GLORIA STUART, AN ACTRESS REDISCOVERED LATE
By ALJEAN HARMETZ and ROBERT BERKVIST
Published: September 27, 2010
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Chris Pizzello/Associated Press
Gloria Stuart at the Academy Awards in 1998. She was nominated for best supporting actress for “Titanic.”
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Paramount Pictures/20th Century Fox
Ms. Stewart in “Titanic” (1997).
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Roman Freulich/Universal Pictures, via Photofest
Ms. Stuart and Boris Karloff in “The Old Dark House” (1932).
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Warner Brothers Pictures
Ms. Stewart in “Gold Diggers of 1935” (1935).
Ms. Stuart had long since moved on from Hollywood when James Cameron, the director of “Titanic,” rediscovered her for the role of Rose Calvert, a 101-year-old survivor of the ship’s sinking. She was 86 at the time.
Her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actress. It was her only Oscar nomination, and she was the oldest person ever to receive one for acting. (She lost to Kim Basinger.)
Rose’s wistful recollections of a love affair aboard the ship as it headed for disaster on its maiden voyage form the frame of “Titanic.” Kate Winslet, who was nominated for best actress, played the character as a young, well-to-do, romantically restless passenger in first class who falls in love with a poor would-be artist in steerage, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie won 11 Oscars and was the top-grossing film of all time until it was overtaken in 2009 by “Avatar,” also directed by Mr. Cameron.
Audiences in 1997 had little if any memory of Ms. Stuart’s early screen career, but it had been substantial: a total of 46 films from 1932 to 1946. She abandoned movies, she said, after growing tired of being typecast as “girl reporter, girl detective, girl overboard.”
“So one day, I burned everything: my scripts, my stills, everything,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1997. “I made a wonderful fire in the incinerator, and it was very liberating.”
In the best of her early movies, Ms. Stuart, a petite and elegant presence, was forced to seek shelter with Boris Karloff in James Whale’s classic horror film “The Old Dark House” (1932) and was horrified when Claude Rains, her mad-scientist fiancé, tampered with nature in “The Invisible Man” (1933), also directed by Whale.
She was James Cagney’s girlfriend in “Here Comes the Navy” (1934), Warner Baxter’s faithful wife in John Ford’s “Prisoner of Shark Island” (1936), Shirley Temple’s cousin in “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (1938) and the spoiled rich girl who falls in love with penniless Dick Powell in “Gold Diggers of 1935.”
“Few actresses were so ornamental,” John Springer and Jack Hamilton wrote in “They Had Faces Then,” a book about the actresses of the 1930s. “But ‘undemanding’ is the word for most of the roles she played.”
After a small role in the limp 1946 comedy “She Wrote the Book,” Ms. Stuart had had enough and left the film world, not to be seen again until she appeared in a television movie almost 30 years later.
Although Screen Play magazine had called Ms. Stuart one of the 10 most beautiful women in Hollywood, she was more than a pretty face. She was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild and helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, an early antifascist organization.
After she left Hollywood, Ms. Stuart taught herself to paint. In 1961 she had her first one-woman show, at Hammer Galleries in New York.
In 1983 the master printer Ward Ritchie taught her to print, and she started a fresh career as a respected designer of hand-printed artists’ books and broadsides. She produced illustrated books and broadsides under her own imprint, Imprenta Glorias, including “Haiku,” “Beware the Ides of March” and “The Watts Towers.”
Ms. Stuart and Mr. Ritchie also began an autumn romance that lasted until Mr. Ritchie’s death in 1996 at the age of 91. Her print work is in the collections of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Gloria Frances Stewart was born in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 4, 1910, two years before the Titanic sank. When she started in movies, Ms. Stuart wrote in her autobiography, “I Just Kept Hoping” (Little Brown, 1999), a collaboration with her daughter, she shortened “Stewart” to “Stuart” “because I thought — and still do — its six letters balanced perfectly on a theater’s marquee with the six letters in ‘Gloria.’ ”
She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she met her first husband, the sculptor Gordon Newell. Settling in Carmel, Calif., in 1930, she and Mr. Newell joined a bohemian community that included the photographer Edward Weston and the journalist Lincoln Steffens. Ms. Stuart acted at the Golden Bough Theater and wrote for a weekly newspaper.
In 1932 Mr. Ritchie, who was Mr. Newell’s best friend, drove her to Pasadena, where she had been offered a role at the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse. “The morning after I opened in Chekhov’s ‘The Sea Gull,’ ” Ms. Stuart remembered, “I signed a seven-year contract with Universal.”
Soon came movies like “The Girl in 419” (1933), in which she played a mysterious woman who witnesses a murder. Her social circle included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and other New York intellectuals who had settled at the Garden of Allah hotel while writing and acting in movies. An excellent cook whose oxtail stew with dumplings was praised by M. F. K. Fisher in her book “The Gastronomical Me,” Ms. Stuart liked to cook Sunday dinners for them.
Ms. Stuart and Mr. Newell divorced in 1934; later that year she married Arthur Sheekman, a screenwriter who worked on Marx Brothers movies.
After Ms. Stuart gave up on Hollywood, the Sheekmans sailed around the world and settled in New York. She had a daughter with Mr. Sheekman and later moved to Italy with them and started to paint. Mr. Sheekman died in 1978.
