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 get revenge, passed away on Thursday at the age of 85. The director’s daughter, Claudia Silver, confirmed her move to New York Times on Friday, reporting the cause of death as vascular dementia.
Having started his career writing early childhood education films for Encyclopedia Britannica and Learning Corporation of America, Silver’s first feature, 1975 Hester Street, was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2011. An adaptation of the author’s 1896 novel Abraham Cahan Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, about a couple of Jewish immigrants who lived in the Lower East Size, the studios felt that Silver’s low-budget project was too niche and too ethnic to be marketable, since the dialogue is mainly in Yiddish. The director and her husband Raphael D. Silver got the distribution, as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for Hester Street star Carol Kane.
While the Times notes, Silver found himself against anti-Semitism and sexism when trying to tell Jewish stories, despite the studio system of the 1970s. “I heard things so blatantly sexist that the studio executives told me when I started,” an interview with the American Film Institute in 1979. For example, “’Films are too expensive to assemble and distribute, and the directors are one of the more problems we don’t need. ‘”
Silver was to direct seven feature films and a series of films for television. 1977 Between the lines introduces Jeff Goldblum, John Heard and Marilu Henner as some of the young journalists working at an alternative newspaper in Boston. From 1988 Crossing Delancey, based on Susan Sandler’s play, earned protagonist Amy Irving a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress for her part as a single employee in a Jewish bookstore divided between an author and the local bachelor chosen by her grandmother’s matchmaker.
Silver’s final film, 1998 A carp in the bathtub, starred Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara and Mark Ruffalo, while his final project was the 2003 TV movie Point Hunger. She left three daughters, Claudia, Marisa and Dina, a sister and five grandchildren.