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      The Breakout Stars of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Breakout Stars of 2020Here are the 12 stars and trends that managed to thrive and shine in an impossible year.Clockwise from bottom left: Sarah Cooper, Maria Bakalova, the hand of the artist Salman Toor, Jonathan Majors and Radha Blank.Credit…Clockwise from bottom left: Lacey Terrell/Netflix; Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times; Peter Fisher for The New York Times; Adria Malcolm for The New York Times; Douglas Segars for The New York Times Dec. 23, 2020Updated 7:44 a.m. ETWhile plenty of us felt trapped this year, wandering through the same spaces and talking to the same people, it was the artists and entertainers who kicked open windows to new sights, sounds and experiences. Yes, the pandemic dealt a significant hit to the culture world, but nothing could derail its creativity. So, despite the limitations, stars in a variety of disciplines managed to thrive and shine, and by doing so, made a difficult year more tolerable for most everyone. Here are 12 artists and trends who gave us a fresh perspective in 2020.Radha Blank wrote, directed and starred in the autobiographical satire “The 40-Year-Old Version.”Credit…Douglas Segars for The New York TimesFilmRadha BlankRadha Blank was the hero many of us needed in 2020, when the concept of time got an overdue interrogation. In her autobiographical satire “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” which was on Netflix, she portrays a playwright who — refusing to believe that her dreams have an expiration date — pivots to rap as a grown woman. Like her character, Blank, who grew up Brooklyn, is a 40-something playwright who knows what it’s like to fight to elevate her voice.And elevate it she did. She wrote, directed and starred in the film, her first feature, a New York Times Critic’s Pick that A.O. Scott called “a catalog of burdens and also a heroic act of unburdening.”In “I May Destroy You,” Michaela Cole explores sexual assault, truth, revenge and trauma; she also created the HBO series.Credit…Natalie Seery/HBOTelevisionMichaela CoelMichaela Coel may have created the most important TV show of 2020: “I May Destroy You.” The series, which premiered on HBO in June, is inspired by Coel’s own experience with sexual assault, and in it, she deftly plucks apart ideas around truth, revenge, anxiety, trauma and fear.Coel, a 33-year-old British-Ghanaian writer and actor, plays a writer who is drugged and raped in a bathroom stall. The assault leaves her traumatized and grappling with hazy, fragmented memories. “Coel brings a superb discipline to the portrayal of distress,” wrote Mike Hale, a TV critic at The Times.In a critic’s notebook, Salamishah Tillet, a professor and contributing critic at large for The Times, noted that the show could be considered “part of a larger cultural trend in which Black women’s experiences with sexual assault are appearing with greater frequency and treated with more sensitivity.” (She pointed to the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” and TV shows like “Queen Sugar,” “The Chi” and “Lovecraft Country” as examples.)“By offering multifaceted endings,” Tillet went on, “Coel gives victims of sexual assault, particularly Black women who have survived rape, some of the most radical and cathartic moments of television I have ever witnessed.”ComedySarah CooperSarah Cooper, 43-year-old comedian, made her mark in 2020 by pantomiming the words of President Trump in viral videos that have been viewed tens of millions of times across social media. Jim Poniewozik called her first Trump lip-sync, “How to Medical,” a “49-second tour de force” and said Cooper was helping to develop “a kind of live-action political cartooning.”“Cooper’s Trumpian drag is partly a caricature of performative masculinity,” Poniewozik wrote.The success of her videos helped land Cooper a Netflix special, “Everything’s Fine,” directed by Natasha Lyonne. “This special shows that she can do much more than lip-sync,” Jason Zinoman, a comedy columnist at The Times, said of the production. “She has a promising future as an actor in television or movies.” She currently has a show in the works for CBS.Maria Bakalova, the Bulgarian actress who plays Borat’s teenage daughter in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.” Credit…Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesFilmMaria BakalovaIt’s no easy feat to stand out next to the unabashed actor-prankster Sacha Baron Cohen, but Maria Bakalova, a 24-year-old from Bulgaria, was riveting as the teenage daughter of his Borat character in his most recent mockumentary film. As the culture reporter Dave Itzkoff put it in The Times: “Sacha Baron Cohen may be the star of ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,’ but it is Maria Bakalova who has emerged its hero.”Her performance also grabbed headlines for an edited scene involving President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is seen putting his hands down his pants in a hotel room, where Bakalova, impersonating a TV journalist, is interviewing him. He later denied any wrongdoing.About the opportunity to star in a major American film, Bakalova said: “I will be really grateful to Sacha for giving this platform to an Eastern European, to play a strong and complicated character who’s not just one thing.”Adrienne Warren was nominated for a Tony for her starring role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.” Credit…Molly Matalon for The New York TimesTheaterAdrienne WarrenAdrienne Warren’s starring role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” earned her a Tony nomination in October for best actress in a musical. But it was her vocal and steadfast stand on racial injustice, including in the arts world, that brought Warren, 33, more deeply into one of the most urgent conversations of 2020. In an impassioned, impromptu speech this summer — during the Times event Offstage: Opening Night on the subject of being Black on Broadway — she questioned whether she even wanted to continue performing as part of an institution that didn’t stand up for people like her.“The last thing on my mind right now is me going back to Broadway,” Warren said. But in an interview with The Times after her nomination, she said, “I know this is what I’m supposed to do, but the question is whether I want to do it at the address I’ve been doing it.”As for what a dream role might look like for her in the future: “I want to make sure that I’m telling stories that represent me as a Black woman and also push the needle forward in ways that resonate with people, both in this nation and abroad,” she said.Jonathan Majors made a mark in both HBO’s “Lovecraft Country” and the Spike Lee drama “Da 5 Bloods.”Credit…Adria Malcolm for The New York TimesTelevisionJonathan MajorsJonathan Majors isn’t afraid of pain, and that may just be his secret to success. “I’m willing to hurt more,” he told Alexis Soloski in The Times over the summer. “It doesn’t bother me.”The 31-year-old star had a big year doing just that to great effect onscreen, as a Korean War veteran in the supernatural HBO thriller “Lovecraft Country,” set in 1950s Jim Crow America, and the son of a Vietnam War veteran in “Da 5 Bloods,” Spike Lee’s drama for Netflix that was named a Critic’s Pick in The Times by A.O. Scott.