The lacerating 1959 drama Shadows, a pinnacle of US independent film-making, heralded two striking new talents: the director John Cassavetes and the actor Lelia Goldoni, who was just 20 when she gave a guileless performance combining wistful romanticism and mercurial restlessness. She played Lelia – all the actors in the film share their first names with their characters – who is an African-American woman “passing” for white. Goldoni herself was of Sicilian descent.
When Lelia’s white boyfriend (Tony Ray, son of the director Nicholas) meets one of her darker-skinned brothers (Hugh Hurd) and realises that she is black, his discomfort inflames tensions in the household and sends aftershocks through the rest of the film.
Goldoni, who has died aged 86, was cast in 1956 after joining an acting workshop that Cassavetes had co-founded earlier that year. “It seemed to me that he was always in a state of discovery,” she said. “What I learned from him was that if you didn’t dare, you couldn’t do.”
During a weekend session with his most promising students, Cassavetes outlined the scenario that would come to form the core of Shadows, then assigned everyone their parts and invited them to improvise. “The actors excitedly went on with variations for more than three hours,” wrote his biographer, Ray Carney. Goldoni said that “what made the scene so exciting was precisely that the problem it posed could not be solved in a decisive or clear way.”
Funded by donations, the film was shot in early 1957 with a lightweight 16mm camera borrowed from the director Shirley Clarke. No one was paid. “What kept us going was enthusiasm,” Cassavetes said.
The three actors playing siblings – Goldoni, Hurd and Ben Carruthers – became as close as a real family in their off-screen lives; Goldoni and Carruthers were married before the end of the year.
Cassavetes used artful tactics to manipulate his cast. For one scene, Carney wrote, “Tony was given his lines in advance,” while Goldoni “received hers at the last possible minute, just before shooting began – which then made his performance more confident and hers more tentative.”
It was 18 months before Shadows was ready, but no sooner had it been acclaimed by the avant-garde film-maker Jonas Mekas than Cassavetes withdrew that version for re-editing and reshooting. Only the second cut, released in 1959, has ever been in circulation. Although Mekas denounced the new Shadows as a sellout, it retains an intensity through claustrophobic closeups and the performers’ raw, jangling energy.
Goldoni exudes an ingenuous vitality, her grin as wide as Madison Avenue, her eyes huge and hungry. Vulnerable she may be, but the character of Lelia is no damsel in distress. She is piercingly frank during a post-coital lament with one boyfriend, and toys with another like a cat with a mouse before admitting: “I’m a strange one.”
Goldoni was born in New York City to Rosaria (nee Pernicone), a seamstress, and Charles Rizzuto, an actor. Once she started performing, she changed her surname to Goldoni, relishing the echo of Carlo Goldoni of the commedia dell’arte.
When the family moved to Los Angeles, she was educated at Hollywood high school. She began dancing at the age of 14 alongside Alvin Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade, under the tutelage of the innovative choreographer Lester Horton. She later directed Genius on the Wrong Coast, a 1993 documentary about him, which was edited by her son, Aaron Rudelson. “There was an element of collectivism in that company,” Rudelson said. “Everybody learned how to make costumes and build sets as well as how to dance, and she took a lot from that experience.”
She studied drama with Jeff Corey in Los Angeles before attending Cassavetes’s workshop when she moved to New York. She could not afford the fees but paid her way by teaching a dance class for his actors.
After Shadows, she worked again with Cassavetes in episodes he directed of two television series, Johnny Staccato (1959) and The Lloyd Bridges Show (1963). She then moved to the UK for the next decade. “She had trouble springboarding the success of Shadows into work in the States because people assumed she was African American, which led to fewer opportunities in that era,” Rudelson said. “She didn’t have that problem in England.”
Her films in the UK included The Italian Job (1969), in which she had one scene as the widow who passes on her late husband’s plans for a bullion heist to the ex-convict played by Michael Caine. “I am going to New York tomorrow at 6am,” she says, seemingly dashing his hopes of a tryst. Then she adds: “But that still gives us four hours to kill.” In the same year, she played Zelda Fitzgerald in an episode of the arts series Omnibus entitled F Scott Fitzgerald: The Dream Divided.
After returning to the US, she landed roles playing a friend to the protagonist in two high-profile films: Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) with Ellen Burstyn, for which Goldoni received her second Bafta nomination (the first was for Shadows), and John Schlesinger’s shrill Hollywood satire The Day of the Locust (1975), in which she appeared alongside Karen Black.
Other films included Philip Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the heady drama Bloodbrothers (both 1978), in which she played Richard Gere’s mother, and the horror film The Devil Inside (2012). She worked frequently in television, including The Pacific (2010), a miniseries co-produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.
She taught acting technique and script analysis at the Lee Strasberg Institute, among others, and designed an after-school theatre curriculum for students aged five to 11 in Los Angeles. In 2013, she starred in Beckett Solos, featuring three of the playwright’s shorter pieces; it was directed in Brooklyn by Alec Duffy, who was previously responsible for a 2011 stage version of Shadows. “I don’t know how she did Beckett Solos because the dialogue was all non-sequiturs,” Rudelson said. “Even a person half her age would have had trouble keeping track of it.”
The show was a critical success. “Stark and ambient, it captures Beckett’s singular music of alienation,” wrote the New York Times. “And Ms Goldoni makes a fine instrument.”
She is survived by Aaron, her son by the screenwriter and actor Robert Rudelson, whom she married in 1968 and who died in 1997, and by two grandchildren, Lily and James. Her marriage to Carruthers ended in divorce in 1960. Her second marriage, to William B Hale a year later, also ended in divorce.
• Lelia Goldoni (Lelia Vita Rizzuto), actor, born 1 October 1936; died 22 July 2023