Besides her daughter, Ms. Thompson, Ms. Stuart is survived by four grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
Ms. Stuart made brief returns to film and television acting in the 1970s and had a cameo role in the 1982 film “My Favorite Year,” in which she danced with Peter O’Toole, who starred as a worn-at-the-edges film idol.
But it was “Titanic,” 15 years later, that made Ms. Stuart a celebrity again. She was interviewed on television, invited to Russia for the opening of the movie there and chosen by People magazine as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world. Her newfound fame resulted in more film and television work into her 90s.
If she had been more famous as an actress, Ms. Stuart might never have won the role of Rose Calvert; Mr. Cameron wanted a lesser-known actress for the part, one who, as Ms. Stuart said in a 1997 interview, was “still viable, not alcoholic, rheumatic or falling down.”
Ms. Stuart was so viable that it took an hour and a half each day to transform her youthful 86-year-old features into the face of a 101-year-old woman.
When the script of “Titanic” was sent to her, Ms. Stuart told The Chicago Tribune, she thought, “If I had been given plum roles like this back in the old days, I would have stayed in Hollywood.”
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BUDDY COLLETTE, MUICIAN WHO PLAYED WITH JAZZ GREATS
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: September 29, 2010
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Alan Nahigian
Buddy Collette performing at Lincoln Center in 1997.
The cause was a respiratory ailment, his daughter Cheryl Collette-White said.
Unlike many jazz musicians who gravitate to New York to achieve visibility, Mr. Collette remained primarily a West Coast player, performing and recording with stars there and teaching music at several colleges and universities.
Over the years he played with performers like Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, Stan Kenton, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Nelson Riddle and Louie Bellson.
Mingus so admired Mr. Collette’s saxophone playing that he went so far “as to claim that his friend Buddy Collette could play as well as Bird,” a reference to Parker’s nickname, Ted Gioia wrote in his 1997 book “The History of Jazz.”
Mr. Collette came to national attention in 1955 as a flutist with the drummer Chico Hamilton’s quintet, playing alongside the guitarist Jim Hall and the cellist Fred Katz. He had already made his mark, moving from small jazz groups to big bands and from film studio work to television.
Among his recordings was “Live From the Nation’s Capital,” a Grammy Award nominee in 2001. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz said Mr. Collette brought a “virile approach” to the saxophone and an “improvisational, swinging and, in its own way, hot” sound to his flute-playing.
A stroke ended his playing career in 1998. He also taught music at several colleges and universities in California.
William Marcel Collette was born on Aug. 6, 1921, in the Watts district of Los Angeles. His father, Willie, was a pianist; his mother, Goldie Marie, was a singer. In addition to his daughter Cheryl, Mr. Collette is survived by two other daughters, Veda and Crystal; a son, Zan; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
As a child Mr. Collette went to a Louis Armstrong concert with his parents and soon turned from piano lessons to the saxophone — and jazz. When he was 12, he formed his first band. Among the youngsters in the group was Mr. Mingus, whom Buddy persuaded to switch from cello to bass.
After serving in the Navy in World War II, during which he led a dance band, Mr. Collette became a well-known name among the swing and bebop players in the night spots dotting Central Avenue in Los Angeles. In 1949, he broke a color barrier when he became the only African-American in the band for the Groucho Marx show “You Bet Your Life.”
Along with the alto saxophonist and composer Benny Carter, Mr. Collette became a leader in the struggle to eliminate segregation in the American Federation of Musicians. On April 1, 1953, the black and white locals of the union in Los Angeles merged.
“I knew that was something that had to be done,” Mr. Collette told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. “I had been in the service, where our band was integrated. My high school had been fully integrated. I really didn’t know anything about racism, but I knew it wasn’t right. Musicians should be judged on how they play, not the color of their skin.”
Correction: October 1, 2010
A picture with an obituary on Wednesday about the jazz musician and bandleader Buddy Collette carried an incorrect credit in some editions. The photograph of Mr. Collette performing at Lincoln Center in 1997 was taken by Alan Nahigian — not by Vince Bucci/Getty Images.
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TONY CURTIS, HOLLYWOOD LEADING MAN
By DAVE KEHR
Published: September 30, 2010
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Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Tony Curtis with his wife Janet Leigh in 1961. More Photos »
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Mr. Curtis, one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s golden age, became a respected dramatic actor, earning an Oscar nomination as an escaped convict in “The Defiant Ones,” a 1958 Stanley Kramer film. But he was equally adept in comedies; his public even seemed to prefer him in those roles, flocking to see him, for example, in the 1965 slapstick hit “The Great Race.”
As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley and his plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early ’50s.
A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot” (1959); a slave who attracts the interest of an aristocratic Roman general (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960); a man attracted to a mysterious blonde (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).
But behind the pretty-boy looks was a dramatically potent combination of naked ambition and deep vulnerability, both likely products of his Dickensian childhood in the Bronx. Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, to Helen and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Emanuel operated a tailor shop in a poor neighborhood, and the family occupied cramped quarters behind the store; the parents in one room and little Bernard sharing another with his two brothers, Julius and Robert. Helen Schwartz suffered from schizophrenia and frequently beat the three boys. (Robert was later found to have the same disease.)