“Emotions in the men in my family run deep,” Majors told Soloski — who described him as “an actor of precision and intensity.” When asked if acting gave him a place to put those big emotions, he said: “With acting, it was almost like I was in a corridor, and it just appeared to me and said, ‘Go that way, son.’ I didn’t get in trouble once I started acting. I had a place to put the energy, to put my focus.”The artist Christine Sun Kim performing in American Sign Language at the Super Bowl in Miami in February.Credit…A J Mast for The New York TimesArtChristine Sun KimIn February, just minutes ahead of the Super Bowl in Miami, the artist Christine Sun Kim stood at the 40-yard line performing in American Sign Language as Yolanda Adams sang “America the Beautiful” and Demi Lovato sang the national anthem.“As a child of immigrants, a grandchild of refugees, a Deaf woman of color, an artist and a mother, I was proud to perform,” she wrote in an Op-Ed for The Times afterward. But because only a fraction of her performance was aired, she called the experience “a huge disappointment — a missed opportunity in the struggle for media inclusiveness on a large scale.”“Being deaf in America has always been political,” she wrote.Kim, 40, who was born in California and is now based in Berlin, has spent years channeling this perspective into her art. At the Whitney Biennial in New York last year, she exhibited hand-drawn charcoal drawings from her “Degrees of Deaf Rage in the Art World,” and in 2013, the Museum of Modern Art selected her for its exhibition “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” dedicated to sound art.“I want people to start thinking about what deafness means,” she told Vogue this year, “and maybe that will reduce the stigma and society will be more inclusive of people with disabilities.”MusicVerzuzYou could call it a battle, a face-off, a showdown. But Verzuz is also something else entirely: a pandemic pivot, cutting right to the very core of quarantine entertainment by combining livestreaming and nostalgia while filling a hole left by canceled live shows and shuttered clubs.Since April, Verzuz, the creation of Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, has streamed over 20 battles. Each one has brought together two hip-hop or R&B heavyweights: Gladys Knight vs. Patti LaBelle, Erykah Badu vs. Jill Scott, Gucci Mane vs. Jeezy, Babyface vs. Teddy Riley, Snoop Dogg vs. DMX, Ludacris vs. Nelly, to name a few. Millions of people have tuned in.Initially, Verzuz was streamed on Instagram Live. In July, Verzuz and Apple Music announced they’d struck a partnership which allowed the videos to be viewed live and on-demand on that platform, too.Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The Times, called the events staples of this era and “less battles in the conventional sense than choreographed chest-puffing combined with bows of respect.” To that point, there is no winner winner. As Swizz Beatz told ABC News: “The people won, the culture won, the music won.”The artist Salman Toor has his first solo museum show, “How Will I Know,” up at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Credit…Peter Fisher for The New York TimesArtSalman ToorThe painter Salman Toor was about to have his first solo museum show, “How Will I Know,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art early this year when the shutdown thwarted the whole thing. He took it pretty well. “My first reaction was, thank God,” he told The Times in June. “I’m not a social animal.” But disappointment inevitably crept in as he realized the exhibition might never happen.Thankfully for him and fans of figurative and queer art, the show eventually did go up at the Whitney, where it will appear through April. And that’s only the start for Toor. Over the summer, he joined the gallery Luhring Augustine, which will open an exhibition of his work in the next few years.Toor, 37 — who was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, and moved to the United States in 2002 — primarily depicts gay men of South Asian descent. In The Times, the writer Ted Loos described Toor’s contemporary settings: “iPhones appear here and there, the glow emanating from them emphasized with bright lines.” Toor said that he aspired to represent “what this new free space is like,” referring to living an openly queer life. In Pakistan, gay sex is illegal. “People are curious to know what it means to have the freedom of so much choice, and what is the nature of that freedom and what is the cost of that.”TheaterElizabeth StanleyUp against Adrienne Warren for that Tony is Elizabeth Stanley, who was nominated for her gutting performance as Mary Jane — “a brittle tiger mom suppressing secret trauma,” as Jesse Green, a theater critic for The Times, put it — in “Jagged Little Pill,” based on Alanis Morissette’s smash album from 1995. When Broadway shut down, Stanley, 42, did not take too long before shifting her energy toward digital performances.In April, she told Deadline that she’d already been wondering about what else she could do during the pandemic: “How can I twist to this and find something new and exciting out of this time?”What came of that question epitomized what much of theater looked like in 2020: creating new digital spaces for live performance.In April, she delivered a jaw-dropping rendition of “The Miller’s Son” from “A Little Night Music,” for the acclaimed event “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration.” In June, she sang her wrenching rendition of “You Learn,” from “Jagged Little Pill,” for an Opening Night Times event on the future of Broadway. On Dec. 13, Stanley and her “Jagged Little Pill” co-stars reunited for “Jagged Live In NYC: A Broadway Reunion Concert.”Kali Uchis performing in Atlanta in 2018. She recently released the album “Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios).”Credit…Paul R. Giunta/Invision, via Associated PressMusicKali UchisIn 2018, Kali Uchis released a debut album titled “Isolation.” Clearly she was ahead of her time. In November, the Colombian-American artist — with a moody, seductive, dance-inducing style — dropped her second studio album, this time predominantly in Spanish, “Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios).” (Its lead single, “Aquí Yo Mando,” features the up-and-coming rapper Rico Nasty.) The album “goes genre-hopping and era-hopping, from romantically retro orchestral bolero to brittle reggaeton,” Jon Pareles, the chief pop music critic of The Times, wrote this month.Having grown up between Colombia and the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, Uchis, 26, had many inspirations and influences, she told Interview magazine. “The last thing I ever want to do is be a predictable artist. I love that my fans never know what to expect when I drop a song.”DanceThe Year of the SoloIt wasn’t just that the coronavirus put an end to live performance in March. The need for social isolation uprooted every part of what gets a dance onto a stage: Suddenly, there were no more classes, no more rehearsals. How to fill that void? The solo.This solitary form has provided an outlet for frustration, for sadness and even for euphoria as dance artists continue to find meaning through movement. It’s true that some attempts have been sentimental and aimless, but much good has emerged from it, too. Instagram, from the start, illuminated these explorations in a steady stream of posts; choreographers worked with dancers remotely to create films in which the body could be fearless and free. “State of Darkness,” Molissa Fenley’s 1988 solo revived for seven dancers, was a glittering, harrowing reminder of the achievement that comes from strength, both internal and external.One of its interpreters, the dancer Sara Mearns, said that she saw herself as “someone that has gone through really, really hard times, but then in the end has come out stronger and on top.” Yes, dance and dancers are suffering right now. But the solo has given it — and them — a powerful voice. — Gia Kourlas, dance critic for The New York TimesAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Chad Stuart, of the Hit British Duo Chad & Jeremy, Dies at 79

