children, Noah, Jonah and Anna. He lived in Los Angeles and died in a hospital there.Mr. Lipton had an idealistic certainty about the coming dominance of 3-D films, but he was also critical of the way Hollywood had limited its use to cartoons and action movies.“I had hoped that stereoscopic cinema would be about actors and acting and involve people in stories about the human condition, but that’s not what happened,” he told Moving Images. “What happened is, it’s a cinema of spectacle.”Still, he held out hope for something different around the corner.“As soon as someone has success, financial success, a stereoscopic documentary or a stereoscopic buddy comedy, then the studios will copy it,” he said. More

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      Joanna Simon, Opera Singer from Famously Musical Family, Dies at 85

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      A renowned mezzo-soprano, she grew up alongside her younger sisters, Carly and Lucy, both of whom became singer-songwriters.Joanna Simon, a smoky-voiced mezzo-soprano who grew up in a family loaded with musical talent, including her younger sisters Carly and Lucy, before forging an acclaimed career as an opera and concert singer, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 85.Mary Ascheim, a first cousin of Ms. Simon’s, said the cause was thyroid cancer. Ms. Simon died in a hospital a day before Lucy Simon’s death at 82 at her home in Pierpont, N.Y.Ms. Simon was one of the best-known American opera singers to emerge in the 1960s, a time when arts funding was flush, audiences were full and gleaming new music palaces were opening, chief among them the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York.She made her professional debut in 1962 as Cherubino in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” at New York City Opera. The same year, she won the Marian Anderson Award, an annual prize given to a promising young singer.She stood out for her range of material, mastery of foreign languages and willingness to take risks on contemporary composers. She was the first to sing the role of Pantasilea, a courtesan in 16th-century Italy, in “Bomarzo,” by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, when it made its debut in 1967 at the Opera Society of Washington (today the Washington National Opera). That performance won her worldwide acclaim, and she reprised it in New York and Buenos Aires.She was equally regarded as a concert singer, performing classical and contemporary songs, including “Over the Rainbow.”A few days before one recital in New York, in 1975, she tripped on a rug in her apartment and broke her leg. Rather than call off the show, she mounted the stage on crutches.“As soon as I was sure that my voice hadn’t been affected, I knew I would go on,” she told The New York Times.Her easy grace and glamorous good looks made her a popular guest on television talk shows. She sang and sat for interviews on “The Tonight Show” and “The Dick Cavett Show,” and she was a featured performer on the last original telecast of “The Ed Sullivan Show” before it went off the air in 1971.In her embrace of popular culture, Ms. Simon was not too far removed from her singer-songwriter sisters. Carly Simon achieved lasting fame in the early 1970s with pop hits like “Anticipation” and “You’re So Vain.” Lucy Simon sang with Carly early on — they were billed as the Simon Sisters — and later found success as a composer. She received a Tony nomination in 1991 for best original score, for the musical “The Secret Garden.”The sisters occasionally crossed paths. Joanna sang backup on Carly’s album “No Secrets” (1972) and Lucy’s album “Lucy Simon” (1975), and Carly played guitar offstage during Joanna’s performance on “The Mike Douglas Show” in 1971. Carly wrote her own opera, “Romulus Hunt,” released as an album in 1993; it featured a character named Joanna, a mezzo-soprano.The sisters grew up singing and playing music together and remained close as adults, avoiding the petty jealousies that often ensnare siblings engaged in similar careers.