In 1933, at the height of the Depression, his parents found they could not properly provide for their children, and Bernard and Julius were placed in a state institution. (Julius was hit by a truck and killed in 1938.) Returning to his old neighborhood, Bernard became caught up in gang warfare and the target of anti-Semitic hostility. As he recalled, he learned to dodge the stones and fists to protect his face, which he realized even then would be his ticket to greater things.
In search of stability, Bernard made his way to Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. During World War II he served in the Navy aboard the submarine tender U.S.S. Proteus. His ship was present in Tokyo Bay in 1945 for the formal surrender of Japan aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, which Signalman Schwartz watched through a pair of binoculars.
Back in New York, he enrolled in acting classes in the workshop headed by Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research, where one of his colleagues was another Seward alumnus, Walter Matthau. He began getting theater work in the Catskills and caught the eye of the casting agent Joyce Selznick, who helped him win a contract with Universal Pictures in 1948. After experimenting with James Curtis, he settled on Anthony Curtis as his stage name and began turning up in bit parts in films like Anthony Mann’s “Winchester ’73” alongside another Universal bit player, Rock Hudson.
Mr. Curtis’s career advanced rapidly at first. He was promoted to supporting player, billed as Tony Curtis for the first time, in the 1950 western “Kansas Raiders,” and became, he recalled, first prize in a Universal promotional contest, “Win a Weekend With Tony Curtis.”
He received top billing in 1951 in the Technicolor Arabian Nights adventure “The Prince Who Was a Thief.” His co-star was Piper Laurie, and they were paired in three subsequent films at Universal, including Douglas Sirk’s “No Room for the Groom,” a 1952 comedy that allowed Mr. Curtis to explore his comic gifts for the first time.
In 1951 Mr. Curtis married the ravishing MGM contract player Janet Leigh. Highly photogenic, the couple became a favorite of the fan magazines, and their first movie together, George Marshall’s “Houdini” (1953), was Mr. Curtis’s first substantial hit.
Perhaps the character of Houdini — like Mr. Curtis, a handsome young man of Hungarian Jewish ancestry who reinvented himself through show business — touched something in Mr. Curtis. In any case, it was in that film that his most consistent screen personality, the eager young outsider who draws on his charm and wiles to achieve success in the American mainstream, was born.
Mr. Curtis endured several more Universal costume pictures, including the infamous 1954 film “The Black Shield of Falworth,” in which he starred with Ms. Leigh but did not utter the line, “Yondah lies da castle of my foddah,” that legend has attributed to him. His career seemed stalled until Burt Lancaster, another actor who survived a difficult childhood in New York City, took him under his wing.
Lancaster cast Mr. Curtis as his protégé, a circus performer who becomes his romantic rival, in his company’s 1956 production “Trapeze.” But it was Mr. Curtis’s next appearance with Lancaster — as the hustling Broadway press agent Sidney Falco, desperately eager to ingratiate himself with Lancaster’s sadistic Broadway columnist J. J. Hunsecker in “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957) — that proved that Mr. Curtis could be an actor of genuine power and subtlety.
The late ’50s and early ’60s were Mr. Curtis’s heyday. Taking his career into his own hands, he formed a production company, Curtleigh Productions, and in partnership with Kirk Douglas assembled the 1958 independent feature “The Vikings,” a rousing adventure film directed by Richard Fleischer. Later that year the producer-director Stanley Kramer cast Mr. Curtis in “The Defiant Ones” as a prisoner who escapes from a Southern chain gang while chained to a fellow convict, who happens to be black (Sidney Poitier).
“The Defiant Ones” may seem schematic and simplistic today, but at the time it spoke with hope to a nation in the violent first stages of the civil rights movement and was rewarded with nine Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Curtis as best actor. It was the only acknowledgment he received from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in his career.
Mr. Curtis began a creatively rewarding relationship with the director Blake Edwards with a semi-autobiographical role as a hustler working a Wisconsin resort in “Mister Cory” (1957). That was followed by two hugely successful 1959 military comedies: “The Perfect Furlough” (with Ms. Leigh) and “Operation Petticoat,” in which he played a submarine officer serving under a captain played by Cary Grant.
Under Billy Wilder’s direction in “Some Like It Hot,” another 1959 release, Mr. Curtis employed a spot-on imitation of Grant’s mid-Atlantic accent when his character, posing as an oil heir, tries to seduce a voluptuous singer (Marilyn Monroe). His role in that film — as a Chicago musician who, with his best friend (Jack Lemmon), witnesses the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and flees to Florida in women’s clothing as a member of an all-girl dance band — remains Mr. Curtis’s best-known performance.
Success in comedy kindled Mr. Curtis’s ambitions as a dramatic actor. He appeared in Mr. Douglas’s epic production of “Spartacus,” directed by Stanley Kubrick, and reached unsuccessfully for another Oscar nomination in “The Outsider” (1961), directed by Delbert Mann, as Ira Hayes, a Native American who helped to raise the flag at Iwo Jima. In “The Great Impostor,” directed by Robert Mulligan, he played a role closer to his established screen personality: an ambitious young man from the wrong side of the tracks who fakes his way through a series of professions, including a monk, a prison warden and a surgeon.
