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Joan Micklin Silver, who forged her own path as a director in the ’70s and’ 80s and directed seven feature films including “Crossing Delancey” and “Hester Street”, died Thursday in Manhattan. She was 85 years old.
Her daughter, Claudia Silver, told The New York Times the cause was vascular dementia.
The 1975 independent film “Hester Street” was the story of a Jewish immigrant couple in the 1890s. The low budget black and white film, in Yiddish with English subtitles, proved to be a hard sell. at the studios and was ultimately funded by her husband, real estate developer Raphael D. Silver. It won rave reviews and made $ 5 million at the box office, an impressive amount at the time. Carol Kane, 21, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress for her role as wife, Gitl.
The 1988 romantic comedy “Crossing Delancey” is also set in the Jewish community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Starring Amy Irving, Sylvia Miles and Peter Riegert, Silver said she struggled to present it because again the studios felt the subject was “too ethnic.”
It was ultimately produced when Irving’s then-husband Steven Spielberg helped ease the connection with a Warner Entertainment executive who was his neighbor, and this film was also a hit, grossing over $ 116 million. of dollars in the world.
Silver struggled to be taken seriously as a director and couldn’t understand why it was so difficult for female directors to find opportunities. She told Film Comment, “I didn’t want to feel like the director. I wanted to feel like one of the many female directors.
She also said that a studio manager once told her, “A female filmmaker is just one more problem we don’t need.”
Born in Omaha, she began teaching music and working in the local theater in Cleveland before moving to New York City, where she wrote and produced educational short films at the Learning Corporation of America.
In the early 1970s, Silver was hired to adapt Lois Gould’s novel “Such Good Friends” for Otto Preminger, but was replaced by a series of writers including Joan Didion and Elaine May. Her original screenplay, “Limbo,” about the POW wives, was purchased by Universal, but the studio replaced her with James Bridges when she disagreed with the director on the film’s execution.
Her other films include “Between the Lines”, starring Jeff Goldblum, John Heard and Lindsay Crouse and the adaptation of Ann Beattie’s popular novel “Chilly Scenes of Winter”, also starring Heard, starring Mary Beth Hurt.
United Artists tried to change the name from “Chilly Scenese of Winter” to “Head Over Heels” and sell it as a comedy, but the bittersweet comedy was a flop. The producers restored the original title and re-released the film with a new ending.
These films were followed by “Loverboy”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry… They Get Even” and “A Fish in the Bathtub”. She continued to work on TV movies until the early 2000s, including “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, “Invisible Child” and “Hunger Point”.
Silver is survived by his daughters, television screenwriter Claudia; writer-director Marisa; and Dina; a sister and five grandchildren.
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