“When Lucy was 16, I envied her hourglass figure,” Joanna Simon told The Toronto Star in 1985. “When Carly first became successful, I envied her first $200,000 check. But those feelings lasted for 20 minutes, and I didn’t dwell on them. I knew it was a given in the operatic world that very few achieved that kind of success. I never expected it, so I wasn’t disappointed.”Ms. Simon in “Bomarzo” with New York City Opera in 1967, the year the opera, by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, had its debut. She was the first to sing the role of Pantasilea, a courtesan in 16th-century Italy, in that opera. New York City OperaJoanna Elizabeth Simon was born on Oct. 20, 1936, in Manhattan, the oldest child of Richard L. Simon, a publisher and founder of Simon & Schuster, and Andrea (Heinemann) Simon, a singer and homemaker. The family lived in Manhattan and, later, the Fieldston neighborhood of the Bronx.The Simon children took to music early; Joanna could play piano at 6 years old. In high school she thought she would become an actress, though by college, at Sarah Lawrence (which Carly also later attended), she had switched to musical comedy. Then a voice coach encouraged her to consider opera.Upon graduating in 1958 with a degree in literature, she continued her opera training in Vienna, then returned to New York to start her career.Ms. Simon, who lived in Manhattan, married Gerald Walker, a novelist and editor at The New York Times Magazine, in 1976. He died in 2004. She dated Walter Cronkite until his death in 2009.In addition to her sister Carly, she is survived by her stepson, David Walker, and a step-grandson. Her brother, Peter, a photojournalist, died in 2018.Ms. Simon continued to sing professionally through the early 1980s, then gradually pulled back before retiring in 1986 to join “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS as a cultural correspondent. She won an Emmy Award in 1991 for a documentary on creativity and manic depression.Funding for arts programming at “MacNeil/Lehrer” eventually dried up, and her position was cut. Casting about for a new career, she became a real-estate broker. Within six months, she told The Times in 1997, she had sold $6 million in property. She later became a vice president of her company, Fox Residential Group.While her musical background wasn’t the key to her newfound success, she said it sometimes came in handy.“When I take customers into potential apartments, I go into the next apartment and vocalize,” she said. “If they can hear me, it’s no deal.” More

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      Mary McCaslin, Folk Singer Who Lamented the Lost Old West, Dies at 75

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      A songwriter in her own right, she was known for renditions of pop and rock songs, “Pinball Wizard” among them, that made them sound like mountain ballads.Mary McCaslin, a pure-voiced folk singer who sang plaintive laments for the fading Old West, reimagined pop and rock classics as mountain ballads and was an innovator of open tunings on the guitar, died on Oct. 2 at her home in Hemet, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles. She was 75.The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s, said her husband, Greg Arrufat.Ms. McCaslin got her start in the mid-60s at the Troubadour, the fabled West Hollywood music incubator, performing at its Monday Night Hoots, as the club’s open-mic nights were known, often hosted by Michael Nesmith, who later found fame as a TV Monkee.John McEuen, a founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Penny Nichols, who was then his girlfriend, were frequent stage mates.“We thought for a moment we might be the next big something or other trio,” Mr. McEuen said in a phone interview. “It was a lot of fun for no money. Mary was a unique singer who always sounded like someone on an old country record. Like Iris DeMent before Iris DeMent, or Ginny Hawker. She had a really natural mountain voice for someone who grew up in Southern California — an authentic and very traditional Americana sound.”Ms. McCaslin was strait-laced and focused on her music, Mr. McEuen added. “She was unusual, even at that time in the ’60s, and all she cared about was getting the music as right as possible,” he said.She would become a hard-working folk festival and coffee house favorite, if not a household name. On her first album, “Way Out West,” in 1974, she wrote of gamblers, rounders and outlaws and, in the title song, of heartbreak and disillusionment:My family left home when I was a childTo head out West, all open and wildI couldn’t wait to ride the prairie on a ponyBut we passed over the plains and on downInto the great suburban stucco forestThe people there all held my dreams in jestSomehow I grew to spite themWay out WestThe album cover shows a serious-looking young woman, her face framed by a curtain of long hair and bangs in the style of the day. In its review, Rolling Stone noted her “clear, delicately affecting vocals,” and how her “unorthodox guitar tunings create unusual, ethereal melodies of striking beauty.”Ms. McCaslin, who also played banjo and ukulele, was self-taught, and her open tuning — tuning the strings to sound like a specific chord, as Joni Mitchell did — distinguished her guitar playing.