Mr. Curtis’s popularity was damaged by his divorce from Ms. Leigh in 1962, following an affair with the 17-year-old German actress Christine Kaufmann, who was his co-star in the costume epic “Taras Bulba.” He retreated into comedies, playing out his long association with Universal in a series of undistinguished efforts including “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962), “Captain Newman, M.D.” (1963) and the disastrous “Wild and Wonderful” (1964), in which he starred with Ms. Kaufmann, whom he married in 1963.
In “The Great Race,” Blake Edwards’s celebration of slapstick comedy, Mr. Curtis parodied himself as an impossibly handsome daredevil named the Great Leslie, and in 1967 he reunited with Alexander Mackendrick, director of “Sweet Smell of Success,” for an enjoyable satire on California mores, “Don’t Make Waves.”
Mr. Curtis made one final, ambitious attempt to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor with “The Boston Strangler” in 1968, putting on weight to play the suspected serial killer Albert DeSalvo. Again under Richard Fleischer’s direction, he gave a rigorously deglamorized performance, but the film was dismissed as exploitative in many quarters and failed to reignite Mr. Curtis’s career. That year, he divorced Ms. Kaufmann and married a 23-year-old model, Leslie Allen.
After two unsuccessful efforts to establish himself in series television — “The Persuaders” (1971-72) and “McCoy” (1975-76) — Mr. Curtis fell into a seemingly endless series of guest appearances on television (he had a recurring role on “Vegas” from 1978 to 1981) and supporting roles in ever more unfortunate movies, including Mae West’s excruciating 1978 comeback attempt, “Sextette.”
A stay at the Betty Ford Center — he had struggled with drug and alcohol abuse — followed his 1982 divorce from Ms. Allen, but Mr. Curtis never lost his work ethic. He continued to appear in low-budget movies and occasionally in independent films of quality. He took up painting, selling his boldly signed, Matisse-influenced canvases through galleries and stores.
After divorcing Ms. Allen, Mr. Curtis was married to the actress Andrea Savio (1984-92) and, briefly, to the lawyer Lisa Deutsch (1993-94). He married his sixth wife, the horse trainer Jill VandenBerg, in 1998, and with her operated a nonprofit refuge for abused and neglected horses.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Curtis’s survivors include Kelly Lee Curtis and the actress Jamie Lee Curtis, his two daughters with Janet Leigh; Alexandra Curtis and Allegra Curtis, his two daughters with Christine Kaufmann; and a son, Benjamin, with Leslie Allen. A second son with Ms. Allen, Nicholas, died of a drug overdose in 1994.
He published “Tony Curtis: The Autobiography,” written with Barry Paris, in 1994 and a second autobiography, “American Prince: A Memoir,” written with Peter Golenbock, in 2008, and in it he described a romance with Marilyn Monroe in 1948, when both were young, relatively unknown performers who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The affair was only a memory when they worked together a decade later, both as major stars, in “Some Like It Hot.”
“Somehow working with her on ‘Some Like It Hot’ had brought a sense of completion to my feelings for her,” he wrote. “The more we talked, the more I realized that another love affair had bitten the dust.”
In 2002 he toured in a musical adaptation of “Some Like It Hot,” in which he played the role of the love-addled millionaire originated by Joe E. Brown in the film. This time, the curtain line was his: “Nobody’s perfect.”
His final screen appearance was in 2008, when he played a small role in “David & Fatima,” an independent budget film about a romance between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim. His character’s name was Mr. Schwartz.
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JOE MANTELL, PLAYED SIDEKICK IN ‘MARTY’
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: October 1, 2010
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United Artists, via Photofest
Ernest Borgnine, left, and Joe Mantell in the 1955 film “Marty.”
Mr. Mantell was a familiar figure on television beginning in the 1950s, appearing in guest roles on numerous series — dramas including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Defenders,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Lou Grant”; and situation comedies like “My Three Sons,” “Maude” and “Barney Miller.” In the early ’60s he had a regular role on the comedy “Pete and Gladys,” and in the late ’60s he had a recurring part on the detective drama “Mannix.”
In the movies he appeared in “Onionhead,” with Andy Griffith, and “The Sad Sack,” with Jerry Lewis. In “The Birds,” Hitchcock’s classic horror film about avian madness in a California town, he played a traveling salesman who advises, “Kill them all!”
But he was probably best known for playing a couple of sidekicks. In “Marty,” the Oscar-winning 1955 film adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from his own teleplay about a lonely Bronx butcher (Mr. Borgnine) and his search for love, Mr. Mantell played the title character’s best pal, Angie. Angie began almost every conversation with the same question — “What do you feel like doin’ tonight?” — and always got the same answer: “I don’t know, Ange. What do you feel like doin’?”
For Mr. Mantell, who was nominated for an Oscar himself for best supporting actor, it was actually a reprise; in the television play, broadcast live in 1953, he had played Angie opposite Rod Steiger.
In 1974, Mr. Mantell appeared in the celebrated nouveau-noir sleuth film “Chinatown” as Walsh, an associate of Jake Gittes (Mr. Nicholson), a private eye who becomes embroiled in a complex mess involving water rights, incest and murder. It was a small role for Mr. Mantell, made notable by his final line, also the final line of the film, which was set in the Los Angeles of the 1930s. Gittes, shaken by the violent conclusion of events (which takes place in the sorry neighborhood that gives the film its name) is encouraged to go home and take it easy.
