Another loss

The Washington Post has an article by Adam Bernstein about the death of a very good actor:

Ron Silver, a Tony Award-winning actor who excelled in intense and unconventional roles, notably on film as Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz in Reversal of Fortune and a Holocaust survivor balancing three wives in Enemies: A Love Story, died on 15 March of esophageal cancer in New York City at the age of 62.
Mr. Silver gained a reputation as a formidable political activist for liberal causes. He headed a major theatrical union in the 1990s and campaigned for several Democratic presidential contenders, including former senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. In 1989, he helped form the Creative Coalition, a group of liberal Democratic actor-activists including Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin who supported and testified before Congress about First Amendment rights, arts funding and public education.
"Basically I'm trying to be useful," he told The Los Angeles Times. "I've always thought involvement in public affairs is a legitimate use of celebrity. A celebrity's capacity for indignation is as great as any other citizen's, but our ability to find a forum for its expression is greater."
He startled many of his activist peers in 2004 by calling himself 'a 9/11 Republican' and speaking at the Republican National Convention in New York City. "If we don't get this right," he told The New York Times about the war on terror, "all the other things don't matter worth a hill of beans. I'll live to fight another day on health care, environmental concerns, and sensible gun legislation."
As a performer, Mr. Silver was described as smoldering, expressive and brainy. In Hollywood, he was often cast in ethnic and offbeat roles, including as a union boss in Silkwood in 1983, and a psychopath in Blue Steel in 1990.
Speaking of his role in Enemies, Madonna told People magazine, "Only Ron Silver could play an incorrigible womanizer and still be endearing. In other words, he's dangerous."
The son of a clothing salesman, Ronald Silver was born on 2 July 1946 and raised on Manhattan's Lower East Side near Chinatown. He studied Chinese and Spanish at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and after graduation he traveled to Southeast Asia during what he called his "extended adolescence". During a Sino-Soviet political flare-up, he was arrested in Leningrad for possessing Chinese study materials, but said he bribed his way out with two cartons of American cigarettes.
He received a master's degree in Chinese from St. John's University in Queens, New York, and flirted with the idea of becoming a China expert for the CIA. But, he told People, "to be my age in 1968-69 and want to work for the CIA was kind of perverse."
His relationship with an actress led him to pursue dramatic studies with teachers Herbert Berghof and Lee Strasberg. A role in a musical revue took him to Los Angeles, where he won small roles in television (Rhoda) and film (Semi-Tough). His 1975 marriage to Lynne Miller ended in divorce. Survivors include two children, Adam and Alexandra.
After returning to New York in 1984, Mr. Silver distinguished himself in two long-running Broadway plays directed by Mike Nichols: David Rabe's Tony-winning Hurlyburly as a Los Angeles bottom feeder; and Andrew Bergman's Social Security, as a New York art dealer whose life is complicated by his visiting mother-in-law (played by Olympia Dukakis).
Mr. Silver's performance in Speed-the-Plow launched him to wider prominence. As producer Charlie Fox, Mr. Silver gave "the performance of his career," New York Times theater critic Frank Rich wrote. "While one expects this actor to capture Charlie's cigar-chomping vulgarity," Rich added, "Mr. Silver's frightening eruptions of snarling anger and crumpled demeanor in the face of defeat make what could be another Beverly Hills caricature into a figure of pathos."
Despite the honors he received, Mr. Silver told People that he knew "most of the audience was there to see" Madonna. "But I was thrilled. Here I was with a wonderful part in a wonderful play, and all this attention was being focused on the play because of Madonna."
Mr. Silver maintained an active film career, as the sympathetic son of a dying mother (Anne Bancroft) in Sidney Lumet's Garbo Talks; Cybill Shepherd's bedroom-athlete husband in Married to It; a corrupt senator in the Jean-Claude Van Damme thriller Timecop; and as Muhammad Ali's trainer Angelo Dundee in Ali.
One of his meatiest roles was portraying Dershowitz in Reversal of Fortune. In the film, Dershowitz, a champion of unpopular causes, agrees to handle the legal appeal of Claus von Bulow (played by Jeremy Irons), a slippery aristocrat who had been found guilty of trying to kill his wife with insulin. "If Mr. Irons's Claus von Bulow gives the film its satiric tone," wrote New York Times film critic Vincent Canby, "Mr. Silver's Alan Dershowitz gives it its energy and its singularly tough, unsentimental conscience." The same year, Washington Post film critic Desson Howe praised Mr. Silver's "desperate, harried vitality" in Enemies: A Love Story, based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel about a Jew so traumatized by the Holocaust he finds himself unable to make decisions. As Herman Broder, Mr. Silver drives himself into spiritual, emotional, and financial bankruptcy married to three women simultaneously: the smothering peasant Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), the lusty and unstable Masha (Lena Olin), and the wry Tamara (Anjelica Huston).
The late 1980s and early 1990s marked Mr. Silver's career peak in Hollywood and Broadway. He had won the Tony for best actor as an unctuous movie producer in David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, a drama that also starred pop singer Madonna and Joe Mantegna. On television, he was singled out for riveting performances as a blacklisted screenwriter during the 1950s era in Fellow Traveler, broadcast on HBO; and as statesman Henry A. Kissinger opposite Beau Bridges as President Richard M. Nixon in Kissinger & Nixon, which aired on the TNT cable channel. Mr. Silver had recurring roles on popular television series, including The West Wing as a campaign manager, Chicago Hope as a hospital chief executive and Veronica's Closet as a businessman who dies in a "fluke volcano accident".
In 1991, he was a scholar-in-residence at Yale Law School and studied the First Amendment to prepare for his presidency of the Actors' Equity Association, a labor union of theater actors and stage managers. He also deepened his role as a liberal activist, but campaigned for Republican Rudy Giuliani in his 1993 New York mayoral bid. At the time, Mr. Silver said he was "very uncomfortable with the orthodoxies" of party politics. Of his later rightward lurch after the 2001 terrorist attacks, he told the New York Times he was disappointed by the repercussions in his social life. When he received invitations to parties, he said, "there's no engagement. It's 'Ron, you're too smart for this,' 'Ron, you must be kidding,' 'Ron can we not talk about the war and have a nice dinner party?' And then they talk about it, but everybody has the same opinion." Referring to the country music performers, he added, "I'm getting friendly with the Gatlin Brothers, what can I tell you?