Sylvia Miles, Actress With a Flair for the Flamboyant, Dies at 94
Sylvia Miles in Evil under the Sun
By Anita Gates
Sylvia
Miles, who earned two Academy Award nominations (for “Midnight Cowboy”
and “Farewell, My Lovely”) and decades of glowing reviews for her acting
before drawing equal attention for her midlife transition to constant
partygoer and garishly flamboyant dresser, died on Wednesday in
Manhattan. She was 94.
Her death was confirmed by a friend, the publicist Mauricio Padilha. He said she died in ambulance on the way to a hospital.
Blond-maned
and nasal-voiced, Ms. Miles was in her mid-40s when she portrayed,
briefly, a well-groomed, poodle-owning Upper East Side hooker (her
building has a doorman) who manages to out-hustle Jon Voight’s
character, an aspiring prostitute himself, in “Midnight Cowboy” (1969).
She earned her second Oscar nomination for a five-and-a-half-minute scene with Robert Mitchum in “Farewell, My Lovely”
(1975), based on a crime novel by Raymond Chandler. He was the
detective Philip Marlowe, and she was a former entertainer wearing a
bathrobe in the middle of the day who trades information for a bottle of
bourbon. Perhaps her most memorable line was, “When I like a guy, the
ceiling’s the limit.”
In
between, as the sexual revolution hit its peak, she established a
reputation as daring and bawdy. She starred as an aging movie actress
enjoying a younger man (Joe Dallesandro) in “Heat” (1972), an X-rated
film directed by Paul Morrissey, under the aegis of Andy Warhol. She
appeared bare-breasted in European posters for the film and posed nude
(with a group of men, also naked) for a magazine layout. Criticized
widely, she was quoted in Earl Wilson’s column in The New York Post as
saying: “What’s wrong with it? They’re all friends of mine.”
But her acting abilities were still taken seriously.
“Sylvia
Miles is something special, a persona,” Vincent Canby wrote, reviewing
“Heat” in The New York Times. He added, “She looks great even when she
looks beat, and because she’s a good actress she automatically works 10
times as hard as everyone else to enliven the movie.”
She
was, however, beginning to acquire a reputation for going to every
party possible in whatever town she was in. She would “attend the
opening of an envelope,” the comedian Wayland Flowers was said to have
remarked.
In 1976, People magazine ran an article
with the headline “What Would a Manhattan Party Be Without the
Ubiquitous Sylvia Miles?” In 1980, Roger Ebert, the film critic of The
Chicago Sun-Times, interviewed her at a publicity brunch in Los Angeles.
“And if a brunch is a party, why then, of course that is Sylvia Miles
in the corner,” he wrote. “She is dressed as a cross between an Indian
princess, a hippie and a bag lady.”
That
reputation was said to be at issue in her most notorious altercation.
At a party during the New York Film Festival in 1973, she approached the
theater critic John Simon and dumped a plate of food on his head to
protest his New York magazine review of “Nellie Toole & Co.,” an Off
Broadway play in which she was starring. Her actions were not, she said
later, motivated by what he had written about her performance; rather,
she said, she was upset that he had referred to her as “one of New
York’s leading party girls and gate-crashers.” She never gate-crashed,
she said.
Ms. Miles defended her busy
social calendar. “I go out a lot because that’s the only way I get to
meet people,” she told a CNN interviewer in 1994. “I don’t go as far as
going to meet the planes when the producers come in. I don’t think I
have to be ashamed.”
From
left, Andy Warhol, Ms. Miles and the actress Geneviève Waïte at a party
in 1974. “I go out a lot,” Ms. Miles once told an interviewer, “because
that’s the only way I get to meet people.”CreditWilliam E. Sauro/The New York Times
Sylvia
Miles was born in New York City on Sept. 9, 1924 (though for many years
she listed her birth year as 1932). She revealed little about her
parents to interviewers, but according to some sources she was the
daughter of Reuben Lee, a furniture maker who had a factory on Prince
Street in Manhattan, and Belle (Fellman) Lee. She grew up in Greenwich
Village and attended Washington Irving High School and Pratt Institute.
She studied at the Actors Studio.
Ms.
Miles began her career as a stage actress, making her Off Broadway debut
in 1954 in “A Stone for Danny Fisher,” with Zero Mostel. She was, in
fact, considered an Off Broadway pioneer. She played Marlyse, the
brothel thief, in José Quintero’s Obie-winning production of “The
Balcony” at Circle in the Square Downtown in 1960 and worked often with
Mr. Quintero. (Although she often mentioned having been in his landmark
1956 production of “The Iceman Cometh,” with Jason Robards, she did not
originate the role of Margie the prostitute; she replaced Eileen Ryan in
1957.)
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Ms.
Miles was a witch in “A Chekhov Sketchbook” (1962), starred opposite
Rip Torn in “The Kitchen” (1966) and earned the Times critic Clive
Barnes’s praise for “very fine acting” as a “delicately vulgar” mother
in “Rosebloom” (1972).
Her only
Broadway appearances were in the short-lived “The Riot Act” (1963), as a
waitress engaged to a police sergeant (she was praised by The Times’s
Howard Taubman for “nice comic timing”), and in the high-profile 1976
revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana,” as Maxine,
the lusty, widowed hotel owner, opposite Richard Chamberlain.
When
she tried an Off Broadway solo show, in 1981, perhaps too much water
had flowed under the bridge. The show, “It’s Me, Sylvia,” for which she
wrote the book and lyrics (Galt MacDermot, best known for “Hair,” wrote
the music), ran only nine performances.
Her
film debut was in the crime drama “Murder Inc.” (1960), with Stuart
Whitman. She was a flirtatious tobacco worker in “Parrish” (1961). She
described her character in the 1977 horror film “The Sentinel” as “a mad
dead crazed German zombie lesbian ballet dancer.”
Her
other film roles included the aggressive matchmaker who introduces Amy
Irving to a pickle merchant in “Crossing Delancey” (1988); an
opinionated real estate agent in “Wall Street” (1987); a corrupt
congresswoman in Mr. Morrissey’s 1988 Mafia comedy, “Spike of
Bensonhurst”; a script clerk in Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie” (1971);
Meryl Streep’s mother in “She-Devil” (1989); and herself in the
documentary “Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol” (1990).
Though
she was not thought of as a television actress, Ms. Miles did make
periodic guest appearances over the decades on series like “Route 66”
(1961), “Miami Vice” (1985) and “Sex and the City” (2002), in which she
appeared as a lunch-counter lady who sprinkles drugs on her ice cream.
Her
final TV appearance was in 2008, on the series “Life on Mars.” Her last
screen appearance was in “Old Monster,” a 2013 short based on the epic
“Beowulf.” And her final feature film was the sequel “Wall Street: Money
Never Sleeps” (2010), in which she reprised her role from the original
“Wall Street.”
Ms. Miles was a competitive chess player, participating in tournaments and earning a mention in a 1972 feature article on female players in The Times and in the newspaper’s chess column in 1968.
She
married and divorced three times. Her first husband (1948-50) was
William Miles, whose name she kept. Her second (1952-58) was Gerald
Price, an actor; her third (1963-70) was Ted Brown, the New York radio talk-show host and disc jockey. She lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Padilha, her friend, said her only immediate survivor was a sister, whose name he did not know.
Despite
her relish for the spotlight, Ms. Miles never published a memoir. When
asked why by an interviewer in 2001, she replied: “I don’t have all the
answers. My life’s been a mystery to me.”
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
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