ARAB TIMES, MONDAY, JANUARY 4, 2021 NEWS/FEATURES 13 People & Places Obits Rapper MF Doom dead ‘Crossing Delancey’ Director Silver dies LOS ANGELES, Jan 3, (AP): Joan Micklin Silver, who forged a path for female directors and independ- ent fi lmmakers with movies including “Hester Street” and “Crossing Delancey,” has died. She was 85. Silver died from vascular dementia Thursday at her home in New York, her daughter Claudia Silver told The Associated Press. She used a combination of talent, fortitude and luck to create 1975’s “Hester Street,” her fi rst feature, re- leased when she was 40 years old. “Joan Micklin Silver was one of the most coura- geous artists I ever knew,” Carol Kane, who was nominated for a best actress Academy Award for her role in “Hester Street,” said in a statement to the AP. “She knew she could prevail at a time when women were not being taken seriously as fi lm directors.” A black-and-white period piece partly in Yiddish about a family of Jewish immigrants attempting to assimilate in New York, the fi lm became an unlikely triumph after Silver fought to make it. Kane would get her Oscar nomination for playing a wom- an attempting to make herself a Silver New World wife to please her husband. “When I read the script of ‘Hester Street,’ it was so beautifully written that I had the sensation that I was watching the movie as I read it,” Kane said. Silver would eventually move on to directing studio fi lms in a strained relationship with Hollywood. Her biggest commercial success would come with “Crossing Delancey,” a 1988 romantic comedy star- ring Amy Irving as a New York bookstore employee torn between two men. It was set nearly a century later than “Hester Street” but took place in the same neigh- borhood and explored similar themes of Judaism and This photo provided by PBS shows Glenda Jackson in a scene from ‘Elizabeth Is Missing.’ Only one project lured the two-time Academy Award winner back to the romance amid shifting cultures. screen after an absence of 25 years: ‘Elizabeth Is Missing.’ (AP) Recognition Born Joan Micklin in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1935, she went to college at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, Television New York. In 1956, the year she graduated, she mar- ried Raphael Silver, who would become a real estate developer and a producer of her fi lms. The two lived in Cleveland for the fi rst 11 years of their marriage and had three daughters while Joan ‘Elizabeth Is Missing,’ moving look at dementia Micklin Silver wrote plays for community theater. In 1967 they moved to New York, where she wrote scenarios for an educational fi lm company and scripts for fi lms. When scripts she sold either were not pro- Jackson returns to screen after 25 yrs duced or were changed beyond recognition, she real- ized she would have to direct them herself to tell the NEW YORK, Jan 3, (AP): Only one The fi lm has interwoven timelines of days where I was convinced that I’d stories she wanted. project lured two-time Academy and Maud seamlessly switches be- contracted the disease, but that’s par “I had always wanted to be a director,” Silver said in Award winner Glenda Jackson back to tween her 1949 past and present, re- for the course, really,” she said. a 1983 German documentary on her fi lms. “It seemed the screen after an absence of 25 years: vealing a sympathetic and unsentimen- Other recent fi lms that have tackled that I shouldn’t postpone it any longer.” “Elizabeth Is Missing.” tal portrait of dementia. Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in- She set out to make “Hester Street,” fi ghting The fi lm is a mystery but so much “Nobody listens to me. Am I invis- clude “Away From Her,” “Still Alice,” through a constant lack of funding and other obstacles, In this Dec 12, l995 fi le photo, Phyllis more — a powerful and moving look ible or something?” says Maude. Later “The Notebook” and “The Savages.” helped by a little luck. The crew at one point prepped McGuire, the youngest of The McGuire at dementia, a pressing emotional and she melts down at a restaurant: “I want Brown credits writer Emma Healey, an 1896 street for a week’s worth of shooting, and she Sisters, smiles after receiving a cluster fi nancial issue for many nations with to scream but it won’t come out!” whose book of the same name was would later say that one rainstorm would mean the end of balloons from longtime friends Deb- aging populations. Jackson plays a Jackson, who picked up Acad- the source of the fi lm’s adaptation, of the fi lm. It stayed