LELIA GOLDONI

(1 October 1936 - 22 July 2023)

The American actress Lelia Goldoni has died at the age of 86, following complications with Alzheimer’s. She made her mark in John Cassavetes’ extraordinary maverick 1959 film Shadows, the one that changed American cinema and influenced many filmmakers. It handled racial issues only touched on by Hollywood and was truly independent of the mainstream. Without it, we might never have seen Shirley Clarke’s The Connection, Frank Simon’s The Queen, Joseph Strick’s The Savage Eye, Jonas Mekas’ The Brig or the films of Andy Warhol. And there might never have been Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider.

In Shadows, Goldoni played the sister of two black brothers (Ben Carruthers and Hugh Hurd) trying to make a living in New York, one a jazz trumpeter, the other a singer. Their sister Lelia wants to write but drops her boyfriend and gets pregnant by another guy, who kicks off when he finds that Lelia is Afro-American. In real life Lelia Goldoni was not black but was born Lelia Vita Rizzuto in New York to a Sicilian family.

The family moved to Los Angeles where Lelia attended the City College and became a dancer in the 1950s. She had been a child actress during the 1940s, in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s House of Strangers and John Huston’s We Were Strangers. Back in New York, she joined an acting class and met John Cassavetes which led to Shadows and a Bafta nomination. Her next film was Hysteria, a Hammer horror, and then something equally horrific, Theatre of Death (aka Blood Fiend) with Christopher Lee. In The Italian Job (1969) she was the woman who gives Michael Caine the route for the famous chase around Turin. She was nominated again by Bafta for best supporting actress in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Martin Scorsese’s drama with Ellen Burstyn as a widow looking for a better life. Goldoni played her best friend and neighbour Bea.

The Day of the Locust was John Schlesinger’s satire on 1930s Hollywood and those desperate to be in the movies. Goldoni played Mary whose boyfriend is a passionate dwarf. She then appeared in John Hancock’s Baby Blue Marine with Jan-Michael Vincent as a recruit who flunks getting into the Navy. Bloodbrothers was a coming-of-age family drama with Richard Gere and Paul Sorvino. She was also in Philip Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers with Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams.

She played herself in A Constant Forge, a 200-minute documentary on Cassavetes, with Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Sean Penn, Jon Voight and Gena Rowlands. Still to come is Stefan Lysenko’s comedy, The Next Cassavetes about a director planning to remake Minnie and Moskovitz. In 1993 Goldoni produced and directed the documentary Genius on the Wrong Coast, about the dancer Lester Horton. Goldoni married and divorced Shadows co-star Ben Carruthers and then wed William B. Hale from 1961 until his death, and finally the writer Robert Rudelson, by whom she has a son, Aaron.

MICHAEL DARVELL