The Memorial Wall

North County resident Gene Shefrin, an entertainment industry publicist who represented such stars as Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis, has died at age 90.

Shefrin’s son, Paul, said his father died April 6 in Encinitas after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

During his career, Shefrin represented the likes of Guy Lombardo, Frankie Laine, Vic Damone, Perry Como, Sam Cooke, author Irving Wallace, Don Rickles, Don Adams, Richard Pryor, Jackie Mason, Peter Falk, James Caan, Monty Hall, Peggy Lee, Kate Smith, Connie Francis, Sarah Vaughan, Freda Payne and Dick Clark.

Gene Shefrin was born in New York City in 1921, graduated from City College of New York, and during World War II served in an Army Air Force bomber group.

He began his career in New York in 1945 and started his own company in Los Angeles in the 1960s. He retired in 1987.

Born Feb. 10, 1921 in New York City, Shefrin attended Townsend Harris High School and then City College of New York from which he graduated in 1942 with a bachelor of social sciences degree. He then joined the U.S. Army Air Force and was initially stationed at Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas, and was assigned as a reporter on the base newspaper, the Randolph Rookie, according to information provided by his family.

While there, he married Sophie Schwimmer on Jan. 9, 1943. During World War II, he served in the 96th Bomber Group in England and was awarded two battle stars. He was honorably discharged in 1945.

Later that year, he started his career in public relations at Fred Stengel Associates in New York as an apprentice publicist and, the following year, he joined David O. Alber Associates. In 1963 he left the Alber company and soon thereafter moved to Los Angeles, founding Gene Shefrin Associates, which was re-named The Shefrin Company in 1976 when his son, Paul, joined the firm.

Shefrin retired to North County, primarily Carlsbad, where he lived until his death.

He was a longtime member of both The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Publicists Guild.

Shefrin was well-known for his sense of humor, which he maintained until his final days, his family said.

He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Sophie; his son, Paul, along time publicist; and his two grandchildren, Jordan and Michael.

Professionally known as Ian Holm, the versatile British character actor who earned an Oscar nomination for his turn as the athletics trainer in 'Chariots of Fire' and portrayed the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in four movies, has died. He was 88.

Holm died “peacefully in hospital” of an illness that was related to Parkinson’s disease, his agent said in a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.

Holm gained many sci-fi admirers for his performances as Ash, the decapitated android who keeps on going, in Ridley’s Scott’s Alien (1979) and as the office manager Mr. Kurtzmann in another classic, Terry Gilliam’s fantastical Brazil (1985).

Holm was at his subtle best as Gena Rowlands’ emotionally unavailable husband in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988) and as an inscrutable big-city lawyer in the tragedy-laced The Sweet Hereafter (1997), written and directed by Atom Egoyan.

At 5-foot-6, Holm was always an excellent candidate to play a certain pint-sized French emperor, and he did so three times, in the 1974 nine-part miniseries Napoleon and Love, in Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) and in The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001).

And in one of his rare performances as a leading man, he was excellent as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in the 1978 BBC miniseries The Lost Boys.

A member of the Royal Shakespeare Company starting in the 1950s, Holm collected Tony and Olivier awards before a case of stage fright that blindsided him during previews for The Iceman Cometh left him queasy about working in front of a live audience for more than a decade.

Holm cemented his place in British cinema history when he played the eccentric track coach Sam Mussabini in the historical sporting drama Chariots of Fire (1981). The film, one of England’s most beloved, took the Oscar for best picture, and Holm was nominated for best supporting actor (he lost out to countryman John Gielgud of Arthur).

Holm later portrayed Bilbo, all for Peter Jackson, in The Lord of the Rings films The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003) and in The Hobbit installments An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).

The chameleon-like actor also played King John in Robin and Marian (1976), the father of the scientist in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), a nasty restaurateur in Big Night (1996), a New York City cop in Sidney Lumet’s Night Falls on Manhattan (1996), a holy man in The Fifth Element (1997) and Zach Braff’s psychiatrist father in Garden State (2004).

“I’m never the same twice,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2000, “and I’m not a movie-star type, so people don’t demand that I’m always the same.”

“I had such a good time and a fruitful one with Ian, and my only regret was not to have worked with him once again,” Scott said in a statement. “Ian talked to me during production quite a lot, which I found to be very helpful. A great talent and a great man — we’ll miss him.”