dry. bie Reynolds and Rip Taylor at her woman lost in the fog between the past emy Awards for 1971’s “Women In for fi nding a compelling way to show home in Las Vegas. Phyllis McGuire, and present. Love” and 1974’s “A Touch of Class,” mental decline. But the fi lm’s success did not mean chances to di- the last surviving member of the three rect bigger pictures immediately emerged. “This is something that as a society, swapped fi lm and TV for politics “In a way, Emma Healey used a singing McGuire Sisters who topped we have to look at seriously,” the ac- in 1992 when she became a Labour mystery to draw the viewers in but re- “I was hardly deluged with offers from Holly- the charts with several hits in the 1950s, wood,” Silver said in the German documentary. “Peo- tor told The Associated Press by phone Member of Parliament. ally that was the Trojan horse to which has died, Tuesday, Dec 31. (AP) from England. “It’s a big black hole.” we understood the disease,” she said. ple have subsequently said to me if any man had made Effects ‘Hester Street’ he would have had a three-picture deal The 90-minute fi lm aired in the UK It is Jackson’s searing portrayal that from Paramount or Warners.” in 2019 to great acclaim and American She used to visit senior centers — resonates. She plays Maude as angry Her next feature would be another indie, 1977’s viewers get a chance to see it starting they’re called care homes in Britain — and horrifi ed, embarrassed and fero- “Between the Lines,” starring John Heard, Lindsay Sunday via Masterpiece on PBS. as part of the job and saw fi rst-hand the cious. It is a role not unlike her recent Crouse and Jeff Goldblum, about an alt-weekly news- Jackson, 84, plays the role of Maud, effects of the disease. Broadway work in “King Lear,” who paper undergoing a big-business buyout. who is in the throes of Alzheimer’s “The issue is one that I’ve been descends into madness. She fi nally made her fi rst studio movie with 1979’s disease. Her home is covered with banging on about for a very long time, “It is a fi erce performance. It is ac- “Chilly Scenes of Winter,” originally released as taped-up reminders and instructions certainly when I was still a member of tually ‘Lear’-like in many ways,” said “Head over Heels.” — “Don’t forget to lock up” and “No parliament,” she said. “We are looking Brown. “She brings the fi erceness as The fi lm was not well-received, and she directed a more bread” — and her pockets are at a situation where if we continue to well as the tenderness as well as the pair of fi lms for television before returning to the big stuffed with scrawled notes she wrote live longer than we have in the past, humor — and sometimes all in one screen with “Crossing Delancey,” which would go on to remind herself of events and ap- care homes are going to be central to scene.” to make more than $100 million — more than $200 pointments. how we actually look after ourselves.” Jackson says strangers have come million in current dollars. Los Angeles Times fi lm Bardot Bolling “The unique thing about it that isn’t To get into the role, Jackson con- up to her to share the toll the disease writer Mark Olsen tweeted Thursday that “Crossing often done in pieces about dementia is sulted with the group Dementia UK has taken on their families, both physi- Delancey” may just be “a perfect movie.” that it takes the viewer inside the expe- and its head of research and publica- cally and emotionally. She’s lately “It’s certainly an ideal rom-com -- warm, empathet- Variety rience of living with dementia — the tions, Dr. Karen Harrison Dening. seen British politicians embrace the ic, heartfelt & with a distinct sense of place,” he wrote. fear, the panic, the frustration,” said “I asked her one of the things I seriousness of dementia, especially in Silver would go on to direct seven features in all, Sarah Brown, an executive producer. found most diffi cult to get around with light of how COVID-19 has ravaged though not nearly as many as she might have. NEW YORK: Claude Bolling, the French Viewers meet Maude just as she is was actually what motivated this wom- nursing homes. ❑ ❑ ❑ pianist, composer and arranger who attained insisting she fi nd out what has hap- an,” said Jackson. The response was “Let’s hope it has a similar reac- a worldwide following through his melodic pened to her friend, Elizabeth, who one word: frustration — that no one tion to those people who are suffering MF Doom, a masked rapper who awed hip-hop blend of jazz and classical infl uences and seems to have vanished.