Lelia Goldoni, lead of John Cassavetes’ groundbreaking independent film Shadows (1959), has passed away at 86.
By Orlando G. Bregman, August 5, 2023
R.I.P. Lelia Goldoni (Oct. 1, 1936 – July 22, 2023)
On Sat. July 22 the (independent) film community lost Lelia Goldoni (86), the wonderful actress of John Cassavetes’ groundbreaking Shadows (1959), Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and many more, and dancer, and acting teacher, in Cassavetes’ footsteps, film and theater director, like John, and a fierce believer in and defender of the arts, a true artist in her own right, and a fantastic human being.
She became a dear friend and my “film mother”, since she’d joked during my 2001 John Cassavetes Film Retrospective at the Laemmle Theatres that she had wanted to adopt me. We spent a truly special Fall of 2001 together, working on the 3 month-long running line-up of all of John Cassavetes’ major directorial work, plus Elaine May’s Mikey And Nicky and Charles Kiselyak’s 3-hour Cassavetes documentary A Constant Forge (made for the Criterion Collection box set.)
Lelia (despite only having acted in his first film Shadows) showed up for every single one of the 11 screenings, both Saturday and Sunday mornings, to relentlessly advocate for John’s work and vision. Along with Seymour Cassel and camera operator on most of Cassavetes’ work Michael Ferris, Lelia Goldoni was absolutely instrumental in making the film retrospective a truly meaningful success.
All three helped get Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk, as well as composer Bo Harwood and producer Fred Caruso, on board and we had a truly great time together. They would take my co-producer Mario Luza and myself out after every single screening for lunch and drinks, often on them as well, at the Sunset Bar And Grill and Chez Jay’s in Santa Monica and the Rose Cafe in Venice, free acting lessons from Lelia at the Pacific Building on Hollywood Blvd., hanging out on the fire escape overlooking Hollywood Blvd. with wine and cigarettes, listening to Lelia talking about John, a delicious Greek dinner and Cognac (from Orson Welles) at Mike Ferris’ house, (he’d worked on Welles’ Touch Of Evil.) He’d called Mario and myself part of the Cassavetes film family and threw the dinner for us in honor of John Cassavetes at his own house. Just fantastic and ever inspiring memories, and an enormous loss to myself and to the film world.
I have no words to describe here for what John Cassavetes, Lelia Goldoni, and Seymour Cassel (who worked crew on Shadows and had a tiny part before becoming a Cassavetes acting regular) accomplished with the making of Shadows (1959) and with the John Cassavetes acting workshop (in 1957) that the film sprang forth from as initially just an acting experiment.
(As a side note, anyone who thinks that John Cassavetes cast a white actress in a black part does not truly understand the actual storyline nor the time the film was made in, 1959, when the US was still very much segregated.
In the original acting class workshop, a Black actress was in fact cast to play one of three siblings around which the story in Shadows revolves, then just a single scene, but by the time the idea for a feature film on Black and White 16mm was conceived by Cassavetes she had dropped out and was replaced by another actress in the same acting class or workshop, Italian American Lelia Goldoni, who had paid for class by teaching a dance class in the same building. Bob Fosse worked on the top floor and John Cassavetes and Burt Lane had the ground floor for all their classes.
In the film Lelia Goldoni plays a young, bi-racial Black and white woman who passes for white, just like one of her two brothers, played by Ben Carruthers, who was bi-racial in real life, and to whom she became briefly married after the shoot, but unlike the other brother in the film, who was fully black and was played by Black actor Hugh Hurd, who also had a small but wonderful part in the spaghetti dinner scene in A Woman Under The Influence from 1974.
Also, before 1960, when Lyndon B. Johnson rightfully removed the “national origins” classification from immigration laws, Americans from Italian descents, as well as of Greek descent like John Cassavetes himself, where not so easily socially viewed as white, which at the time mostly meant from the Western European countries in the north west of Europe exclusively and of Anglo-Saxon and Protestant origins, not Southern or Eastern Europe and of Catholic origins.