“While Joni’s tunings were more jazz-inflected,” said Mitch Greenhill, president of Folklore Productions/Fli Artists, who managed Ms. McCaslin and her first husband, the folk singer Jim Ringer, starting in the mid-70s, “Mary’s went the opposite way. They were more angular, more Celtic sounding. And she always put the tunings on her albums, which aspiring musicians always appreciated.”She recorded her albums mostly on Philo, a small independent New England label. One newspaper called her an “L.A. cowgirl who records in Vermont.” Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that she was known as “the prairie songstress.”Along with her own songs, Ms. McCaslin sang western standards and pop and rock classics, like the Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You” and the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” transforming that classic power rocker into an Appalachian ballad with her clawhammer-style banjo playing.Her “pure, narrow soprano,” as John Rockwell of The Times described her vocal style, recalled that of Kate Wolf or Nanci Griffith. Her songs have been recorded by Tom Russell, David Bromberg and Ms. Wolf, among others.It was in 1972 that Ms. McCaslin met Mr. Ringer, a gruffly charming, rumpled folk singer 11 years her senior with a honky-tonk style and a colorful biography — from freight hopping to logging to a bit of jail time in his youth — and they began performing and touring together. They were a study in contrasts — her unadorned soprano and demure stage presence and his outlaw persona — and when they recorded an album of duets, they called it “The Bramble and the Rose.” They married in 1978.“The tug between Miss McCaslin’s childhood dream of the Old West and the reality of the New West is what gives her music much of its mythic resonance,” Mr. Holden wrote 1981, when Mr. Ringer and Ms. McCaslin played the Bottom Line in Manhattan. “Her point of view suggests a woman who grew up riding horses under the open sky of the high plains. Even Miss McCaslin’s experiments with Motown songs conjure a plaintive rusticity.”Her version of the Supremes’ hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” he said, “transforms the tune from an urban teen-oriented lament into a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation.”In her own songs, Ms. McCaslin rued the increasing urbanization of the American West.“I’ve always been attracted by the desert and the beautiful mesas in Arizona and Utah,” she told Mr. Holden. “I get upset that more and more of the land is being developed. Soon there will be no room to graze cattle for food. It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse.”Ms. McCaslin in a 1992 album cover photo. “It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse,” she said.Stuart Brinin, via FLi ArtistsMary Noel McCaslin was born on Dec. 22, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Indianapolis and was adopted by Russell McCaslin, a factory worker, and Lorraine (Taylor) McCaslin, a homemaker. Mary grew up in Redondo Beach, Calif., listening to early rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass and country music; her father often took her to concerts.She counted among her influences the ballads of Marty Robbins, the country and western singer popular at midcentury, and the songs of Petula Clark, the English crooner. She bought her first guitar when was 15 with her babysitting money and performed for the first time at 18 at the Paradox, a club in Orange County.In addition to her husband, Ms. McCaslin is survived by her sister, Rose Brass, and a brother, Eric Mauser. She and Mr. Ringer divorced in 1989.On her 1994 album, “Broken Promises,” Ms. McCaslin writes of heartaches and breakups, her wariness and surprise at a new love (that would be Mr. Arrufat, who worked in music production and had been a friend for years) and, on the song “Someone Who Looks Like Me,” her yearning to know her biological parents:’Cause I would almost give it allTo see my family treeIn my life I’ve never seenSomeone who looks like meIn 2013, she did meet her birth mother, Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear, a member of the Kiowa Apache tribe, and her brother, Eric. Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear gave her daughter a Native American necklace, Mr. Arrufat said, and he asked if it might be appropriate to give his wife a Native American name.Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear approved his choice, he said, which was Mary Noel Singing Bear. Mr. Greenhill, her former manager, marveled that Ms. McCaslin, who had made a career singing of Western imagery and themes, turned out to be, as he said, “a true Native American artist.” More

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      in Theater

      Jeff Weiss, an Unconventional Theatrical Force, Dies at 82