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyChad Stuart, of the Hit British Duo Chad & Jeremy, Dies at 79Mr. Stuart’s wistful tunes of summer romance brought him and Jeremy Clyde an intense but brief burst of stardom during the British Invasion of the 1960s.Chad Stuart in 1965. He and Jeremy Clyde had seven Top 40 singles from 1964 to 1966.Credit…Sony MusicDec. 22, 2020Updated 6:52 p.m. ETChad Stuart, who found stardom as the chief musical force of the duo Chad & Jeremy during the British Invasion in the mid-1960s, died on Sunday at his home in Hailey, Idaho. He was 79.The cause was pneumonia, his daughter, Beth Stuart, said.Singing in lock-step harmony, Mr. Stuart and Jeremy Clyde wrung all they could from the theme of a fondly recalled summer romance. “I loved you all the summer through,” “lovely summer dream,” “sweet soft summer nights,” “soft kisses on a summer’s day” — these phrases come from four different Top 40 Chad & Jeremy hits. They had seven of them in total, all love songs, between 1964 and 1966.Their gentle voices and acoustic guitars conveyed intimacy, but tracks like “A Summer Song” and “Yesterday’s Gone” took on a grander scale from the sweeping strings, plaintive horns and booming drums of Mr. Stuart’s arrangements. The orchestration had neither the spare authenticity of purist folk nor the electric attitude of rock. Mr. Stuart’s pop tunes made wistfulness upbeat; they were less invasion than invitation.Nevertheless, Chad & Jeremy capitalized on the British Invasion phenomenon. As their fame took off, close on the heels of Beatlemania, alongside other British bands like Herman’s Hermits and a fellow duo, Peter and Gordon, Mr. Stuart and Mr. Clyde found themselves serving as archetypal mop-top crooners on “Batman” and other TV series.Mr. Stuart and Mr. Clyde in 1966. Becoming rock stars in America, Mr. Clyde said, “was a young man’s dream come true.”Credit…Sony MusicOn “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” for instance, Mr. Stuart and Mr. Clyde played the Redcoats, a heartthrob British rock duo in skinny black ties and bowl cuts with “every teenager in America looking for them.” After some teenage girls learn that the handsome young Brits had stayed in the suburban home of Mr. Van Dyke’s character, they emit a collective shriek and begin looting his living room, every object in it suddenly a sacred memento.That hysteria was not far from Mr. Stuart and Mr. Clyde’s actual experience of the mid-’60s.Mr. Clyde, in a phone interview, recalled a trip to Los Angeles in 1964 when throngs of screaming girls greeted him and Mr. Stuart at the airport. On their way to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, they found themselves tailed by the girls, who reached out and tried to touch their limousine. Mr. Stuart and Mr. Clyde were pursued into the hotel. One girl jumped out of a laundry basket.Mr. Clyde said the sound of girls’ screams remained among his most palpable memories from the era.“A wall of sound, a blast, like a jet engine — screeching like a jet engine,” he said. “Never letting up. No pause for breath. It keeps on going.”He and Mr. Stuart, he added, found this moment enthralling.“It was a young man’s dream come true,” Mr. Clyde said. “You’re a star, and America’s at your feet.”Mr. Stuart on an episode of “Batman” in 1966, one of a number of television appearances Chad & Jeremy made in their heyday.Credit…ABC TV/Time WarnerChad Stuart was born David Stuart Chadwick on Dec. 10, 1941, in Windermere, England. (He was called Chad as a teenager and changed his name legally in 1964.) His father, Frank Chadwick, worked as a foreman in the lumber industry, and his mother, Frieda (Bedford) Chadwick, was a nurse.His family moved to the town of West Hartlepool, but Chad grew up largely at the Durham Cathedral Chorister School, a boarding school for choirboys that gave him a scholarship. He would later use his musical training to construct the hooks of Chad & Jeremy’s catchy tunes.“They hit them until they learned music theory,” Mr. Clyde said. “He could harmonize anything. For years and years, I’d just say, ‘What’s my part?’ and he’d tell me, and I’d sing it.”Mr. Stuart and Mr. Clyde met as undergraduates at the Central School of Speech and Drama (now the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) in London. Mr. Clyde, an aspiring actor, also played rudimentary folk guitar. A rumor went around that a guitar-playing new boy had mastered “Apache,” an instrumental by the beloved British rock group the Shadows. Mr. Clyde introduced himself, and he and Mr. Stuart became instant friends.Mr. Stuart in 1959 as a student at the Durham Cathedral Chorister School, a boarding school for choirboys, where, Mr. Clyde said, “They hit them until they learned music theory.”Credit…via Stuart familyMr. Stuart “came from a grimy little town in Northern England,” he told the blog Music Web Express 3000. Mr. Clyde, conversely, was the grandson of the Duke of Wellington.“It was kind of a mutual fascination society,” Mr. Stuart said. “It was a good trade-off, really.” Mr. Stuart taught Mr. Clyde about music, and Mr. Clyde introduced Mr. Stuart to a new social world. Thanks to Mr. Clyde’s family connections, the two young men stayed at Dean Martin’s house in Los Angeles and hung out with Frank Sinatra.Their fame had the brevity of a firework. Mr. Clyde wanted to be an actor, and by 1965 he had already returned to London to appear in a play, leaving Mr. Stuart to perform with a cardboard cutout of Mr. Clyde under his arm. They kept putting out records until “The Ark,” a 1968 album for which Mr. Clyde wrote most of the songs, but lagging commercial interest and Mr. Clyde’s other career ambitions broke up the band.