Ian Holm Cuthbert was born on Sept. 12, 1931, in Goodmayes, England. His Scottish parents worked in a psychiatric hospital; his mother was a nurse and his father a psychiatrist and early innovator in the technique of electroshock therapy.

In a 2004 interview with The Independent, Holm said he spent a great deal of time around the asylum as a youngster.

“I wasn’t allowed near any of the dangerous patients,” he noted, “but I do remember one who was called Mr. Anderson. He was always immaculately dressed and, most days, he would fill a wheelbarrow with soil and then spend the rest of the day picking every grain of soil out of the wheelbarrow and putting it on the ground. I rather liked that.

“My childhood there was a pretty idyllic existence. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was happy, but it passed without too much trauma.”

Holm studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then spent more than a decade at the Royal Shakespeare Company starting in 1954. In a 1959 production of Coriolanus, Laurence Olivier cut Holm’s finger during a sword fight, and he wound up with a scar that he was quite proud of.

He made several appearances on British television in the early ’60s, including a stint as King Richard III in the BBC miniseries The Wars of the Roses.

In London in 1965, Holm starred as Lenny, one of the sons of a retired butcher, in the first staging of Harold Pinter’s eerie The Homecoming. He accompanied the play to Broadway two years later and won his Tony award, then reprised the role for the 1973 film adaptation. (All three versions were directed by Peter Hall.)

“He puts on my shoe and it fits!” Pinter once said of Holm. “It’s really gratifying.”

Things did not go as smoothly for Holm in 1976 when stage fright struck during work on Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.

“I got into my first preview, which I just managed to get through,” he recalled in 1998. “Then in the second preview, on the following night, I just walked off the stage and into the dressing room and said, ‘I’m not going back. I cannot go back.’ And they had to put the understudy on. My doctor said, ‘The Iceman goeth.’

“Something just snapped. Once the concentration goes, the brain literally closes down. It’s like a series of doors slamming shut in a jail. Actors dry up all the time. Well, I wasn’t just drying; I was stopping. My fellow actors were looking at me in amazement.”

Holm starred in Pinter’s Moonlight in 1993, then completed his stage comeback four years later when he disrobed completely in Richard Eyre’s acclaimed RSC production of King Lear and won an Olivier award.

Holm’s big-screen résumé also included The Fixer (1968), Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Mary Queen of Scots (1971), Juggernaut (1974), Greystoke — The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), Dreamchild (1985), Henry V (1989), Hamlet (1990), Naked Lunch (1991), The Madness of King George (1994), A Life Less Ordinary (1997), Joe Gould’s Secret (2000), The Aviator (2004) and Strangers With Candy (2005), and he voiced the grumpy chef Skinner in Ratatouille (2007).

For all this, Holm was named a Commander of the British Empire in 1989 and knighted nine years later. He published his memoir, Acting My Life, in 2004.

Survivors include his wife, Sophie. He was married four times (his third wife was Downton Abbey actress Penelope Wilton), was in another yearslong relationship with a photographer, and had five children.

Adam Wade, whose career spanned in the music and TV industry, has died. He was 87.

Wade's wife, Jeree Wade, first confirmed the tragic news to The Hollywood Reporter, saying that the actor, singer, and game show host died at his home in Montclair, New Jersey.

She did not release an official statement regarding her husband's passing. But she confirmed that Adam Wade's cause of death was Parkinson's disease.

Meanwhile, a separate statement posted on Facebook, per American Songwriter's website, also disclosed Wade's passing.

"It is with deep sadness that we inform you of the passing of our husband, father, brother, friend, Adam Wade. Arrangements are being made for his memorial and we will keep you updated; it is a great loss for everyone who knew and loved him. Please keep our family in your prayers. With deep sorrow, The Wade Family," it went on.

The Johns Hopkins Medicines clarified that Parkinson's disease is not "a direct killer." Instead, it can lead a patient to become more vulnerable to falls and infection. The later stages of the disease also cause people to overlook the signals that can threaten lives even more.

Meanwhile, NHS explains that it is a condition in which the parts of the brain get damaged progressively over the years.

After his death, notable personalities and his fans offered tribute as they remembered his contributions to different industries.

Comedian and actress Marsha Warfield said, "I'm so sorry to hear the passing of actor/singer/game show host, Adam Wade. Among his many accomplishments, he will always be the first Black American man to ever host a TV game show, 'Musical Chairs.' My condolences to all whose lives he touched.

