Crossing Delancey director Joan Micklin Silver, who fought Hollywood sexism to make moving films about the Jewish immigrant’s experience on the Lower East Side, died last week at her Manhattan home.
The filmmaker and mother of three children died of vascular dementia, according to reports. She was 85 years old.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Russian Jewish parents, Silver studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers. She made her film debut in the late 1960s, writing screenplays for educational films.
But when she moved to Hollywood, she was disappointed with the high-risk studio system after a script she wrote about the wives of Vietnam War prisoners was rewritten without her contribution. When she tried to work as a director, she was passed over by men, she said.
“I came of age for cinema at a time when sexism was very strong and although I could get a job as a writer, I couldn’t get a job as a director at all,” she said. “And I had the experience of watching guys who made shorts, like me, award-winning shorts, like me, starting to direct films 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 tight budget of $ 320,000 in 34 days, and was entirely Yiddish with English subtitles.
The film was rejected by Hollywood and labeled “ethnic eccentricity”, but won generous praise from critics and grossed $ 5 million at the box office.
The studios also labeled their 1988 film “Crossing Delancey”, a romantic comedy starring Amy Irving, as very 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 leaves her three daughters, five grandchildren and a sister.