“It always amazed me that after being so prolific in the ‘Ark’ period, he just walked away,” Mr. Stuart told Music Web Express 3000.Mr. Stuart continued to perform, but with a greatly reduced pop-cultural stature. At one point he opened for the hard-rock band Mountain in a bowling alley in Hartford, Conn. He made a living producing radio jingles and, toward the end of his life, giving private music lessons. Mr. Clyde had a successful career as an actor onstage and on television in Britain.Mr. Stuart’s two previous marriages, to Jill Gibson and Valerie Romero, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, from his second marriage, he is survived by his wife, Judy Shelly; two children from his first marriage, Andrew and Patrick Stuart; another child from his second marriage, Beau, and two stepchildren from that marriage, Hallie Kelly and Devin Kelly; two stepchildren from his current marriage, Cassi Shelly and Owen Shelly; five grandchildren; and a sister, Jen Histon.Mr. Stuart and Mr. Clyde in 2014. They toured annually from 2004 to 2016 and were surprised by how much they enjoyed the experience.Credit…Alma PitchfordMr. Stuart and Mr. Clyde did several reunion tours in the 1980s and annually from 2004 to 2016, surprising themselves by how much they enjoyed the experience. Fans asked them to sign photographs they had taken with the duo decades ago, and to take new photographs together.“We want to keep going until we drop,” Mr. Stuart said in an interview with the blog ClassicBands.com. “This is the best fun either one of us has had in decades.”Mr. Stuart “jumped right in” to “hugging the audience,” Mr. Clyde said. “He loved being loved.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Saturday Night Live’ Finds a New Joe Biden After Jim Carrey Exits

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Saturday Night Live’ Finds a New Joe Biden After Jim Carrey ExitsAlex Moffat became the latest “S.N.L.” cast member to portray Biden, following Carrey’s announcement that he was stepping down from the role.The role of Joe Biden was taken over on “S.N.L.” this week by Alex Moffat, left, pictured with Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris and Beck Bennett as Mike Pence.Credit…NBC Universal, via YouTubePublished More

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      Zosia Mamet’s Week: Log Cabin Living

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRecently ViewedZosia Mamet’s Week: Log Cabin LivingThe former “Girls” star, who played a mordantly comic lawyer in “The Flight Attendant,” spends her days at the barn and her nights with David Sedaris and Meryl Streep.Zosia Mamet, who stars in “The Flight Attendant,” with her horse, Ten: “She’s the love of my life (don’t tell my husband) so just being with her makes me happy.”Credit…Heather Sten for The New York TimesDec. 22, 2020, 10:40 a.m. ETWhen Zosia Mamet auditioned for “The Flight Attendant,” Kaley Cuoco unexpectedly booped her on the nose. Mamet reacted by swatting her hand away, and a relationship was born.“We had this immediate chemistry,” said Mamet, who is best known as the “Girls” naïf, Shoshanna Shapiro, “and the scene, just like lava, flowed out of us.”In “The Flight Attendant,” the zingy thriller on HBO Max that just finished its first season, Cuoco plays the booze-swilling Cassie Bowden, who picks up a passenger on a flight then wakes up in Bangkok with his dead body in bed beside her — and no memory of the night before. Mamet is her best friend, Annie Mouradian, a stony-faced lawyer who keeps the F.B.I. at bay using skills she cultivated while representing mob wives.At the moment, Mamet is nesting in New York’s Hudson Valley, with her husband, the actor Evan Jonigkeit, and their dog, Moose. But she more or less lives at the horse stables down the road, doling out snuggles and peppermints to her thoroughbred, Ten. In a Zoom interview from her 1920s Sears catalog cabin, with a log wall behind her, Mamet talked about life in and out of the riding ring, and her seasonal affliction. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Thursday MorningWoke up at 8. I’m a big-time sleeper. My husband says I could sleep through anything. But I wanted to get up early to give Moose a good long walk. First things, first: coffee, made in a French press with a big chunk of oat milk. I used to be quite picky about the brand of coffee, and I’m not anymore. I know this is a controversial point for snobby coffee drinkers, but we love a flavored coffee in our house, like a hazelnut or a vanilla.Mamet is nesting with her husband, the actor Evan Jonigkeit, in the Hudson Valley. Credit…Heather Sten for The New York TimesThursday AfternoonThe barn is about a 25-minute drive from our house so I normally either do NPR, Howard Stern, music or a podcast. I love a good podcast. Today was the new Whitney Cummings with Alison Brie. I didn’t get past the opening but that alone was killing me. They were talking about the frustration with stores putting stickers on things that you can’t get off, and it leaves this horrible residue. The struggle is real.My horse, Ten, sadly has a boo-boo in her front right foot, so she’s currently on what’s called stall rest, which is basically the equivalent of bed rest for a human. I’ve been gone for almost a month, and she’s developed this very sweet silly habit of trying to nibble on every part of me. Yesterday it was my beanie. Today it was the arms of my jacket. But she’s the love of my life (don’t tell my husband) so just being with her makes me happy.Evan is still in Pittsburgh shooting a new Netflix show called “Archive 81,” so we chatted on my drive home. We like to stay as much a unit as possible. I went out there for three weeks, and then I came home a little bit earlier than him because I wanted to be with Ten. The minute I found out she got hurt, he was like, “If you need to go home, I’ll understand.”Thursday EveningMy best friend, Emma, claims that I was an elf in a previous life. I do all the Christmas shopping for both of our families and all of our friends, so I’m currently set up in our living room surrounded by presents, my Christmas 2020 Excel spreadsheet, wrapping paper, scissors, ribbon, tape. All the essentials. I listened to Alabama Shakes. Evan proposed to “I Found You,” and sometimes when I miss him, I put them on.I’m in bed with a hot water bottle because I’m 90 and watching “The Queen’s Gambit.” I’m trying to savor it because I just think it’s so good. No, I have not learned chess. A card game like rummy, that’s my jam. Chess is too much for my brain to handle.I have a book problem, and there is a stack on my bedside probably 10 books high. I’m currently halfway deep into the latest David Sedaris, “The Best of Me,” and loving every second. I adore him. I’ve read almost all of his books and also listened to a lot of them on tape. His writing is so wonderful to begin with, but then when you hear him reading his writing, it just elevates it to the next level.Friday MorningEvan is the one that got me into the routine of putting music on first thing in the morning. It sets the tone for the day. Whitney Cummings mentioned the Lone Bellow the other day on her podcast, and I hadn’t listened to them in forever, so that’s what was on this morning.Spotify very kindly made me a 2020 playlist of the things I’d listened to most, so I put that on my drive to the barn. It was cold but sunny, so it was more of a sing-at-the-top-of-your-lungs-with-the-window-slightly-down than listen-to-a-podcast kind of day. A few faves on the playlist: Red Hearse, Lucy Dacus, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, Phoebe Bridgers. Portugal. The Man is also on there; Nathaniel Rateliff, who came out with a solo album this year that’s super beautiful and lovely. Oh, there’s this great album that I love called “Trio.” It’s Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Sometimes when I’m cleaning the house, I’ll listen to it on repeat because their harmonies sound like angels.