Adam Wade's Career

Wade did notable moves in the music, TV, and acting industries that made him more unforgettable.

In 1961, he got compared to Johnny Mathis because of his romantic songs like "The Writing on the Wall," "As If I Didn't Know," and "Take Good Care of Her."

It took years before he clarified in a 2014 interview that he was actually trying to imitate Nat King Cole instead of Mathis.

He then became the first Black person to host the game show, "Musical Chairs." Created by Don Kirshner, the game master recorded it at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York and challenged contestants to answer correct lyrics and song titles.

As for his acting career, he made his debut in an episode of "Tarzan" before collecting more titles like "Come Back Charleston Blue," "Across 110th Street," "Phantom of the Paradise," "Search for Tomorrow," "The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo," and "The Dukes of Hazzard."

Peter Bogdanovich was an iconic film director known for “The Last Picture Show,” “Paper Moon,” and “Mask.” Died Thursday, January 6, 2021 at his home in Los Angeles of complications of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 82.

Within one decade, the ’70s, he was transformed from one of the most celebrated of filmmakers, notably for “The Last Picture Show,” into one of the most ostracized.

Peter Bogdanovich built a reputation as a film journalist in the 1960s with many of his stories published in Esquire magazine. He was hired by B-movie legend Roger Corman and worked with him on his films including “Wild Angels.” He directed and co-wrote the critically acclaimed Oscar-nominated “The Last Picture Show” in 1971. Based on a Larry McMurtry novel, the coming-of-age drama starred Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepard as young adults and the choices they have to make in a small Texas town. The movie established Bogdanovich as one of the maverick young directors of the 1970s along with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. They made their own artistic choices with their films instead of the studios. His next two films were critical and box office hits, “What’s Up Doc?” starring Barabara Streisand and Ryan O’Neal and “Paper Moon” with O’Neal and his daughter Tatum. Bogdanovich’s career then took a downturn, though he had success with the 1985 film “Mask.” He also acted, most notably playing a psychotherapist on “The Sopranos.”  

Notable Quote: “Movies used to be something powerful. …It’s been a bit ruined now. I don’t know if we can get it back — I think we can. But it’s lost its innocence. The interesting stuff has moved to TV, and movies have become more like, ‘What can I blow up next?’ There’s a terrible cancer at the heart of that.” – Los Angeles Times in 2015 

Peter Bogdanovich, who parlayed his ardor for Golden Age cinema into the direction of acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” only to have his professional reputation tarnished in one of Hollywood’s most conspicuous falls from grace, died early Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82.

His daughter Antonia Bogdanovich confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.

Originally trained as a stage actor (he was also a producer, a screenwriter, a film historian, a programmer and a critic, as well as a theater and television director), Mr. Bogdanovich was long recognizable by his soulful basset-hound face, outsize horn-rimmed glasses and trademark neckerchief.

As a filmmaker, he was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past — bygone in American cinema, bygone in America itself.

Reviewing “The Last Picture Show” — only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film and widely considered his foremost — on its release in 1971, Newsweek’s critic called it “a masterpiece,” adding, “It is the most impressive work by a young American director since ‘Citizen Kane.’”

Before the end of the ’70s, however, Mr. Bogdanovich had been transformed from one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood into one of the most ostracized. His career would be marred for years to come by critical and box-office failures, personal bankruptcies, the raking of his romantic life through the press and, as it all unspooled, an orgy of film-industry schadenfreude.

“It isn’t true that Hollywood is a bitter place, divided by hatred, greed and jealousy,” the director Billy Wilder once observed. “All it takes to bring the community together is a flop by Peter Bogdanovich.”

What was more, Mr. Bogdanovich’s life and work would be affected by violent, almost unimaginable personal loss.

Yet in a business that rarely grants second acts, he enjoyed a professional renaissance, both behind the camera and in front of it, in the 21st century. To television viewers of the period, he was probably best known for his recurring role on the HBO drama “The Sopranos.” He portrayed Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the psychiatrist who treats Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, played by Lorraine Bracco.

Mr. Bogdanovich’s film career had seemed almost foreordained, for he was nothing short of a cinematic prodigy. “I was born,” he liked to say. “And then I liked movies.”

As a writer and critic, a calling he pursued in the 1960s, he was the author of influential monographs on Hollywood directors before he was out of his 20s.

