Celebrity Biographies
Sylvia Miles
She achieved two Oscar nominations with very brief interventions, and was very active, especially in the 1970s. Sylvia Miles died at the age of 94, on June 12, 2019, in the ambulance that was taking her from her home in Manhattan , New York, to the hospital. “She had no family, but her family was the many friends she had in the city,” said actress Geraldine Smith.
Born on September 9, 1924, in Greenwich Village, the neighborhood of the Big Apple, Sylvia Lee (her real name) was the daughter of a humble furniture manufacturer. After spending time training at the Actor’s Studio, she began her run on the Broadway stage in 1947, and later she began appearing in television series and films.
She rose to prominence in Midnight Cowboy as Cass, a middle-aged woman living with married men who conned naive Texan Joe Buck, played by Jon Voight . Despite the fact that she only appeared on screen for six minutes, she earned an Oscar nomination for best secondary. She didn’t get out much either, about five minutes total, in Goodbye, Doll , where she played an alcoholic being questioned by Detective Philip Marlowe, played by Robert Mitchum .
Close friends with Andy Warhol , she starred in his experimental film Heat , in which she played a Hollywood old glory. Sylvia Miles did not sit well with criticism, because in a restaurant she spilled the contents of a plate of food to the critic John Simon, because he had not liked her negative comments, in the review of one of her films . She married in 1948 to William Miles, from whom she took her last name forever, she divorced two years later. She was later linked to Gerald Price and the disc jockey Ted Brown, although the couples did not last long; the latter stated in an interview that he had left the relationship because she refused tooth and nail to have children.
Throughout her extensive career, she stood out as a theater producer, in Death Under the Sun , an adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel . She also played Oliver Stone ‘s Wall Street real estate agent Dolores, who brought her back for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps , the sequel. She was also the mother of Meryl Streep in Life and Love of a Devil .