“My husband is like, ‘How do you spend six hours at the barn?’”Credit…Heather Sten for The New York TimesFriday AfternoonI got to the barn and first had to say hi to Tenny because she’s my princess unicorn, so she needs treats and kisses. Then I got to ride a Polly Pocket-size pony named Snickers. I had my lesson with my amazing trainer Vanessa. I got to ride one of our barn’s trusty steeds named Junior, who gave me a run for my money.My husband is like, “How do you spend six hours at the barn?” Well, we have to untack the horse. When we jump them, we wash their legs and spray them with liniment that keeps their legs healthy. Then we clean all of our tack. It’s part of the process that I love just as much as the riding — the care of the horse, the care of my tack.I stopped at Michaels because I needed a wreath hanger for our door. In middle and high school, there are horseback riding teams called [Interscholastic Equestrian Association], and there’s a whole show circuit. Our barn has one, and each year they take old horse shoes and paint them red, blue, green, silver or gold, and they make wreaths and sell them to raise money for the I.E.A. team. So I got one.Friday EveningI spent a little time decorating. I love Christmas more than anything. My maternal grandmother had this way of making Christmas exceptionally magical. There were all of these traditions, and the house was full of smells and sounds and lights. We always decorated the tree together. I’ve been enamored with magic since I was little, and what is more magical than Christmas? I’m the person who will sit on the stairs with all the other lights off at night and just watch the tree.I finally realized I was starving so I went with tacos. I listened to Phoebe Bridgers’s new holiday album, which is heartbreaking and gorgeous and sadly only four songs, so I had it on repeat for a bit. Then I put on “The Prom,” which was delightful, while wrapping presents. Elf duties.Saturday AfternoonI love Marc Maron’s podcast, and a friend recommended his episode with Glenn Close, so I finished that up on the way to the barn. What an epic human. What a crazy life. I had no idea she was in a cult!There are a few podcasts I’m obsessed with. I love “You Must Remember This,” which is all about old Hollywood. On the drive to Pittsburgh, I listened to “Dr. Death.” Oh my God, it’s crazy and fascinating. It’s about this surgeon who keeps botching all of these spine surgeries, but everyone’s too afraid to report him to the medical board. So he just keeps moving from hospital to hospital and paralyzing people. It’s very dark, but it was a six-hour drive, so it kept me entertained.Saturday EveningI’m about to start wrapping more presents while watching “Let Them All Talk.” Then it’s a pit stop for some of my banana bread that is my favorite thing ever. It’s gluten- and dairy-free with like five ingredients and yes, I know — Covid/lockdown/banana bread — but I’ve been making this literally for years. So please, no judgment.Sunday MorningWe were having a barn-decorating contest at the farm today so I decorated Ten’s stall with a unicorn theme. I didn’t win, but it’s just an honor to be nominated or whatever.Sunday AfternoonAfter the judging for the stall-decorating contest, we all gave our secret Santa gifts. Then I took down Ten’s decorations because she almost ingested a 10-foot-long piece of tinsel.Sunday EveningI headed home to wrap more gifts and hang with Moose. I really want to watch “PEN15,” but Evan and I watch that together so I can’t. So perhaps an old movie, possibly “Death Becomes Her.” I just realized that there seems to be a Meryl Streep theme going on here. Listen, I love me some Meryl — I mean, who doesn’t — but I definitely didn’t do that on purpose. Although what says, “It’s the holidays!” more than Meryl Streep? So I guess that’s it: I’m just in a very Meryl Christmas mood.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘City Hall’ and ‘The Masked Dancer’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat’s on TV This Week: ‘City Hall’ and ‘The Masked Dancer’Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary airs on PBS. And “The Masked Dancer” debuts on Fox.Mayor Martin J. Walsh of Boston, as seen in Frederick Wiseman’s “City Hall.”Credit…Film ForumDec. 21, 2020, 1:00 a.m. ETBetween network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 21-27. Details and times are subject to change.MondayWONDER WOMAN (2017) 6 p.m. on Cartoon Network. Superpowered sword and shield meet World War I weaponry in this DC Comics blowout, the first stand-alone “Wonder Woman” movie with Gal Gadot. (The second, “Wonder Woman 1984,” comes out this weekend.) Directed by Patty Jenkins, this take on the superhero’s origin story takes place primarily in the early 20th century, introducing Gadot’s character as a mythical Amazon warrior who lives with other Amazons on a Mediterranean island. That island is magically insulated from the rest of the world — until an American fighter pilot (Chris Pine) crash-lands there, tailed by German soldiers. The hodgepodge of mythology (of both the Greek and the comic-book varieties) and history that follows makes for a movie that “cleverly combines genre elements into something reasonably fresh, touching and fun,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. The film’s “earnest insouciance recalls the ‘Superman’ movies of the ’70s and ’80s more than the mock-Wagnerian spectacles of our own day,” Scott added, “and like those predigital Man of Steel adventures, it gestures knowingly but reverently back to the jaunty, truth-and-justice spirit of an even older Hollywood tradition.”TuesdayCITY HALL (2020) 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The documentarian Frederick Wiseman (“Titicut Follies,” “Ex Libris”) trains his patient, piercing lens on the Boston City government in this, his most recent documentary. Shot around Boston’s administration building and in other areas of the city (including, during one extended sequence, Faneuil Hall), the film follows Boston’s mayor, Martin J. Walsh, and other city employees during moments both mundane (streams of people arriving at City Hall, workers answering calls at a 311 center) and extraordinary (a town-hall meeting about a proposed cannabis dispensary that turns into an impassioned debate). In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film is both “an exploration of civil society and the common good” and “fundamentally a portrait of a people.” Dargis and Scott each included the film on their lists of the top 10 movies of 2020.WednesdayChris Rock, left, and Bernie Mac in “Head of State.”Credit…Phillip V. Caruso/DreamWorks PicturesHEAD OF STATE (2003) 10 p.m. on Showtime 2. A black-tie donor event derailed by Nelly’s “Hot In Herre.” A presidential debate where candidates quarrel over whether a debate is the same thing as an argument. These are a couple memorable moments from “Head of State,” Chris Rock’s directorial debut and a very early-2000s satire of American electoral politics. Rock stars as Mays Gilliam, an alderman who’s unexpectedly chosen to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. (He eventually enlists his older brother, played by Bernie Mac, to be his running mate.) The tone is set in the very first sequence, when a staid shot of Mount Rushmore tilts down to reveal the singer Nate Dogg performing at the monument’s base.MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944) 8 p.m. on TCM. Hear Judy Garland sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — and other songs that became standards — in this technicolor musical. