Nobody seemed to care
more about what actors
had to say than James
Lipton. As the longtime
host of the Bravo show Inside the
Actors Studio, Lipton interviewed
Hollywood stars with an ardor that
endeared him to devoted fans even as
it drew eye-rolling from critics who
found him pompous and obsequious.
His effusive style invited parody, most
notably from Will Ferrell, who lam-
pooned Lipton in Saturday Night Live skits. Yet
with an approach that sidestepped gossip for a
somber focus on the craft of acting, Lipton often
succeeded in getting his famous guests to reveal
intimate details. Spike Lee and Ben Kingsley both
cried in the interview chair, while Jack Lemmon
confessed to being an alcoholic. “When you’re
talking about the thing that is most important
to someone,” said Lipton, “they’re liable to feel
something strong.”
Born in Detroit, Lipton was raised largely by
his mother, a teacher and librarian, said The
Washington Post. His father was a journalist
and Beat poet who “abandoned the family for
an itinerant life.” Lipton developed an early
interest in acting; for a period, he played the
Lone Ranger’s nephew on radio. But “hav-ing associated the arts with his
delinquent father,” he decided to
become a lawyer, said The New
York Times. After a stint in the Air
Force, Lipton studied at Columbia
University and, “in need of an
income, sought out acting jobs.”
Five years later, he quit the law and
embraced the acting life.
Lipton took small-time TV roles
and in 1953 made his feature debut
“as a wiseguy in the ultralow-
budget The Big Break,” said The Hollywood
Reporter. After finishing a film in Greece, he
traveled to France and “stumbled into one of his
more unusual jobs”: recruiting patrons for a live-
sex performer. “We did a roaring business,” he
said. “It was a great time of my life.” Returning
home to act, Lipton found more success as a
writer and spent years scripting soap operas, TV
movies, and a pair of Broadway musicals. In the
1990s, he helped create the Actors Studio Drama
School in Manhattan and conceived a series of
interviews that would serve as master classes.
He cut a deal with Bravo to air Inside the Actors
Studio, little guessing it would bring him the fame
his own acting never generated. “I had no dark
hopes for it,” he said of the show. “I just had no
way of guessing these things would happen.”Max von Sydow was
a striking presence
in Hollywood and
European cinema for
seven decades. Standing a gaunt
6-foot-4 and possessing piercing
blue eyes, the Swedish actor was
best known to U.S. audiences as the
titular priest in The Exorcist (1973),
the anti-social artist in Hannah and
Her Sisters (1986), and the enigmatic
Three-Eyed Raven in HBO’s Game of
Thrones. But his most critically acclaimed perfor-
mances were those directed by Ingmar Bergman.
In The Seventh Seal (1957), his first of 11 mov-
ies under the legendary Swedish filmmaker, von
Sydow plays a disillusioned medieval knight who
challenges Death to a game of chess. His subtle
portrayal of a man in spiritual turmoil showed a
maturity far beyond his years. “Simplicity,” the
actor explained, “is a good method.”
Von Sydow was born in Lund, Sweden, to a
folklore professor father and schoolteacher
mother. He fell in love with theater “after see-
ing his first play, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, at age 14,” said the Associated
Press, and soon found that acting helped him
overcome his own shyness. After studying act-
ing in Stockholm, von Sydow moved to Malmoin 1955 and began working with
Bergman, then director of the city’s
leading theater, said The Guardian
(U.K.). “Following The Seventh
Seal, von Sydow played in six som-
ber films in a row for Bergman.”
He was a 19th-century mesmerist
and magician in The Face (1958)
and the vengeful father of a raped
girl in The Virgin Spring (1960).
His growing arthouse fame earned
Hollywood’s attention, and after
repeatedly refusing roles, he agreed to play Jesus
Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told.
That 1965 “all-star epic was a flop,” said The
Washington Post. Worse, for von Sydow, it begot
“decades of typecasting in Hollywood” as stern
priests and stereotypical villains, including an
otherworldly tyrant in Flash Gordon (1980) and
James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld in Never Say Never
Again (1983). Von Sydow did more serious work
in Europe, earning his first Oscar nomination in
1988 for the Danish film Pelle the Conqueror,
about a widowed Swedish laborer. Famously
humble, he was happy to be shaped by directors.
Von Sydow recalled his last conversation with
Bergman, who died in 2007: “He said, ‘Max,
you have been the first and the best Stradivarius
that I have ever had in my hands.’”Obituaries
Max von
Sydow
1929–2020Ne
ws
com
,^ A
P
The TV host who went inside actors’ minds
The actor who played chess with Death
James
Lipton
1926–2020McCoy Tyner was often called
the most influential jazz pia-
nist of his generation. A cre-
ative force for six decades, he
made his biggest mark in his
early 20s, after
being tapped
by John Col-
trane. As a
member of the
saxophonist’s classic quartet
in the mid-1960s, Tyner played
on a string of LPs—among
them Live at Birdland and A
Love Supreme—considered
high-water marks not just
in jazz but in 20th- century
music. Playing with an inten-
sity that belied his genial
character, Tyner did much
to define the band’s sound,
favoring rich, inventive chord
clusters and a hammering
left-hand attack that could set
the piano shaking. “He com-
pletely changed the sound of
modern jazz piano,” wrote
critic Peter Watrous.Tyner grew up in Philadel-
phia, where his father
worked for a medicated-
cream company and his
mother ran a beauty salon,
said The Times (U.K.). His
mother “saved for a year to
buy her son a piano,” which
she installed in the salon; as
a teen, Tyner jammed with
his rhythm and blues band
“while customers were being
attended to.” He studied both
classical music and African
drumming; by 16, Tyner was
playing at house parties and
diving into the city’s vibrant
jazz scene.He spent five years with
Coltrane, leaving when the
saxophonist’s music grew
increasingly atonal, said the
Los Angeles Times. Tyner’s
subsequent work ranged
widely, incorporating solo,
ensemble, and big-band set-
tings; stints as a sideman and
a bandleader; and excursions
into Afro-Cuban music. Tyner
said he was “honored” by
his many imitators. “If I could
make a statement that makes
a difference, and the influence
could be preserved through
the generations to come, that
means that my stay here on
earth has a meaning.”McCoy
Tyner
1938–202035
The pianist and
Coltrane sideman
who reshaped jazz