“Forget it, Jake,” Walsh says. “It’s Chinatown.”
Joseph Mantel was born in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn on Dec. 21, 1915. His parents were immigrants from Poland who ran a butcher shop. He served in the Army during World War II and, some time between his discharge and his film debut, in 1949, he changed his name, adding an “l” and altering the pronunciation from “MON-tle” to “man-TELL.”
In addition to his work onscreen, Mr. Mantell was also a stage actor whose credits included a Broadway musical, “Buttrio Square,” in 1952. Two decades later he appeared in a post-Broadway tour of “Twigs,” a play by George Furth that starred Sada Thompson in a Tony-winning performance.
In addition to his son, who lives in Lancaster, Calif., Mr. Mantell is survived by his wife, Mary; two daughters, Jeanne, of Encino, and Cathy, of Studio City, Calif.; a grandson and a step-grandson.
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STEPHEN J. CANNELL, PROLIFIC TV WRITER
By BILL CARTER
Published: October 2, 2010
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Roger Ressmeyer/Starlight, via Photofest
Stephen J. Cannell
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Sleuth
Stephen J. Cannell created almost 20 series, including “The A-Team,” with Dwight Schultz (in cap) and George Peppard. He also had a hand in “Wiseguy” and “21 Jump Street.”
For 30 years, beginning in the early 1970s and extending through the 1990s, television viewers could hardly go a week without running into a show written by Mr. Cannell. His writing credits include more than 1,000 episodes of various series, primarily crime dramas, and he is listed as the creator of almost 20 series — some long-running hits like “The Rockford Files,” and “The Commish,” others quick flame-outs like “Booker. ” At one point in 1989, Mr. Cannell’s company was producing five series on three networks. One of them, “21 Jump Street,” introduced a future Oscar nominee to public acclaim: Johnny Depp.
But that was not unusual. Mr. Cannell’s shows often opened doors for emerging actors. Jeff Goldblum gained his first wide notice in a short-lived but well-remembered Cannell series, “Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.” And “Wiseguy” gave another future Oscar winner, Kevin Spacey, a chance to stand out in a memorable extended turn as a villain.
Mr. Cannell, who regarded his writing less as an art than a craft to which he was both committed and devoted, never writing less than two hours a day, shifted late in his career to crime novels and again proved he had a popular touch. Several of his 16 books, many featuring the detective Shane Scully, were best sellers.
“Most of my things strike to the same theme,” Mr. Cannell said in an interview this year in Success magazine, “which is not to take yourself so seriously that you can’t grow.”
In many ways Mr. Cannell’s own success mirrored the formula he repeated in so many of those episodes. It was a three-act, feel-good story of overcoming debilitating flaws.
Born Feb. 5, 1941, in Los Angeles, to an affluent family (his father owned an interior design business), Mr. Cannell suffered from extreme dyslexia, which went undiagnosed and all but ruined his school years. Despite inheriting his family’s intense work ethic, he failed three grades and was unable to retain a football scholarship to the University of Oregon because of his academic record.
But a professor there recognized his writing gifts and encouraged him. Once he tried to break into television writing, Mr. Cannell quickly found he had a knack for its basics. He was fast and dependable. From early work on shows like “It Takes a Thief” and “Toma” he graduated to more serious efforts, like a script for the notoriously demanding “Columbo.”
He was successful and happy, unlike many of his Hollywood writing contemporaries. He married his grade-school sweetheart, Marcia Finch, in 1964. She survives him, along with two daughters, Tawnia and Chelsea; a son, Cody; and three grandchildren.
It was while banging out a script for “Toma” that Mr. Cannell created a character named Jim Rockford. Like Rockford, Mr. Cannell often pointed out, his lead characters were flawed men who somehow found a way to get the right thing done.
Rockford was an ex-con turned reluctant detective who would rather crack wise than fight. The series, which was a hit for seven seasons, has since been credited with helping to signal a cultural shift away from the perfect physical and moral specimens of the movies and early television and toward more realistic heroes, the kind viewers had come to expect, given the harder-edged reality they saw on the evening news.
“Culture changed, and as that happened, so did our need for a hero,” Mr. Cannell said in a 1999 interview. “That square-jawed good guy began to look like an idiot to us.”
Rockford also introduced another staple of Mr. Cannell’s best work: humor. His shows tended to be leavened either with wry comedy, which so fit the performing style of that show’s star, James Garner, that he seemed inseparable from the role, or extremely broad comedy, typified by “The A-Team,” the loud, seemingly mindless action series that ran for five years in the mid-’80s, all but saving the NBC network in the process. That series included big set-piece action sequences with explosions and crashing vehicles — and people were hardly ever killed.
Critics and viewers often questioned how a show like that, and other Cannell titles like “Riptide, “Renegade” and the late-night series “Silk Stalkings” could spring from the same mind that created a complex, groundbreaking crime drama like “Wiseguy,” which has often been cited as a forerunner to “The Sopranos” (though David Chase, creator of that HBO series, never actually saw it).
Mr. Cannell shrugged off such puzzlement, saying he didn’t know why his work ranged so widely. “But I do know it’s easier to think of me simply as the guy who wrote ‘The A-Team,’ ” Mr. Cannel told the Associated Press in 1993. “So they do.”