As a director, he blazed to fame in the early ’70s as the auteur of three critically acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show,” based on Larry McMurtry’s novel of small-town Texas life; “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a contemporary twist on 1930s screwball comedies, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal; and “Paper Moon” (1973), starring Mr. O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum, about a Depression-era confidence man.

Mr. Bogdanovich’s life, it turned out, was bracketed by loss. For as he would discover, he had been born to a family defined by absence.

The son of Borislav and Herma Robinson Bogdanovich, Peter Bogdanovich was born on July 30, 1939, in upstate Kingston, N.Y., and reared on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His parents were recent immigrants to the United States — his father a Serbian painter, his mother a member of a well-to-do Austrian Jewish family.

The Bogdanovich home, Mr. Bogdanovich recalled long afterward, was pervaded by melancholy. His father was silent and withdrawn. Throughout Peter’s boyhood, their rare moments of camaraderie came when the elder Mr. Bogdanovich took his son to silent films at the Museum of Modern Art.

When Peter was about 8, he learned the source of the family sorrow: He had had an older brother, who died as a baby after a pot of boiling soup was accidentally spilled on him.

By this time Peter was irretrievably in love with motion pictures — sound and silent alike. From the age of 12 to about 30 he kept a file of index cards, one per picture, evaluating every movie he saw. In the end, he had amassed some five thousand cards.

Pictures from the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system — by directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock, starring actors like John Wayne, Cary Grant and James Stewart — beckoned to him above all.

“I just wanted to be like those people on the screen,” Mr. Bogdanovich told The Los Angeles Times in 1972. “I wanted to look like Bill Holden, because I wanted to be a real American boy and do all those wonderful things. And with a name like Bogdanovich there wasn’t much of a chance.”

As a teenager, Peter studied with the famed acting teacher Stella Adler. Leaving the Collegiate School, a Manhattan prep school, “a failed algebra examination shy of a high school diploma,” as The New York Times wrote in 1971, he played small roles in summer stock, Off Broadway and on television.

At 20, he directed an Off Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’s drama “The Big Knife.” (The cast included a young Carroll O’Connor.) Around this time, he began writing on film for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. He helped program Golden Age pictures for the New Yorker Theater, a Manhattan revival house, and for MoMA.

For MoMA, Mr. Bogdanovich wrote his series of monographs on great directors, including Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles. It was a mission undertaken, he cheerfully confessed, so that he could meet and interview his idols.

Those sessions, he said, were his de facto film-school education. (Mr. Bogdanovich would spend the rest of his career, interviewers often carped, dropping his teachers’ names. “Jack” flicked out conversationally denoted Mr. Ford. “Hitch” and “Orson” were self-explanatory.)

He would become most closely involved with Welles, recording scores of hours of oral history before Welles’s death in 1985. The seminal book that resulted, “This Is Orson Welles” (1992), edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and with Mr. Bogdanovich and Welles as co-authors, is “the closest we’ll ever come to a Welles autobiography,” The Orlando Sentinel said in 2002.

Though Mr. Bogdanovich repeatedly disavowed the connection, critics liked to point out affinities between Welles’s career and his own: Both men began as directorial wunderkinds. (“Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, was Welles’s first full-length feature.) Both were later expelled from the Eden of A-list directors. (In the 1970s, a down-and-out Welles lived for a time in Mr. Bogdanovich’s mansion in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles.)

Mr. Bogdanovich struck out for Hollywood in 1964, accompanied by his wife, Polly Platt, a production designer he had married two years before. He was hired as a second-unit director and rewriter by the producer Roger Corman, whose movies — among them “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957) and “Teenage Cave Man” (1958) — strove for maximal shock value at minimal expense.

For Mr. Corman, Mr. Bogdanovich directed his first feature, “Targets,” released in 1968. Inspired by the Charles Whitman Texas tower shootings of 1966, it was nominally a thriller about a troubled young man who embarks on a killing spree.

But it was really a paean to, and an elegy for, the Hollywood films that Mr. Bogdanovich cherished. An aging, elegant Boris Karloff plays an aging, elegant version of himself. Scenes of Tim O’Kelly, who played the young man, scaling heights from which to shoot random strangers — a gas storage tank, a drive-in theater screen — are vivid homages to James Cagney’s last stand, high up in a gas plant, in “White Heat,” Raoul Walsh’s celebrated 1949 film.