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      Downtown, he was known for sprawling works and vivid performances, but later in his career he drew praise as an actor in mainstream productions, too.Jeff Weiss, a playwright and actor known for innovative, offbeat shows in out-of-the-way New York theaters as well as for roles in mainstream productions, including more than a dozen on Broadway, died on Sept. 18 in Macungie, Pa., near Allentown. He was 82.His brother, Steve, said the cause was metastasized prostate cancer.Mr. Weiss was an important figure in the experimental theater scene in New York, beginning in the 1960s. His plays were seen at Caffe Cino in the West Village, La MaMa on the Lower East Side and other Manhattan spots known for the provocative and the outlandish. Those include his own Good Medicine and Company, a Lower East Side storefront theater that he ran with his partner in theater and in life, Carlos Ricardo Martinez. His plays were also sometimes staged in Allentown, where he grew up.The works he wrote were impossible to classify and did not lend themselves to conventional plot description. In “F.O.B.” (1972), Mr. Weiss spent much of his onstage time immersed in a bathtub full of cold water. “Hot Keys” (1992), Mr. Weiss’s response to the AIDS crisis, was a late-night serial about a serial killer.Some of his performances lasted four hours, five hours, even eight hours. His best-known and most ambitious work could be said to have lasted decades. It was called “… And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid.” Part I was first staged in 1966. Part IV appeared in 1984.In some of his works, including “… And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid, Part III,” Mr. Weiss played all the characters — and there could be a lot. In others, he made roles for other actors and could place extraordinary demands on them. “… And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid, Part IV,” for instance, consisted of dozens of scenes, with more added as the run went along, and they could be presented in any order.“Jeff would post the order for a particular evening an hour before the show,” Nicky Paraiso, an actor and musician who worked with him for decades, said by phone.The actress Kate Valk was part of the grueling adventure that was “Part IV,” which was subtitled “The Confessions of Conrad Gehrhardt,” with Mr. Weiss playing the title character.“Was Conrad a maniac?,” Ms. Valk said by email. “Or an actor who played a maniac? That was the edge Jeff walked in his work. It always felt a little dangerous.”“To perform onstage with him,” she added, “was to be right there inside his glorious mania, virile and vibrant.”A 1966 poster for “…And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid,” Mr. Weiss’s best-known and most ambitious work.La Mama ArchivesMr. Weiss performing in “…And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid” at La MaMa on the Lower East Side in 1966.La MaMa ArchivesThe goings-on could be tough sledding for anyone expecting a conventional play. In 1982, when Charles Richter, then the chairman of the theater department at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, brought to the school a Weiss play called “Last Gasps,” he was blunt in describing its appeal to The Morning Call, the Allentown newspaper.“I wouldn’t consider the play avant-garde,” he said. “I think it defies categorization. It’s part vaudeville, part intellectual, part blatant sensationalism. I think a large part of the audience won’t get it.”Yet enough people got Mr. Weiss that he developed a following, one that stretched beyond the experimental theater world. Part IV of his “Rent” opus drew a favorable notice from Mel Gussow in The New York Times during a production with members of the Wooster Group in SoHo in the summer of 1984.“As the play entered its fourth hour in the un-air-conditioned Performing Garage,” Mr. Gussow wrote, “one had long ago accepted discomfort as a way of Weiss life. Though the evening had its excesses, it also had a visceral investiture of theatrical imagination.”One whose attention Mr. Weiss caught was the actor Kevin Kline, who became a fan and friend and in 1986 was preparing to play Hamlet for Joseph Papp’s Public Theater.“During the casting process I was trying to think what actor could play the Player King,” Mr. Kline said by email, “one who could both inspire and confound Hamlet, someone as humane as he was unabashedly histrionic. To me Jeff was the man.”He left a note at Mr. Weiss’s theater asking if he’d consider auditioning, though that prospect seemed unlikely; some years earlier, Mr. Weiss had been cast in a Public show but had withdrawn, unable to handle the demands of conventional theater.“To my surprise, he responded favorably,” Mr. Kline said. “He came in and auditioned for the director, Liviu Ciulei, who was so knocked out that he asked him to play not only the Player King but also the ghost of Hamlet’s father, as well as Osric. He couldn’t get enough of him.”Mr. Weiss acknowledged that casting him was a risk.