“I’m generally a very happy guy, because I’m doing what I want,” Mr. Cannell said in the Success interview. “I’m willing to tell you that there are people who are much better than I am in writing. I don’t have to be the fastest gun in the West.”
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ARTHUR PENN, DIRECTOR OF ‘BONNIE AND CLYDE’
By DAVE KEHR
Published: September 29, 2010
Correction Appended
Arthur Penn, the stage, television and motion picture director whose revolutionary treatment of sex and violence in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde” transformed the American film industry, died on Tuesday night at his home in Manhattan, the day after he turned 88.
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Warner Brothers, via Photofest
The actress Faye Dunaway and Arthur Penn on the set of his groundbreaking film, “Bonnie and Clyde.” More Photos »
The cause was congestive heart failure, his son, Matthew, said.
A pioneering director of live television drama in the 1950s and a Broadway powerhouse in the 1960s, Mr. Penn developed an intimate, spontaneous and physically oriented method of directing actors that allowed their work to register across a range of mediums.
In 1957 he directed William Gibson’s television play “The Miracle Worker” for the CBS series “Playhouse 90” and earned Emmy nominations for himself, his writer and his star, Teresa Wright. In 1959 he restaged “The Miracle Worker” for Broadway and won Tony Awards for himself, his writer and his star, Anne Bancroft. And in 1962 he directed the film version of the Gibson text, capturing the best actress Oscar for Bancroft, the best supporting actress Oscar for her co-star, Patty Duke, and nominations for writing and directing.
Mr. Penn’s direction may have also changed American history. He advised Senator John F. Kennedy during his watershed television debates with Richard M. Nixon in 1960 (and directed the broadcast of the third debate). Mr. Penn’s instructions to Kennedy — to look directly into the camera and keep his responses brief and pithy — helped give Kennedy an aura of confidence and calm that created a vivid contrast to Nixon, his more experienced but less telegenic Republican rival.
But it was as a film director that Mr. Penn left his mark on American culture, most indelibly with “Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Arthur Penn brought the sensibility of ’60s European art films to American movies,” the writer-director Paul Schrader said. “He paved the way for the new generation of American directors who came out of film schools.”
Many of the now-classic films of what was branded the New American Cinema of the 1970s — among them Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” — would have been unthinkable without “Bonnie and Clyde” to lead the way.
Loosely based on the story of two minor gangsters of the 1930s, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, “Bonnie and Clyde” was conceived by its two novice screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, as an homage to the rebellious sensibility and disruptive style of French New Wave films like François Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.”
In Mr. Penn’s hands, it became something even more dangerous and innovative: a sympathetic portrait of two barely articulate criminals, played by Warren Beatty and a newcomer, Faye Dunaway, that disconcertingly mixed sex, violence and hayseed comedy, set to a bouncy bluegrass score by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.
Not only was the film sexually explicit in ways unseen in Hollywood since the imposition of the Production Code in 1934 — when Bonnie stroked Clyde’s gun, the symbolism was unmistakable — it was violent in ways that had never been seen before. Audiences gasped when a comic bank robbery climaxed with Clyde’s shooting a bank teller in the face, and were stunned when this attractive outlaw couple died in a torrent of bullets, their bodies twitching in slow motion as their clothes turned red with blood.
Reporting on the film’s premiere on the opening night of the International Film Festival of Montreal in 1967, Bosley Crowther, the chief film critic for The New York Times, was appalled, describing “Bonnie and Clyde” as “callous and callow” and a “slap-happy color film charade.” Worse, the public seemed to love it.
“Just to show how delirious these festival audiences can be,” Mr. Crowther wrote, “it was wildly received with gales of laughter and given a terminal burst of applause.”
Similar reactions by other major critics followed when the film opened in the United States a few weeks later. The film, promoted by Warner Brothers with a memorable tag line — “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people.” — floundered at first but soon found an enthusiastic audience among younger filmgoers and won the support of a new generation of critics. “A milestone in the history of American movies,” wrote Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times. Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, described it as an “excitingly American movie.”
“Bonnie and Clyde” received 10 Oscar nominations but won only two (for Burnett Guffey’s cinematography and Estelle Parson’s supporting performance). That outcome reflected the Hollywood establishment’s ambivalence over a film that seemed to point the way out of the creative paralysis that had set in after the end of the studio system while betraying the values — good taste and moral clarity — that the studios held most dear.
But the breach had been opened: “Bonnie and Clyde” was followed by “Easy Rider,” “The Wild Bunch” and a host of other youth-oriented, taboo-breaking films that made mountains of money for Hollywood.
Mr. Penn was perceived as a major film artist on the European model, opening the way for a group of star directors — including Robert Altman, Terrence Malick, Bob Rafelson and Hal Ashby — who were able to work with comparative artistic freedom through the next decade. The “film generation” had arrived.
Arthur Penn was born on Sept. 27, 1922, in Philadelphia. His father, a watchmaker, and his mother, a nurse, divorced when he was 3, and Arthur and his older brother, Irving (who would achieve fame as a photographer), went to live with their mother in New York and New Jersey, changing homes and schools frequently as she struggled to make a living.
Mr. Penn traced his affinity for alienated heroes and heroines to a traumatic childhood. Truffaut’s “400 Blows,” he once said, “was so much like my own childhood it really stunned me.”