So when anyone talks of Lelia Goldoni and Cassavetes regular Ben Gazzara, from the Bronx and with Sicilian roots, as simply white actors, or Greek-American John Cassavetes from New York as simply a white director, they should understand that prior to the 1960s those definitions were not so clearcut in place, and people from Southern European heritage as well as Eastern European, have experienced a history in the US of very real, and at the time legal, ethnic discrimination.
Ben Gazzarra had played several leads in Broadway productions of what became classically acclaimed plays, only to be replaced by a truly white actor in the Hollywood film versions, the most famous of which is Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, with Paul Newman in the film version, and immortalized as Brick that way. But Italian-American Ben Gazzara played him first, and to raving reviews, including from a young Peter Bogdanovich who was among the Broadway audience and subsequently worked with Cassavetes himself.)
Lelia Goldoni, a cousin of Yankee player Phil Ruzzuto, was born in New York and raised in Los Angeles, moved back to New York at 19 and joined the Cassavetes acting class shortly after, which resulted in Shadows, later moved back to have a career in Hollywood, where she also participated in the SAG-AFTRA strike of 2007/2008 with Seymour Cassel, who narrowly lost becoming SAG president himself, and who would have been a true fighter for actors’ rights.
Lelia, after teaching acting for several decades in Los Angeles, eventually moved back to New York and passed away last Saturday, July 22 of 2023, in the Actors Fund Home in New Jersey. She’s survived by her son Aaron, who also showed up several times for our Cassavetes retrospective, and his two children.
Rest In Peace Lelia Goldoni (Oct. 1, 1936 — July 22, 2023) A true maverick.
On a final note, and I am sorry to say this, but if the American film community at large had the human and artistic integrity and work ethic John Cassavetes possessed the film industry wouldn’t be in half the mess we’re in today.
I don’t want to attack the artist while the vast majority of the blame obviously lies with the insatiably greedy streamer and studio CEOs, but the artist, if you are truly an artist, should have fought to take control of the film business a lot harder and sooner and collectively than what is finally being displayed at this historic double strike in Hollywood.
And I for one am pretty proud of myself for not subscribing to any streamer ever, save for a few brief stints (for Sam Feder’s Disclosure and Christine Vachon’s Pride, and Transparent, Pose and The L Word) but outside of that still religiously attend films in movie theaters, or rather art houses and museums and film festivals, and actually still buy DVD’s, specifically from the Criterion Collection. I do sometimes watch films on Kanopy with my Public Library card, and PBS on TV, and routinely get lost on YouTube, especially watching old Dick Cavett episodes.
We all know by now that Hollywood needs a serious overhaul, a whole new eco-system even, and the independent film industry has practically died out, and it starts with the artist taking back control.
Yes we need the Paramount Decrees back, and non-exclusive distribution rights but we need film distribution companies back, specifically ones who specialize in low-budget films. We need low-budget films back. We need people working for less money, and less people per production, and producing independently of the streamers and the studios and not selling to the steamers and the studios. We need smaller movie theaters back, specifically art houses who specialize in independent, international and revival films.
We need more and smaller and specialty film festivals and film markets, and outdoor screenings and film venues, and a proper identifying and understanding, and nourishing, of niche audiences. We need DVDs still or back, (still my main mode of home viewing, or van viewing now,) and specialty companies like The Criterion Collection. We also need stage theater and bookstores back but that’s another story.
We need interesting, compelling and mature programming and narration and moderation and education of film again, film theory and criticism and film magazines, in order to instill a love of film again, as it existed in the 1990s and the 1970s. We need a love, a passion and reverence for film as art again that we’ve never quite seen in the US before if we want this business to survive.
It’s already happening on a fairly small scale in Los Angeles and primarily in museums like the Academy Museum and the Hammer and through UCLA as well as festivals put on by Outfest and screening series by the International Documentary Association but we need way more of it and fast because there is an opportunity now to instill a passion for true filmmaking again, and without that the actual film industry will die anyway. It’s up to the artists to take control. And I have some ideas.
Orlando G. Bregman
(They/He)
Written by Orlando G. Bregman. All Rights Reserved (2023)
