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“Crossing Delancey” director Joan Micklin Silver, who has battled Hollywood sexism to make poignant films about the experience of Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, died last week at her Manhattan home.
The filmmaker and mother of three has died of vascular dementia, according to reports. She was 85 years old.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Russian Jewish parents, Silver attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers. She made her film debut in the late 1960s, writing screenplays for educational films.
But when she branched out into Hollywood, she was disappointed with the high-stakes studio system after a screenplay she wrote about the wives of Vietnam War prisoners was rewritten without her input. When she tried to work as a director, she was ignored by men, she said.
“I came of age for cinema at a time when the sexism was pretty strong and even though I could find work as a writer, I couldn’t work as a director at all,” she said. . “And I had the experience of looking at young men who had made shorts like me, award winning shorts like me, moving on to making movies and I couldn’t do it.
Silver’s first feature film as a director was “Hester Street”, produced by a company she founded with her husband Raphael Silver. The critically acclaimed 1975 film about Russian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side was made on a limited budget of $ 320,000 in 34 days and was entirely in Yiddish with English subtitles.
The film was rejected by Hollywood and called an “ethnic quirk,” but won critical acclaim and grossed $ 5 million at the box office.
The studios also called her 1988 feature film “Crossing Delancey,” a romantic comedy starring Amy Irving, too ethnic. But Warner Brothers distributed the film after Irving’s husband, Steven Spielberg, intervened.
Throughout his career, Silver has directed seven feature films and worked on several theatrical productions.
She is survived by her three daughters, five grandchildren and a sister.
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