Arthur returned to Philadelphia to live with his father when he was 14 and became interested in theater in high school. He joined the Army in 1943 and, while stationed at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, organized a theater troupe with his fellow soldiers; later, while stationed in Paris, he performed with the Soldiers Show Company.
After the war he took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend the unconventional Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where his classmates included John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller. He went on to study at the Universities of Perugia and Florence in Italy, returning to the United States in 1948. Intrigued by the new, psychologically realistic school of acting that had grown out of the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski — broadly known as the Method — he studied with the Actors Studio in New York and with Stanislavski’s rebellious disciple, Michael Chekhov, in Los Angeles.
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Warner Brothers, via Photofest
A violent shootout from “Bonnie and Clyde,” which stunned audiences not used to such scenes. More Photos »
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United Artists, via Photofest
Arlo Guthrie and Kathleen Dabney in “Alice’s Restaurant” (1969), another work directed by Mr. Penn. More Photos »
TV as Dramatic Springboard
Back in New York, Mr. Penn landed a job as a floor manager at NBC’s newly opened television studios. In 1953 an old Army buddy, Fred Coe, gave him a job as a director on “The Gulf Playhouse,” also known as “First Person,” an experimental dramatic series in which the actors addressed the camera directly. The series, broadcast live, introduced Mr. Penn to writers who would make their names in the television drama of the 1950s, among them Robert Alan Aurthur, Paddy Chayefsky and Horton Foote.
As Mr. Coe moved on to the expanded formats of “The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse” and “Playhouse 90,” he took Mr. Penn with him. His “Playhouse 90” production of Mr. Gibson’s “Miracle Worker,” starring Patricia McCormack as Helen Keller and Ms. Wright as the blind girl’s determined teacher, Annie Sullivan, was shown on Feb. 7, 1957, and earned glowing reviews for Mr. Gibson and Mr. Penn.
Their television success allowed Mr. Penn and Mr. Gibson to return to the original arena of their ambitions, Broadway. With Mr. Coe producing, they mounted Mr. Gibson’s play “Two for the Seesaw,” about a Midwestern businessman (Henry Fonda) contemplating an adventure with a New York bohemian (Bancroft). Opening in January 1958, it was an immediate success.
Sensing themselves on a roll, Mr. Penn and Mr. Coe decided to tackle Hollywood. With Mr. Coe producing, Mr. Penn directed his first film, “The Left Handed Gun” (1958), for Warner Brothers. Based on a Gore Vidal television play, the project was an extension of the “Playhouse 90” aesthetic: a low-budget, black-and-white western about a troubled, inarticulate young man (Paul Newman, in a performance stamped with Actors Studio technique) who happened to be Billy the Kid.
As the critic Robin Wood wrote in a 1969 book about Mr. Penn, “The Left Handed Gun” provides “a remarkably complete thematic exposition of Penn’s work.” Here already is the theme of the immature, unstable outsider who resorts to violence when rejected by an uncaring establishment — a configuration that Mr. Penn would return to again and again in his mature work.
The film earned mediocre reviews, however, and quickly sank from view. But Mr. Penn had a backup plan. Returning to New York, he mounted “The Miracle Worker” for Broadway with Bancroft as Annie Sullivan and Ms. Duke as Helen Keller. Mr. Penn’s highly physical approach made the show a sensation, and the production ran for 719 performances.
During that run Mr. Penn found time to stage three more hits: Lillian Hellman’s “Toys in the Attic”; “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” the Broadway debut for that comedy team; and “All the Way Home,” an adaptation of James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family.”
When Hollywood beckoned again, Mr. Penn returned in strength in 1962 to direct the film version of “The Miracle Worker,” which became a popular and critical success.
But he was dismissed from his next project, “The Train,” after a few days of filming by its temperamental star, Burt Lancaster. Mr. Penn’s subsequent film, “Mickey One” (1965), an absurdist drama about a nightclub comedian (Mr. Beatty) on the run from mobsters, wore its European art-film ambitions on its sleeve and baffled most American critics, though it was admired by the iconoclastic young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, the French magazine that championed the New Wave.
Mr. Penn had another frustrating experience with “The Chase” (1966), a multi-character, morally complex drama set in a Texas town where the sheriff (Marlon Brando) is on the lookout for a local boy (Robert Redford) who has escaped from prison. Adapted by Hellman from a Foote play, the drama was taken away from Mr. Penn and re-edited by its producer, Sam Spiegel. But even in its mutilated form, “The Chase” remains one of Mr. Penn’s most personal and feverishly creative works.
An embittered Mr. Penn returned to Broadway, where he staged the thriller “Wait Until Dark” with Lee Remick and Robert Duvall. But he eventually returned to Hollywood, summoned by Mr. Beatty to take over the direction of a project originally offered to Truffaut.
“Frankly, I wasn’t all that certain I wanted to make another film,” Mr. Penn wrote in an essay for Lester D. Friedman’s 2000 anthology, “Arthur Penn’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’ ” “And if I were to do another film, I felt it should be a story with a broader social theme than a flick about two ‘30s bank robbers whose pictures I remembered as a couple of self-publicizing hoods holding guns, plastered across the front page of The Daily News.”