For its stylish direction and brisk screenplay, by Mr. Bogdanovich and Ms. Platt, “Targets” drew wide critical praise. His triumph led him to be hired to direct “The Last Picture Show” for Columbia Pictures.

That film, with screenplay by Mr. Bogdanovich and Mr. McMurtry, centers on life and love in a down-at-the-heels town in the early 1950s. Shot in stark black and white in Mr. McMurtry’s hometown, Archer City, Texas, the movie, designed by Ms. Platt, portrays a world of boarded-up storefronts and blowing dust.

The cast featured relative unknowns, among them Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd, a 19-year-old model whom Mr. Bogdanovich had discovered staring seductively at him from the cover of Glamour magazine while he waited in a supermarket checkout line.

It also included veterans like Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson, who at midcentury had been a member of Ford’s stock company.

“The Last Picture Show,” too, is a valentine to old Hollywood. At the town’s fading movie house, Vincente Minnelli’s 1950 comedy, “Father of the Bride,” is playing. When the theater is forced to close, the last picture shown there is Hawks’s “Red River” (1948), starring the indomitable John Wayne.

Nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, “The Last Picture Show” won two, for the performances of Ms. Leachman and Mr. Johnson.

The film catapulted Mr. Bogdanovich to the first rank of Hollywood directors. It also upended his personal life. He left Ms. Platt and their two young children for Ms. Shepherd, embarking on an eight-year relationship that furnished ceaseless grist for Hollywood gossip columns.

His professional success continued with “What’s Up, Doc?,” a reworking of Hawks’s 1938 comedy, “Bringing Up Baby,” and again with “Paper Moon.”

Set in dust-blown 1930s Kansas, “Paper Moon” brought an Oscar to 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for her performance as a scrappy girl who may or may not be the con man’s daughter. (Despite her divorce from Mr. Bogdanovich, Ms. Platt designed this film and “What’s Up, Doc?”)

But after the wild success of the early 1970s came a string of creative debacles. Two vehicles Mr. Bogdanovich conceived to star Ms. Shepherd incurred critical vitriol: “Daisy Miller,” his 1974 adaptation of Henry James’s 1870s novella, and the musical “At Long Last Love” (1975), also starring Burt Reynolds.

“Produced for $15 million, this ‘musical’ was Cole Porter sung by the tone deaf, danced by the afflicted,” The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1990. “Critics compared leading man Burt Reynolds to a wounded buffalo and Shepherd to an orphan trying to play Noël Coward. The picture, which lost $6 million, was Bogdanovich’s ‘Heaven’s Gate.’”

His next film, “Nickelodeon” (1976), an overt homage to early cinema starring Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Reynolds, was also critically derided. But there was far worse to come.

In the late 1970s, after his romance with Ms. Shepherd had ended, Mr. Bogdanovich met the Playboy model Dorothy Stratten at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. They fell in love, and Ms. Stratten, who was married, left her husband to move in with him.

Mr. Bogdanovich gave her a small role in his caper “They All Laughed,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara. But in August 1980, before it was released, her estranged husband, Paul Snider, shot her to death before taking his own life. (The murder of Ms. Stratten, 20 at her death, would be the subject of a 1983 feature film, “Star 80,” directed by Bob Fosse and starring Mariel Hemingway.)

Afterward, Mr. Bogdanovich was reported to have watched “They All Laughed” — which preserves Ms. Stratten’s last film performance — over and over, as if communing with a ghost.

Released in 1981, the film was a critical and box-office failure. Dissatisfied with its promotion, Mr. Bogdanovich bought the rights and tried to distribute it himself. It proved a disastrous decision, costing him some $5 million.

In 1985, with “$21.37 in the bank and $25.79 in his pocket,” according to court papers, he declared bankruptcy, a move that further marginalized him in Hollywood. In the years that followed, he became, by his own account, addicted to prescription drugs.

“I made an enormous number of mistakes,” Mr. Bogdanovich said in a 2004 interview. “You don’t do rational things when somebody blows up an atom bomb at your feet.”

One thing he did that he said he came to regret was to write a biography of Ms. Stratten, “The Killing of the Unicorn,” which was equal parts adoration and accusation. Published in 1984, it contended that Mr. Hefner, in commodifying her, had been partly responsible for her death.

