JOAN MICKLIN SILVER

(24 May 1935 - 31 December 2020)

The American theatre and film director Joan Micklin Silver, who has died from vascular dementia at the age of 85, became known through such films as Hester Street (1975), Between the Lines (1977) and Crossing Delancey (1988). Born Joan Micklin in Omaha, Nebraska, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, she made films about the immigrant experience and also broke the barriers that had limited women from directing. Her career began as a writer on Village Voice magazine in New York and she also taught music and wrote plays. In 1970 she adapted Lois Gould’s novel Such Good Friends for Otto Preminger but was replaced. Limbo was her screenplay about prisoners’ wives in Vietnam for director Mark Robson but another writer took it over. After working on children’s educational titles, she adapted and directed Hester Street from a book by Abraham Cahan concerning a Jewish immigrant in New York. It starred Steven Keats and Carol Kane, who was Oscar-nominated. Silver’s next film was Between the Lines about an alternative newspaper in Boston, with John Heard, Lindsay Crouse and Jeff Goldblum. Heard was also the star of Chilly Scenes of Winter (aka Head Over Heels) with Mary Beth Hurt and Peter Riegert, a romantic comedy but, with the studio adding a happy ending and a change of title, the film failed. Crossing Delancey was Silver’s most successful movie in which bookshop assistant Amy Irving has a yen to enter literary society but is scared of revealing her lowly background. Later films included Loverboy, Big Girls Don’t Cry... They Get Even, A Fish in the Bathtub and several television movies as well as a radio series of Great Jewish Stories from Eastern Europe and Beyond. In 1956 Joan Micklin married the writer-director-producer Raphael D. Silver, who died in 2013. They have three daughters, Marisa, Claudia and Dina.

MICHAEL DARVELL