But Mr. Beatty, who had an option on the property, persuaded Mr. Penn to join the project with promises of autonomy and the rare privilege of having the final cut.
Working with the screenwriters, Mr. Penn eliminated a sexual triangle among Bonnie, Clyde and their disciple C. W. Moss, a composite character, that he felt was too sophisticated for the characters — “farmers or children of farmers, bumpkins most of them,” Mr. Penn wrote.
“We talked and moved in the direction of a simpler tale,” he added, “one of narcissism, of bravura, and, at least from Clyde’s point of view, of sexual timidity.” They had also settled on a tone.
“It was to start as a jaunty little spree in crime, then suddenly turn serious, and finally arrive at a point that was irreversible,” Mr. Penn wrote.
Making Small, Personal Films
After the success of “Bonnie and Clyde,” Mr. Penn had his choice of Hollywood projects. But he decided to make a small, personal film, very much in the spirit of the American independent cinema that would emerge in the 1980s.
“Alice’s Restaurant” (1969) revisited many of the social-outsider themes of “Bonnie and Clyde” but in a low-key, gently skeptical, nonviolent manner. Starring Arlo Guthrie and based on his best-selling narrative album about a hippie commune’s brush with the law, the film stands as one of Mr. Penn’s most engaging works, a warm and deeply felt miniature.
By contrast, he seemed to lose his way among the epic ambitions of “Little Big Man” (1970), a sprawling, ironic, anti-western that tried to explain American imperialism through the abstract figure of Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), the sole (though fictional) non-American Indian survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, as he bumbled through a glumly revisionist version of the Old West. After that film’s disappointing reception, Mr. Penn mostly laid low before returning in 1975 with the modest thriller “Night Moves.” Starring Gene Hackman as a Hollywood private detective who loses himself on a case in the Florida Keys, the film made explicit the existential despair that had long permeated American film noir, ending on a daring note of irresolution.
But audiences were losing patience with daring notes, flocking instead to the popcorn pleasures of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” summer’s runaway hit in 1975. Suddenly Mr. Penn’s kind of artistically ambitious, personal filmmaking was out of style. He returned to Broadway, where he staged a pair of successes, Larry Gelbart’s “Sly Fox” and Mr. Gibson’s “Golda.”
Mr. Penn’s subsequent film career was one of violent ups and downs. A reunion with Brando for “The Missouri Breaks” (1976) yielded a surreal western with moments of brilliance but a meandering tone. With “Four Friends” (1981), Mr. Penn returned to the subjects of youthful uncertainty and social upheaval.
He seemed less committed to “Target” (1985), a paranoid political thriller with Mr. Hackman and Matt Dillon that uneasily matched a father-son conflict with conventional suspense, and “Dead of Winter” (1987), a partial remake of Joseph H. Lewis’s 1945 gothic thriller “My Name Is Julia Ross.” “I just like to flex my muscles every once in a while and do something relatively mindless,” Mr. Penn told Mr. Schickel.
It came as a pleasant surprise, then, when Mr. Penn uncorked the 1989 independent production “Penn & Teller Get Killed,” a black comedy in which those two magicians are pursued by a serial killer. Full of wild jokes, bizarre reversals and extravagant gore, this tiny film bristles with a youthful spirit of experimentation.
A dutiful drama of South African apartheid produced by Showtime, “Inside” (1996), would be Mr. Penn’s last theatrically released film.
Returning to TV
In his last years Mr. Penn returned to television, serving as an executive producer on several episodes of “Law & Order,” a series on which his son, Matthew, worked as a director, and directing an episode of “100 Centre Street.” One of his final works for the theater was the 2002 Broadway production “Fortune’s Fool,” an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s 1848 play. True to Mr. Penn’s form, it won Tony Awards for its stars, Alan Bates and Frank Langella.
Mr. Penn met his wife of 54 years, the actress Peggy Maurer, when he auditioned her for a television drama in the 1950s. She survives him. Besides his son, Matthew, Mr. Penn is also survived by a daughter, Molly Penn, and four grandsons. Mr. Penn’s brother, Irving Penn, died in 2009.
Throughout his career, Mr. Penn never lost his flair for the spontaneous, his remarkable ability to capture an emotional moment in all its pulsing ambiguity and messy vitality.
“I don’t storyboard,” Mr. Penn explained to an audience at the American Film Institute in 1970s, referring to the practice of sketching out every shot in a film before production begins. “I guess it dates back to my days in live television, where there was no possibility of storyboarding and everything was shot right on the spot — on the air, as we say — at the moment we were transmitting. I prefer to be open to what the actors do, how they interact to the given situation. So many surprising things happen on the set, and I have the feeling that storyboarding might tend to close your mind to the accidental.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 29, 2010
An earlier version misstated one of the stars of the film “Target.” It was Matt Dillon, not Matt Damon. That version also had the wrong given name for the writer of “The Miracle Worker.” He is William, not Walter, Gibson.
Correction: October 2, 2010
An obituary on Thursday about Arthur Penn, the film and stage director, described incorrectly a play he directed on Broadway, “Golda,” starring Anne Bancroft as Golda Meir. While it initially played to near-sellout audiences, it closed after 93 performances when illness forced Ms. Bancroft to drop out. It was not considered a financial success.
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