Joan Micklin Silver, the American filmmaker best known for the Jewish romantic comedy Crossing Delancey and the Yiddish-language immigrant romance Hester Street, died at the age of 85. The New York Times reported that Silver’s daughter Claudia said the cause of death was vascular dementia.
Silver was one of the few directors acting in American cinema in the 1970s, as well as one of the few filmmakers who specifically approached Jewish material – still a rarity in a Hollywood that had traditionally been dominated by Jewish figures in production and studio roles .
After making a series of documentary shorts and earning credit as a writer in the Hollywood film Limbo (1972), about the wives of soldiers serving in Vietnam, Silver tried to make his film debut. Hester Street, adapted from Abraham Cahan’s novel Yekl, detailed the experiences of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in New York; it was named after the street that was part of the Lower East Side Jewish Quarter. Hollywood studios were notoriously reluctant at the time to support a female director; instead, the film, which provided an initial role for Carol Kane, was produced by the husband of Silver’s real estate developer Raphael, who raised more than $ 300,000 for the budget. Skillfully evoking the Yiddish cinema style of the 1930s, with black and white visuals and melodramatic acting, Hester Street was an independent hit on its 1975 release, making its budget come back several times.
After a TV movie based on the story of F Scott Fitzgerald, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Silver and her husband teamed up for their second feature, Between the Lines, about the struggles of an alternative newspaper based in Boston that is taken over by a conglomerate. Launched in 1977, its cast featured a list of important future names, including Jeff Goldblum, John Heard, Lindsay Crouse and Marilu Henner.
Silver’s third film, a 1979 adaptation of Ann Beattie’s Chilly Scenes of Winter, marked a financial step up with the support of the Hollywood studio United Artists, but it was a troubled experience; it became a kind of sleeper hit after the original optimistic ending and title were dismissed.
Silver marked the time with more films for TV until she returned to feature films in 1988 with what remains her best-known film: Crossing Delancey. Like its debut, it was set on the Lower East Side, and also revolved around a female protagonist experiencing the push-pull of tradition and assimilation; the film’s star is Amy Irving, then married to Steven Spielberg. Crossing Delancey shares considerable DNA with When Harry Met Sally, released a year later, as well as with TV sitcom Seinfeld, which also began its nine-year run in 1989.
After that, Silver directed average Hollywood comedies like Loverboy and Big Girls Don’t Cry … They Get Even. Television provided more fertile territory with a series of productions, including the Warsaw ghetto drama In the Presence of the Mine Enemies (1997), starring Armin Mueller-Stahl and Charles Dance and the eating disorder drama Hunger Point (2003 ), with Barbara Hershey and Christina Hendricks, who became Silver’s final credit.