Lelia Goldoni has always been one of my favorite names, but I certainly didn’t like seeing it in an obituary column. Yet there it was in last week’s Los Angeles Times, a brief notice that Lelia had passed away at the Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey, at the ripe old age of 86. (Could that be possible? Lelia as I knew her was younger—and lovelier—than springtime.)
I first met Lelia when my own years were not yet in double digits. I was one of the eager young students at Lester Horton’s Dance Theater, back then a citadel of modern dance that happened to be located, as one newspaper article put it, on the “wrong coast.” (Meaning: we were located in West Hollywood., not in New York City.) Lelia was among my teachers, and I also thrilled to see her perform the lead in Horton’s signature dance-drama, Salome. It never occurred to me then that she was not much older than I was. Horton’s used talented teenagers to lead the kids’ classes, and she may have been all of 17. She was also smart, feisty, and gorgeous.
I left Horton’s at age 10, but my family and I stayed in touch over the years with some of the dancers. The most promising of them tended to go east, in search of new artistic opportunities. That was the path of Alvin Ailey, who went on to found the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, showcasing Alvin’s own choreography and evolving into a still-glorious national treasure. In its early days, the Ailey company showcased the dance skills of Carmen de Lavallade, my very first teacher and today the proud recipient of a Kennedy Center honor for her illustrious career in the arts.
Lelia’s own path was slightly different. She resolutely turned from dance to drama, moving at age 19 back to the city of her birth. In New York she joined a workshop run by actor John Cassavetes.. A class improvisation about an interracial family—one sibling is dark-skinned and two others pass as white—evolved into Cassavetes’ first film project as a director. Called Shadows, it is set in a bohemian neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, among budding musicians and artists. The history of the film is a tangled one: a first version, entirely improvised with somewhat chaotic results, was released in 1958. Cassavetes then reworked the project, formalizing the script and shooting new material, for a 1959 premiere that was hailed as a milestone of American independent cinema. In both versions Lelia played the vibrant but troubled sister, trying out multiple romantic relationships as she ponders where she belongs in the world. (Ironically, she did not share the background of her character, also named Lelia. Unlike her mixed-race screen persona, she herself was ethnically Sicilian all the way.)
Following Shadows¸ Lelia took minor roles, sometimes in major productions. She’s remembered as Ellen Burstyn’s best buddy in the early scenes of Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Later, back in L.A. again, she directed a workshop production of a play written by her husband, Rober Rudelson. In the 1980s, after I‘d interviewed her for a magazine piece on the Horton era, she graciously invited me to lunch in her modest but colorfully decorated apartment. When I gazed at a poster for Shadows that highlighted her lovely face, she surprised me by acknowledging, “I was really beautiful then.” She quickly added, “I can say that, because I’m not beautiful now.”
But Lelia always remained beautiful, for those with eyes to see.
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