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, the film follows four sisters coming-of-age over the four seasons leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The story it tells through sound and color, Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1944 review for The Times, is “warm and beguiling.”ThursdayA CHRISTMAS CAROL (1951) 7:50 p.m. on FXM. When this British adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” debuted in 1951, it stood in stark contrast to some of the more upbeat versions that had come before. “Where the last ‘Carol,’ produced by Metro, was a ruddy and generally cheerful affair, this one is spooky and somber, for the most part, except toward the end,” Crowther wrote in a review for The Times. It’s fitting, then, that FXM is airing the 1951 version, with the Scottish actor Alastair Sim, alongside a rebroadcast of last year’s FX’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL, another gritty take on the tale. That newer version, with Guy Pearce as Scrooge and Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past, airs at 9:40 p.m.FridayFrom left, Cliff Parisi, Daniel Laurie and Annabelle Apsion in “Call the Midwife Holiday Special.”Credit…BBC Worldwide LimitedCALL THE MIDWIFE HOLIDAY SPECIAL 9 p.m. on PBS. This British series based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, an English nurse, has developed a fan base by offering a compassionate look at life — and a group of nuns at work — in a poor area of London in the late 1950s and ’60s. In a review for The Times, Jeannette Catsoulis called the show “unfailingly humane.” Those running low on holiday cheer may want to give this special episode a look.Saturday1917 (2019) 8 p.m. on Showtime. This time last year, the director Sam Mendes exploded into the award-season race at the last minute with this meticulous World War I movie. (It ended up winning several Oscars, including one for Roger Deakins’s cinematography, though it fell short of winning best director or best picture honors.) Made to look as though it were shot in a single take, the film follows a pair of British soldiers (played George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) who are sent on a dangerous mission to deliver a message to a battalion on the front lines. It’s the kind of movie most would doubtlessly prefer to watch in a movie theater, as many audiences did last holiday season; the contrast between December 2019 and December 2020 is pretty well encapsulated by the idea of watching “1917” on a small screen, stuck at home.SundayA scene from “The Masked Dancer.”Credit…Michael Becker/FOXTHE MASKED DANCER 8 p.m. on Fox. Fox had a hit with “The Masked Singer,” a bizarre competition show in which celebrities compete in singing contests while their identities are hidden by elaborate costumes. The series, which was itself adapted from a South Korean program, gets a spinoff with “The Masked Dancer.” The new show’s participants will presumably be up against both their fellow contestants and the elasticity of their costumes.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Sesame Street Creates New Muppets for Rohingya Refugees

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘R’ is for Rohingya: Sesame Street Creates New Muppets for RefugeesNoor and Aziz are Rohingya Muppets who will feature in educational programming that will be shown in refugee camps.A child in a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Grover the Muppet in 2018.Credit…Ryan Donnell/Sesame WorkshopDec. 19, 2020, 2:03 a.m. ETBANGKOK — Six-year-old twins Noor and Aziz live in the largest refugee camp in the world. They are Rohingya Muslims who escaped ethnic cleansing in their native Myanmar for refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. They are also Muppets.On Thursday, the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that runs the early education TV show “Sesame Street” and operates in more than 150 countries, unveiled Aziz and Noor as the latest Muppets in their cast of characters.The twins will appear with Elmo and other famous Muppets in educational programming about math, science, health and other topics that will be shown in the camps.They will speak Rohingya, the language of a group of people that the Myanmar authorities have refused to recognize as a legitimate ethnicity. Elements of Sesame Workshop’s curriculum will be dubbed into Rohingya.“They are among the most marginalized children on earth,” said Sherrie Weston, the president of social impact for the Sesame Workshop, who traveled to the Rohingya refugee camps several times to help formulate the Muppet twins’ characters and story lines. “For most Rohingya children, this will be the very first time that characters in media have looked like them, have sounded like them, and really reflect their rich culture.”More than half the residents of the Rohingya refugee settlements in Bangladesh are children. Many suffered trauma after security forces in Myanmar forced them out of their villages, murdering some of their fathers and raping their mothers.A survey by Doctors Without Borders, released in the wake of a brutal campaign in 2017 that compelled more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee the country in the span of a few months, found that at least 730 children below the age of five were killed from late August to late September of that year.The legacy of violence lingers in Bangladesh and has been incorporated into the Muppets’ histories. Noor, one of the Muppet twins, is scared of loud noises, just as many Rohingya children are today, as gunfire resounds in their memories.The Sesame Workshop has long sought to champion diversity and social justice. Muppets and their young playmates on Sesame Street have had autism, H.I.V. and Down syndrome. They have been homeless and struggled with the stigma of having an incarcerated parent. An Afghan Muppet exemplified the importance of educating girls.The muppets Noor and Aziz are Rohingya Muslim and new characters in the Sesame Street cast. Credit…Sesame WorkshopNoor and Aziz, as conceptualized by Sesame Workshop, are playful and get along well. Aziz, a boy, helps the family with household chores and is steeped in the Rohingya tradition of storytelling. Noor, a girl, is confident and loves learning. The programming chose to depict them specifically as twins so that they would able to play together as a girl and a boy in a way other siblings in this traditional Muslim community might not be able to as easily.