“They took bets at the theater on whether I would show up for rehearsal, and how long I would last,” he told The Times in 1986. “I do have a reputation for fleeing in the face of possible success.”Succeed he did.“Next to Mr. Kline, the most intriguing acting comes from Jeff Weiss, an idiosyncratic actor and playwright in the experimental theater,” Mr. Gussow wrote in his review. Mr. Weiss, he wrote, “reveals a hitherto concealed talent for the classics.”That performance started a run of more conventional acting jobs for Mr. Weiss. Those included Broadway appearances in “Macbeth” in 1988 with Glenda Jackson and Christopher Plummer, an “Our Town” revival later that year, “Present Laughter” in 1996, “The Invention of Love” in 2001 and “Henry IV” in 2003, with a cast that included Mr. Kline.Mr. Weiss worked in high-profile Off Broadway productions as well, including as a drag queen in “Flesh and Blood,” Peter Gaitens’s stage adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel, at New York Theater Workshop in 2003. “Mr. Weiss is terrific,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “trilling the expected, crowd-pleasing notes while providing a darker, more intricate bass line.”Mr. Weiss found himself in demand elsewhere. He turned up as a judge in multiple episodes of the television series “Law & Order.” In 1990, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., he took on the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in the seasonal production of “A Christmas Carol,” to much acclaim. Francis X. Kuhn directed that production.“A professional actor with no headshot, Jeff was described to me as a downtown theater ‘outlaw,’” Mr. Kuhn said by email. “But he proved to be a generous and exhilarating collaborator.”“He was deeply and absolutely committed to exploring and sharing Scrooge’s spiritual journey,” Mr. Kuhn added. “That’s what he cared about, and what he made the audience care about.”Mr. Weiss and Cherry Jones in an Off Broadway production of “Flesh and Blood” in 2003. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJeffrey George Weiss was born on April 30, 1940, in Reading, Pa., and grew up in Allentown. His father, Benjamin, was an executive at a cement company, and his mother, Helen (Eagle) Weiss, was a homemaker.Mr. Weiss wrote his first plays before he was a teenager. Formal education, though, was not for him.“I was kicked out of school pretty regularly, because I was a cutup and kind of neurotic,” he told The Times in 1986, “so I left when I was 16.”Soon he was in New York and had met Mr. Martinez. Their Good Medicine and Company theater had 10 seats and, in the early years, no electricity.“People would learn to bring flashlights to a Jeff Weiss show,” using them to help illuminate the stage, said Mr. Paraiso, Mr. Weiss’s longtime collaborator.Ticket revenue was put to quick use — to buy the makings of dinner, to be served to the playgoers.“While I was performing,” Mr. Weiss told The Pittsburgh Press in 1988, “Carlos was upstairs cooking, so when the show was over, the food would be ready.”Mr. Weiss moved back to Allentown in 1997, though he continued to appear in New York productions. His brother said that Mr. Weiss had wanted to be near their aging mother. Mr. Martinez joined him, and when Mr. Martinez developed Parkinson’s disease, Mr. Weiss cared for him, Mr. Paraiso said.Mr. Martinez died in 2017. Mr. Weiss’s brother is his only survivor.Mr. Kline recalled a vibrant personality offstage as well as on.“Jeff loved to laugh,” he said. “Being with him, just like watching his plays, could make you giddy. There was no one like him.” More

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      in Movies

      Robbie Coltrane, the Beloved Hagrid in ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 72

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      The veteran Scottish actor and comedian also played a gambling-addicted psychologist in the 1990s crime series “Cracker.”Robbie Coltrane, the veteran Scottish actor who played the beloved half-giant Rubeus Hagrid in the “Harry Potter” films and starred in the cult British crime series “Cracker,” died on Friday in Larbert, Scotland. He was 72.