Mr. Hefner retaliated with a bombshell of his own: He publicly accused Mr. Bogdanovich of having seduced Ms. Stratten’s younger half sister, Louise, shortly after the murder, when Louise was 13, below the age of consent.

Mr. Bogdanovich denied the accusation. But it was a matter of record that he paid for Louise’s education; arranged for her to have corrective surgery on her jaw — an act, his detractors said, that was intended to make her look more like her dead sister — and, in 1988, when Louise was 20, married her, causing a frenzy of tabloid opprobrium.

Louise Stratten, billed as L.B. Stratten, appeared in several films and TV movies directed by Mr. Bogdanovich. They divorced in 2001.

“She was like a contact with Dorothy, as far as I was concerned,” Mr. Bogdanovich, speaking of the marriage, told The New York Times the next year. “There was garbage talk that I made Louise have facial surgery — to look like Dorothy. ‘Vertigo’ stuff.”

Mr. Bogdanovich seemed to return to directorial form in 1985 with “Mask,” a well-received picture starring Cher as the mother of a boy with a facial deformity.

But he alienated the Hollywood establishment once more by filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the studio, Universal Pictures, and the producer, Martin Starger, for cutting two scenes and substituting music by Bob Seger for the Bruce Springsteen soundtrack that Mr. Bogdanovich favored. (The suit was later withdrawn.)

Several critical failures followed, including “Illegally Yours” (1988), a romantic comedy starring Rob Lowe; “Texasville” (1990), a sequel to “The Last Picture Show”; and “The Thing Called Love” (1993), a comedy-drama about country music.

In the late 1990s, after declaring bankruptcy again, the down-and-out Mr. Bogdanovich lived for a time in the guesthouse of the young director Quentin Tarantino.

From the mid-’90s through the first years of the 21st century, Mr. Bogdanovich resorted to directing for television. His credits include the TV movies “Prowler” (1995) and “Naked City: A Killer Christmas” (1998) and an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney.”

But the medium, he said, taught him economy and speed. He returned to the big screen in 2001 with “The Cat’s Meow,” his first feature in nearly a decade. Made for just $6 million, it was shot in only 24 days.

That film, too, is a paean to old Hollywood. It tells the story — based on a long-suppressed incident that for years ran through the industry in whispers — of a fatal shooting in 1924 aboard the yacht of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

“The Cat’s Meow” — starring Edward Herrmann as Hearst; Kirsten Dunst as his mistress, the silent-film star Marion Davies; and Eddie Izzard as her lover Charlie Chaplin — earned mostly favorable notices.

Mr. Bogdanovich’s luster was also restored with his publication of two acclaimed books: “Who the Devil Made It” (1997), a collection of his interviews with eminent directors, and “Who the Hell’s in It” (2004), about great actors and actresses.

Later features he directed include “She’s Funny That Way” (2014) and “The Great Buster,” a documentary about Buster Keaton, in 2018.

In addition to his daughter Antonia, he is survived by another daughter, Alexandra (both from his marriage to Ms. Platt); a sister, Anna Bogdanovich; and three grandchildren.

Among Mr. Bogdanovich’s other films as a director are “Saint Jack” (1979), starring Mr. Gazzara as an American who aims to open a bordello in Singapore; “Noises Off …” (1992), an adaptation of a play by Michael Frayn; and the documentary “Directed by John Ford” (1971).

In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bogdanovich offered a cleareyed appraisal of his career.

“I’m not bitter,” he said. “I asked for it. Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do. Pride goeth before the fall.”

But when it came to one of his detractors, at least, Mr. Bogdanovich appeared to have the last laugh. His later-life acting roles included two appearances, in 2005 and 2007, on the NBC series “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

In both episodes, Mr. Bogdanovich, always a wicked mimic, played to the hilt a sybaritic, smoking-jacket-clad, thinly veiled incarnation of Hugh Hefner.

Maia Coleman contributed reporting. Margalit Fox is a former senior writer on the obituaries desk at The Times. She was previously an editor at the Book Review. She has written the send-offs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including Betty Friedan, Maya Angelou and Seamus Heaney.

With Philip J. Hirschkop, he brought Loving v. Virginia to the Supreme Court, which struck down laws against interracial marriages.

