Blanche Marvin, an American expatriate whom The New York Times once called London’s “best-loved theater critic,” was not just a commentator on great dramas, but also claimed to be an inspiration for one of the most famous.
She said her friend Tennessee Williams had named Blanche DuBois, the faded-belle protagonist of his 1947 classic “A Streetcar Named Desire,” after her.
Moreover, she insisted that Mr. Williams had adapted a consoling remark Ms. Marvin had offhandedly made to him into Blanche’s indelible final line: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Whether her assertions were truth or self-mythologizing, Ms. Marvin went on to a redoubtable career as a critic — starting in her 60s and publishing in a newsletter and then mostly on her website — after working as an actress, playwright, impresario and agent. She died at her home in London on Jan. 13, four days before her 101st birthday, her daughter, Niki Marvin, said.
Just 4-foot-11, Ms. Marvin was a sizable and ubiquitous presence in British theaters in her beads, hats and scarves. She was known to have attended 21 performances in a single day at the Edinburgh International Festival. The British Theater Guide called her “bionic Blanche.”
She worked until she was 99, covering mainstream plays and fringe productions with a tireless desire to see and review everything.
“I’m older than anyone else,” she told The Guardian in 2018. “I’ve seen the originals, I can provide the context. Critics used to be authorities. Now they’re just journalists. I’m the only one left.”
In her reviews, she was as keen and unsparing as a fan keeping score at a baseball game.
Of Rachel Weisz’s turn as, yes, Blanche DuBois in a 2009 “Streetcar” production, Ms. Marvin wrote, “I loved her performance, but it was not Blanche in her unnerving faded allure.” She added, “I did not weep as I have always done” at the play’s ending.
As she scrutinized shows, Ms. Marvin could be tetchy about what she viewed as ever-lowering standards: the use of actors who could not, in her estimation, project properly, and the trend of casting celebrities instead of trained stage actors. The appearance of Daniel Radcliffe, of “Harry Potter” fame, in “Equus,” she told The Guardian in 2007, “is a metaphor for the way things are going. Harry Potter in the nude!”
She said that led directly to Ian McKellen playing King Lear “with his pants down,” further “vulgarizing the theater.”
But, she added perkily, “we must keep art alive. That is my mission.”
Stephen Daldry, the three-time Tony Award-winning director whose early work Ms. Marvin championed, said in an email that she “became central to the theatrical landscape of London with her wise and insightful reviews and her determination to be at almost every opening in London and across the country.”
Blanche Schein was born on Jan. 17, 1925, in Manhattan. According to her daughter, she became estranged from her parents and siblings early on and did not discuss them later in life.
Blanche said she left home at 14, supported herself as a babysitter, briefly attended Antioch College in Ohio and sought a career in the theater.
She danced briefly with Martha Graham and took the stage name Blanche Zohar. The Times, describing a photo in her apartment, called the young Ms. Marvin “a sultry jet-haired beauty with cheekbones so sharp they could fillet a sole,” and she won small roles on Broadway that accented her striking beauty.
She was a hand maiden in “Lute Song” (1946), a Chinese-themed musical starring Mary Martin and Yul Brynner and featuring Nancy Davis (who later married Ronald Reagan). She also played a concubine in “Bathsheba” (1947), which marked the American stage debut of the British movie star James Mason.
Onscreen, she made brief appearances in low-budget films like “Port Said” (1948).
In 1950, she married Mark Marvin, a stage and film producer. He died by suicide in 1958 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
The next year, Ms. Marvin became artistic director of the Cricket Theater, an Off Broadway theater that produced an early play by Edward Albee and brought to an American audience for the first time the work of Athol Fugard, the South African playwright who exposed the brutal realities of apartheid.
She also established there what was said to be the first permanent children’s theater in New York and reworked fairy tales into various forms; “Cinderella,” for instance, became a Restoration-style comedy.
She moved to London in 1968 and founded a talent agency, representing artists including the writer Christopher Bond, whose version of the play “Sweeney Todd,” a retelling of a Victorian horror story, inspired Stephen Sondheim’s Tony-winning musical.
She began reviewing plays in 1987, using a bespoke star system that indicated how urgently one should seek tickets. (Four stars meant “stand if necessary”; one star meant “have a drink!”)
Drawing from her pension benefits, Ms. Marvin started an award for small venues in the early 1990s to help them attract more funding. In 2007, The Times called her “that rarest of things, a bully who is on the side of the angels.” In 2010, she was made an honorary member of the Order of the British Empire.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Marvin is survived by a son, Herbert Marvin, who was born without hearing and is a mental health expert for the deaf.
What to make of the likelihood that Blanche DuBois was her namesake?
“It seems more than likely,” The Times of London wrote in 2011.
“My mother never lied,” Niki Marvin, an Oscar-nominated film producer, said in an interview.
As the story goes, Ms. Marvin — then going by Blanche Zohar — met Mr. Williams in 1944 or ’45, and they bonded over their shared dread of the high stakes of Broadway.
In 2014, Ms. Marvin told The Independent that Mr. Williams had spoken with her about how unhappy he was made by living in hotels, among people he didn’t know.
“I’ve only known kindness from strangers,” she said she told him, “and so can you.”
She also said in the interview that her stage surname, Zohar — which means “glow” or “radiance” in Hebrew — had inspired the name of Blanche DuBois’ sister, Stella. (“Stella!” Blanche exclaims in the play. “Stella for star!”)
Annette Saddik, the editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, said in an email that “Stella for Star” had been the title of an early Williams short story. The story won a prize in 1935, long before he knew Blanche Zohar.
Professor Saddik added that while she could not speak to the validity of Ms. Marvin’s other claims without further research, Ms. Marvin “isn’t part of the conversation on Williams in scholarly circles, as far as I know.”
Alastair Macaulay, a longtime theater critic in London and former chief dance critic for The Times, said in an email that many colleagues were “thoroughly skeptical” of her connection to “Streetcar.”
Still, he added, London critics held Ms. Marvin “in fond regard” for being “generous, robust, funny, enthusiastic.” At her 80th birthday party, he said, one colleague joked affectionately that Ms. Marvin had given Aeschylus the idea for the “Oresteia.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
The post Blanche Marvin, 100, Dies; Critic Was, Maybe, ‘Streetcar’ Inspiration appeared first on New York Times.
