[ad_1]
Photo: Joe Schildhorn / Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Joan Micklin Silver, the filmmaker behind films like Loverboy, Cold winter scenes, and Big girls don’t cry … they become equal, died Thursday at the age of 85. Director’s daughter Claudia Silver has confirmed her death in New York Times Friday, giving the cause of death as vascular dementia.
Having started his career writing educational children’s films for the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Learning Corporation of America, Silver’s first feature film, 1975 Hester Street, was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2011. An adaptation of the 1896 novel by author Abraham Cahan Yekl: A History of the New York Ghetto, About a Jewish immigrant couple living in the Lower East Size, the studios felt Silver’s low-budget passion project was too niche and too ethnic to be marketable, as the dialogue is mostly in Yiddish. The director and her husband Raphael D. Silver finally got the cast, as well as a name for best actress at the Oscar. Hester Street star Carol Kane.
As the Times observes, Silver found herself against both anti-Semitism and sexism as she tried to tell Jewish stories in and despite the ’70s studio system. “Studio executives told me so many things. overtly sexist when I started, “the director said in an interview with the American Film Institute in 1979. For example,” Feature films are very expensive to edit and distribute, and female directors are one more of a problem. that we don’t need. “
Silver would go on to direct seven feature films and a host of TV movies. 1977 Between the lines features Jeff Goldblum, John Heard and Marilu Henner among young journalists working at an alternative newspaper in Boston. 1988 Cross Delancey, based on the play by Susan Sandler, earned Amy Irving a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress for her turn as an employee of a Jewish bookstore torn between an author and the local bachelor selected by the matchmaker of his grandmother.
Silver’s last feature, 1998 A carp in the tub, starred Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara and Mark Ruffalo, while his final project was the 2003 TV movie No hunger. She is survived by three daughters, Claudia, Marisa and Dina, a sister and five grandchildren.
[ad_2]
Source link