“Dear Sir,” began the letter from Washington that found its way to Bernard S. Cohen at the American Civil Liberties Union in June 1963. “I am writing to you concerning a problem we have. Five years ago my husband and I were married here in the District. We then returned to Virginia to live. My husband is white, and I am part Negro and part Indian.”

The letter, from Mildred Loving, went on to explain that when she and her husband, Richard, returned to Caroline County, Va., to live, they were charged with violating Virginia’s law against mixed-race marriages and exiled from the state.

“It was that simple letter that got us into this not-so-simple case,” Mr. Cohen said later. The not-so-simple case was Loving v. Virginia, which Mr. Cohen and his co-counsel, Philip J. Hirschkop, eventually took to the Supreme Court. In a landmark unanimous ruling in 1967, the court said that laws banning interracial marriage, which were in effect in a number of states, mostly in the South, were unconstitutional.

Mr. Cohen died on Monday at an assisted-living center in Fredericksburg, Va. He was 86.

His son, Bennett, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.

The Lovings had married in 1958. Five weeks later they were in their home in Caroline County when the county sheriff and two deputies burst in and arrested them. They pleaded guilty to violating the state’s Racial Integrity Act and were sentenced to a year in jail; a judge, Leon M. Bazile, suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave the state and not return together for 25 years.

By 1963 that restriction had begun to chafe, since they had relatives in Virginia and Ms. Loving missed “walking on grass instead of concrete,” as she put it. A relative noticed her distress.

“I was crying the blues all the time, so she said, ‘Why don’t you write Robert Kennedy?’” she recalled in a 1992 interview with The New York Times. “She said that’s what he’s there for.”

Mr. Kennedy was the attorney general at the time, and Ms. Loving did indeed write to him, asking if the national civil rights legislation then being formulated would provide any relief. Mr. Kennedy in turn suggested she write to the A.C.L.U., where Mr. Cohen was a longtime volunteer.

Mr. Cohen acknowledged that he was not particularly well versed in the relevant areas of law. He faced other obstacles as well, not the least of which was Judge Bazile, whose rulings in the case included this oft-cited declaration: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.”

He began by filing a motion to set aside the sentence, but Judge Bazile took no action on it for months; the Lovings became concerned that they’d been forgotten. But in 1964 a law professor introduced Mr. Cohen to Mr. Hirschkop, who had only recently graduated from law school but knew civil rights litigation. He helped steer the case onto a path that eventually brought it to the Supreme Court, where, Mr. Hirschkop said in a phone interview, he argued that the Virginia law was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution and Mr. Cohen argued that it was also a due process violation.

“Under our Constitution,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in finding in their favor, “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Bernard Sol Cohen was born on Jan. 17, 1934, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin, was a furrier, and his mother, Fannie (Davidson) Cohen, was a homemaker.

He grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from the City College of New York in 1956 with a degree in economics. He graduated from Georgetown Law School in 1960.

Bennett Cohen said that, after the Loving case, his father did a lot of work in environmental law. In one case, he said, “the Jewish boy from Brooklyn represented some Christmas tree farmers whose whole crop of Christmas trees was destroyed by acid rain.” That lawsuit, he said, forced nearby power plants to reduce their pollution.

From 1980 to 1996, Mr. Cohen served in the Virginia House of Delegates, where among his accomplishments were measures that restricted smoking — a hard sell in a tobacco state like Virginia. Over the years, the story of the Loving case was told in a 1996 Showtime movie; the 2011 HBO documentary “The Loving Story,” directed by Nancy Buirski; and the 2016 feature film “Loving,” based in part on that documentary.

Richard Loving was killed in a car accident in 1975. Mildred Loving died in 2008.

In addition to his son, Mr. Cohen is survived by his wife of 61 years, Rae (Rose) Cohen; a daughter, Karen Cohen; and three grandchildren.

In 1994, when Mr. Cohen received a distinguished service award from the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association, he gave an acceptance speech in which he lamented that public opinion of lawyers had turned negative, focusing on a few big-dollar civil verdicts and stereotyping anyone seeking redress in the courts as being part of an overly litigious society.

“There seems to be months of trial time available for Pennzoil to sue Texaco and for Polaroid to sue Kodak,” he said, “but cluttering the court with everyday people has become bad form, bad habit, bad business.”

He worried, he said, about the chilling effect.

“In a society of laws, driven by centers of economic and financial power,” he said, “if the courts are not available for the average person to seek justice, then the average person will not receive justice.”