“By modeling girls and boys being equal, by having characters that love to learn, it is important that we’re not only inspiring young girls, giving them a sense of possibility that they may not have had, but that we’re showing little boys that girls can have equal roles and responsibilities,” Ms. Weston said.The programming depicts the Rohingya Muppets as living in a vast warren of tent shelters where more than a million mostly stateless people have been crammed with little hope of returning to Myanmar. United Nations officials have suggested that their exodus bears the hallmarks of genocide.Life in the Rohingya refugee camps can be far harsher than what Noor and Aziz’s back stories suggest. Girls, who are often kept from school, tend to get married before they reach adulthood to ease the financial burden on their families. This year, hundreds of Rohingya girls spent months at sea in overloaded fishing vessels trying to get to Malaysia, where they had been promised as child brides to Rohingya men laboring as undocumented workers. Dozens died during the journey.On Friday, in Kutupalong, the biggest of the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, Ajmat Ara, 8, shook her head when asked whether she knew of a furry collection of characters called the Muppets. Unlike many girls, she is lucky and goes to a school run by an educational charity.“We’re learning English and Burmese in school,” she said, before running off to play.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Comfort Viewing: 3 Reasons I Love ‘Dallas’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyComfort Viewing: 3 Reasons I Love ‘Dallas’Before prestige cable series ruled television, a wily Texas oil baron kicked up drama on network TV with classic cliffhangers and family feuds.The Ewing clan spent 14 seasons clashing over love, money and oil. Clockwise from top left: Patrick Duffy, Victoria Principal, Barbara Bel Geddes, Larry Hagman, Linda Gray, Jim Davis and Charlene Tilton.Credit…CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesDec. 18, 2020When April rolled around and the reality of many, many more weeks of quarantine set in, I started looking for anything other than reality on television.Usually a marathon of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” “Vanderpump Rules” or “Teen Mom” is a digital cure for whatever ails me, but this weird and intense year posed a challenge to even the most reliable go-to stress salves.The search was on for something I could lose myself in, and I found the answer on the free streaming service IMDB TV: “Dallas,” the seminal prime-time soap opera that aired on CBS from 1978 to 1991.I started with a rewatch of the Season 3 finale, “A House Divided,” which made “Who shot J.R.?” the signature obsession of the summer of 1980.Naturally I had to immediately watch Season 4’s “Who Done It?,” which drew 83.6 million viewers when it aired, the second-largest non-Super Bowl broadcast audience of all time. By the end of the week — OK, the end of the next day — I’d skipped around to more than a dozen episodes, and committed to a full-blown 14-season binge.The number of seasons doesn’t tell the full “Dallas” story. Even in a broadcast era when most series aired at least 22 episodes a season — compared to the 10 to 13 that is standard for modern cable and streaming shows — “Dallas” took the “everything is bigger in Texas” sentiment to heart. Several seasons included 30 episodes and Season 9 had 31, equal to half the entire run of “Breaking Bad.”Here are reasons this throwback held my attention throughout a 357-episode rewatch.J.R. EwingLarry Hagman became the defining “Dallas” star as the power-grabbing, blackmailing, philandering J.R., the eldest son of Jock (Jim Davis) and Ellie (Barbara Bel Geddes).It isn’t just that J.R. engages in those activities so relentlessly, but that he does so with unabashed glee that makes him so fun to watch. Every episode of “Dallas” ends with a trademark freeze frame, and many of those are close-ups of a grinning J.R., just after he’s double-crossed a business associate or driven his long-suffering alcoholic wife Sue Ellen (Linda Gray) to another sanitarium stay.J.R. does have some redeeming qualities. The charm Hagman wrings out of uttering one “Darlin’” is worth both of those Emmys he was nominated for. And he genuinely loves his daddy, his mama, his brother Bobby (Patrick Duffy) and his son John Ross (Omri Katz), even though they often take a back seat to his obsession with Ewing Oil. During my rewatch of the Bobby funeral episode, which ends with a freeze frame of a heartbroken J.R. looking up at the sky, I realized that the slick but soulful oilman was my gateway antihero. A New Jersey mobster, an Albuquerque meth kingpin and a couple of suburban Russian spies later won my heart on cable, but it all started with a Stetson-wearing conniver on CBS each Friday night.Duffy left “Dallas” but Hagman eventually convinced him to return, leading to the infamous “Dream Season.”Credit…CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesThe Cliffhangers“Who shot J.R.?” is TV’s most earth-shattering cliffhanger, one that had fans all around the world donning “Who shot J.R.?” T-shirts and buttons and drinking J.R. beer to commemorate the whodunit.But “Dallas” writers liked to leave viewers hanging at the end of every season, from the paternity of Sue Ellen’s baby (is J.R. or his enemy Cliff Barnes the father?) to the series finale, a two-part “It’s a Wonderful Life”-style examination of all J.R. has wrought that ends with a gunshot that leaves the audience wondering if the guilt-ridden oilman had killed himself. (The answer came in a later TV movie, “Dallas: J.R. Returns.”)And then there’s the Season 9 finale, when Pam Ewing (Victoria Principal) wakes up to a surprise: her dead ex-husband Bobby showering in her bathroom. Duffy had quit the show at the end of Season 8 but when ratings started to slip, Hagman asked his best friend to return. Duffy agreed, sparking “The Dream Season,” TV’s most famous do-over. Season 10 opens with confirmation that Bobby is alive and squeaky clean, and that everything that happened in Season 9 had all been Pam’s dream.Family AffairsWhen the Ewings aren’t fighting with each other for control of Ewing Oil, they’re loving and fighting, fighting and loving like it’s a sport. It’s no small feat to keep the middle of a 31-episode season moving, so sometimes those dizzyingly frequent Bobby-Pam and J.R.-Sue Ellen breakup-makeup cycles happen across just a few episodes.In one infamous instance, a family affair proves to be too literal. Jock and Ellie’s rebellious teen granddaughter Lucy (Charlene Tilton) has regular romps with a ranch hand, Ray (Steve Kanaly), during Season 1, only for Ray to later find out he’s Jock’s illegitimate son. Yep, Lucy is his biological niece. (Couldn’t we have gotten a do-over here?) From then on, Lucy and Ray’s early history is ignored and he becomes an avuncular presence in her life.A less disturbing soap opera plotline comes via the series-spanning Barnes-Ewing feud, introduced in the pilot when Bobby marries Pam, the daughter of Jock’s enemy, Digger Barnes. The next generation fuels the fight, with J.R. and Pam’s brother, Cliff (Ken Kercheval), swearing to destroy each other on a near-weekly basis.J.R. is far more successful on this front, of course, and Cliff’s haplessness provides regular moments of levity in the form of his unearned bravado and obsession with takeout Chinese food. This comic counterbalance to all those cliffhanging traumatic moments, all the lives brought to ruination by J.R.’s machinations, is part of an underlying cheekiness that runs throughout the series. Again: “Dallas” erased an entire season with one seven-second shower. But as we near the end of a challenging year full of almost as much drama, who doesn’t wish we all had the chance to call a mulligan on this season of our lives?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Barbara Windsor, Beloved British TV and Film Star, Dies at 83