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Belinda Wright, his British agent. Ms. Wright said that Mr. Coltrane’s family had not disclosed a cause, but that he had been “unwell for some time.”Mr. Coltrane veered from the comic to the gritty in a 40-year career in film and television, with turns as an antihero detective in “Cracker” (1993-96), a K.G.B. agent turned ally to James Bond and a gangster who disguises himself as a nun after betraying his fellow criminals in “Nuns on the Run” (1990).But those roles did little to prepare Mr. Coltrane to play Hagrid, a fan favorite from the “Harry Potter” books whose transition to the big screen would face the sky-high expectations of millions of young readers.Mr. Coltrane successfully embodied the 8-foot-6 half-giant. He appeared in all eight “Harry Potter” films, infusing the franchise with warmth even as he towered over the young witches and wizards at the center of the series who were embroiled in a fight against evil.The first film, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” opened in November 2001 and went on to gross more than $1 billion worldwide, building on the already fervent global fan base of J.K. Rowling’s book series.Ms. Wright, Mr. Coltrane’s agent of 40 years, said the role was the reason he received a “stream of fan letters every week for over 20 years.”Fiercely protective of his privacy, Mr. Coltrane gave few interviews and could be hard-edged with reporters. But he said he had to cast that gruffness aside when he was embraced by a legion of young “Harry Potter” fans.“Kids come up to you and they go, ‘Would you like to sign my book?’ with those big doe-eyes,” he told The Guardian in 2012. “And it’s a serious responsibility.”Mr. Coltrane was born Anthony Robert McMillan on March 30, 1950, in Rutherglen, Scotland, outside Glasgow. His father, Ian Baxter McMillan, was a doctor; his mother, Jean Ross Howie, was a teacher.He grew up on the outskirts of Glasgow and enrolled in Glasgow School of Art, where he studied drawing and painting but struggled to capture his ideas on canvas.“I wanted to paint like the painters who really moved me, who made me want to weep about humanity,” he told The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, in 2014. “Titian. Rembrandt. But I looked at my diploma show and felt a terrible disappointment when I realized all the things that were in my head were not on the canvas.”As the prospect of a future as a painter dimmed, he was encouraged by a drama teacher who told him that he had acting talent after he appeared in a staging of Harold Pinter’s one-act play “The Dumb Waiter,” The Herald reported.After adopting his stage name as a tribute to the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, Mr. Coltrane found steadier footing when he moved to London. He worked as a stand-up comedian and actor, picking up theater roles and small parts in television and film productions.He attracted critical acclaim as Dr. Edward Fitzgerald, known as Fitz, the chain-smoking criminal psychologist in the hit series “Cracker,” whose alcohol addiction echoed Mr. Coltrane’s own issues with drinking. The role earned him the BAFTA award for best TV actor in 1994, 1995 and 1996.A turn as Valentin Zukovsky, a former K.G.B. agent turned Russian mafia kingpin, in the James Bond films “GoldenEye” (1995) and “The World is Not Enough” (1999) exposed Mr. Coltrane to a broader audience, particularly in the United States.There was nothing, however, that could compete with the global fame he found after he was cast as Rubeus Hagrid in the “Harry Potter” series. With his bushy beard and growling voice, Mr. Coltrane brought the beloved character to life. Mr. Coltrane, center, as Rubeus Hagrid in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (2009), with Jim Broadbent, left, as Professor Horace Slughorn, and Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter.Alex Bailey/Warner Brothers PicturesThe young actors who grew up on the sets of the “Harry Potter” films fondly remembered Mr. Coltrane as someone they could count on to lift their spirits with a joke or a word of encouragement.Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, said on Friday that Mr. Coltrane “used to keep us laughing constantly as kids.”“I’ve especially fond memories of him keeping our spirits up on ‘Prisoner of Azkaban,’” Mr. Radcliffe said in a statement, “when we were all hiding from the torrential rain for hours in Hagrid’s hut and he was telling stories and cracking jokes to keep morale up.” James Phelps, who played Fred Weasley in the series, wrote on Twitter that when he was 14 years old and nervous on his first day on the set, Mr. Coltrane came over and said, “Enjoy it, you’ll be great.”Mr. Coltrane is survived by his children, Spencer and Alice, and a sister, Annie Rae. In the HBO Max retrospective “Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts,” which premiered on Jan. 1, Mr. Coltrane reflected on the role that introduced him to a new generation of fans.“The legacy of the movies is that my children’s generation will show them to their children,” he said. “So you could be watching it in 50 years’ time, easy. I’ll not be here, sadly, but Hagrid will, yes.” More