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarbara Windsor, Beloved British TV and Film Star, Dies at 83She went from bubbly sex symbol in the “Carry On” films to working-class hero on “EastEnders.” Her private life was often as troubled as her “EastEnders” character’s.The actress Barbara Windsor at the British Academy Television Awards in London in 2009. She was a star of the series “EastEnders” on and off from 1994 to 2016.Credit…Luke Macgregor/ReutersDec. 18, 2020Updated 4:07 p.m. ETLONDON — Barbara Windsor, a star of the “Carry On” films and the long-running BBC soap opera “EastEnders,” whose dirty staccato laugh and ability to embody working-class life seared her into Britain’s collective memory, died on Dec. 10 at a care home here. She was 83.Her death was announced in a statement by Scott Mitchell, her husband and only immediate survivor, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Windsor with Prime Minister Boris Johnson last year in London. Mr. Johnson wrote on Twitter that Ms. Windsor had “cheered the world up with her own British brand of harmless sauciness and innocent scandal.”Credit…Pool photo by Simon DawsonIn a sign of the impact Ms. Windsor had on Britain’s cultural life over the last six decades, members of the royal family were among those who paid tribute on social media, as was Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who wrote on Twitter that Ms. Windsor “cheered the world up with her own British brand of harmless sauciness and innocent scandal.”Ms. Windsor also had an impact in the United States, albeit briefly, when she appeared on Broadway in 1964 in “Oh! What a Lovely War,” Joan Littlewood’s music-hall-style show that used irreverent songs from World War I to mock the absurdity of conflict.Some American theatergoers might have found Ms. Windsor’s cockney accent hard to understand — one of her first movies, “Sparrows Can’t Sing,” played with subtitles at some screenings in New York — but she was nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical.In 1970, she told a BBC interviewer that she really wanted to make a film in Hollywood, preferably a comedy with Jack Lemmon. “That’d be smashing, wouldn’t it?” she said. She didn’t achieve that particular ambition, but she was soon immortalized in British movie theaters thanks to her roles in the farcical, innuendo-laden — and hugely successful — “Carry On” movies.Later, she became even more well known for her role as the matriarchal pub landlady Peggy Mitchell on “EastEnders,” a character she portrayed on and off from 1994 to 2016. She stopped once her Alzheimer’s made it impossible to continue.Ms. Windsor with her “EastEnders” co-stars in 1999, during the filming of an episode that included the wedding of her character, Peggy Mitchell.Credit…John Stillwell/PA, via Associated PressMs. Windsor was born Barbara Ann Deeks on Aug. 6, 1937, in Shoreditch, then a working-class part of East London. Her father, John, a bus driver, and her mother, Rose, a dressmaker, had a tumultuous marriage, and at 15 Ms. Windsor was made to testify about their rows at a divorce hearing.As a child in World War II, she was evacuated to Blackpool, a seaside resort in northern England. There, she revealed in her 2001 autobiography, “All of Me: My Extraordinary Life,” she first stayed with a family that tried to abuse her sexually, before moving in with a friend whose mother sent them both to dance lessons. The mother was so impressed by her talent that she wrote a letter to Ms. Windsor’s parents begging them to let her take lessons in London. “She’s a proper show-off,” the letter said, Ms. Windsor recalled in the 1970 BBC interview.Back in London, Ms. Windsor was spotted by a talent agent who tried to cast her in a pantomime, the peculiarly British form of theater popular at Christmas, but her school refused to give her time off. She eventually left to go to acting school, where the teachers repeatedly tried — and failed — to get her to lose her accent.Ms. Windsor became celebrated for her bawdy roles in the “Carry On” comedy movies. She is seen here with Sid James, as King Henry VIII, in a scene from “Carry On Henry” (1971).Credit…Bob Dear/Associated PressFor all the promise Ms. Windsor showed, her break didn’t come until 1960, when she traveled to East London to audition for a role with Ms. Littlewood’s Theater Workshop, a company whose works often brought working-class life and humor onstage. The acclaim she got for her work there soon led to appearances on TV and then in film, where she became celebrated for her bawdy roles in the “Carry On” comedies.In those films, the camera often focused on the short (4-foot-11) but buxom Ms. Windsor’s figure. She is probably best remembered for a scene in “Carry On Camping” (1969) in which her bikini top flies off during an outdoor aerobics class (during filming an assistant pulled the top off using a fishing line). That clip has been shown numerous times on British television ever since.Ms. Windsor in 1980 with Ronnie Knight, her first husband, who had just been released on bail after more than two weeks in custody. He was accused (and later acquitted) of ordering a hit man to murder his brother’s killer.Credit…Associated PressAlthough Ms. Windsor found success onscreen, her private life was troubled. She had liaisons with a series of famous men, including the soccer player George Best and the East London gangsters Reggie and Charlie Kray. In 1964 she married Ronnie Knight, another gangster, who in 1980 was tried for ordering a hit man to murder his brother’s killer (he was acquitted), and in 1983 was involved in stealing six million pounds (more than 17 million pounds, or about $23 million, in today’s money) from a security depot and fled to Spain.Her relationship with Mr. Knight caused her to have a nervous breakdown, she told the BBC in the 1990 interview. That marriage and a subsequent one ended in divorce.Her life got back on track on the 1990s after she was cast as Peggy Mitchell on “EastEnders,” the wildly popular kitchen-sink soap opera whose story lines often reflected social issues.She quickly became one of the show’s stars, known for slapping her co-stars when the plot demanded a climatic moment and for story lines that could be far darker than anything one would find in a “Carry On” movie. (In 2010, one of her character’s sons burned down the pub in the middle of a crack cocaine binge.)In the 1990s, her character had breast cancer twice and underwent a mastectomy, a plot that led hundreds of viewers to write to the BBC to express gratitude for how sensitively she handled the subject. In 2016, in her final appearance on the show, her character killed herself because her cancer had returned.Whatever happened to Ms. Windsor, onscreen or off, she never lost the joy of performing.“I don’t think negatively,” she told the BBC in 1990 when asked how she would look back on her life. “I’ll pick out all those wonderful things that have happened, and how lucky that I got paid — paid! — for doing something that I absolutely adored.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More