dead

Tom Noonan, a character actor and filmmaker known for playing villains in “Manhunter” and “The Last Action Hero,” died on Valentine’s Day. He was 74.

The death was confirmed by Fred Dekker, director of “The Monster Squad,” who wrote on Facebook, “Tom’s indelible performance as Frankenstein … is a highlight of my modest filmography.”

Noonan had a nearly 40-year career on TV and in film, making his mark with a role in “Manhunter,” the 1986 movie based on a Thomas Harris novel.

In “Manhunter,” which starred William Peterson of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” as an FBI agent and “Succession” star Brian Cox as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Noonan played Francis Dolarhyde, the serial killer also known as the Tooth Fairy. It was a performance that “knocked out” Dekker, who then pursued Noonan for “Monster Squad.”

Playing a killer wasn’t unusual for Noonan, who stood 6-foot-5 or 6-foot-6, depending on who you trust. On a 2013 episode of TV’s “The Blacklist,” he played “the Stewmaker,” a man with a taste for dissolving human bodies in acid. In the 1993 comedy “The Last Action Hero” he was the Ripper, a fictional nemesis who comes to life in the high-concept film-within-a-film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as action star Jack Slater.

Born in Greenwich, Conn., on April 12, 1951, Noonan was raised by his math-teacher mother Rita and a large extended family after the death of his father, John Ford Noonan Sr. He went to school at Yale Drama and later founded New York’s Paradise Factory theater with Jack Kruger at the site of the Paradise Ice Cream Factory, where the ice cream cone was invented. The two built a theater and rehearsal rooms where the condemned building stood.

Paradise Factory now bills itself as “bringing the rigor of theatrical discipline to the process of cinematic art, and bringing the intimacy and immediacy of the cinema into theatrical performance art.”

“I wish I had more success as an actor,” the New York-based actor told The Times with a dash of melancholy in 2015. “I think people call me because they’re channel surfing late at night and they see me in a movie on cable.”

In that story, about the actor and his friend and collaborator Charlie Kaufman and Kaufman’s stop-motion animation film “Anomalisa,” a Times staff writer described Noonan: “Like Kaufman, he has a dark worldview, an idiosyncratic sensibility, blackly comic thoughts and, at times, an endearing crankiness.”

In “Anomalisa,” Noonan was credited with playing “Everyone Else” — and that wasn’t an exaggeration. Jennifer Jason Leigh and David Thewlis played the leads; Noonan voiced more than 40 other roles in the film.

“Even I can’t tell if it’s me sometimes,” he told The Times in 2015 about the extensive studio-recording process. “I mean, I recognize the voice, but I’m not sure where it came from.”

“My first TV interview was with Tom Noonan for a local NYC show called MIDDAY(?),” actor Jerry O’Connell wrote early Wednesday on Instagram, including a blurry image of them on the show’s set. “I was so nervous. Tom was so kind. I saw him in every (NYC) play he was in after. He bought my brother and I tickets to Eddie Murphy’s RAW (we were too young to purchase). Btw, on this episode, I was talking about a movie about to come out (Stand By Me) and Mr. Noonan was talking about his movie (Manhunter). Rest In Peace LEGEND.”

Noonan appeared in the famous 1980 flop “Heaven’s Gate” and cast a creepy gothic shadow decades later in “The House of the Devil” (2009). He was a ghoulish host of a late-night television horror program in the 2005 vampire movie “The Roost,” then played a wagon-train missionary in the 2007 western “Seraphim Falls.”

“Robocop 2” (1990) had Noonan as Cain, a messianic maniac with a nose ring who leads a gang of terrorist dope dealers.

In 18 episodes of the series “Hell on Wheels,” which ran for five seasons on AMC, he was the Rev. Nathaniel Cole. Other TV credits included episodes of Fox’s “The X-Files,” HBO’s “The Leftovers,” CBS’ “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and the Louis C.K. series “Louie” (FX) and “Horace and Pete.”

Noonan’s half-dozen directing credits include the 1994 film “What Happened Was …,” which was produced as a play, then became a movie and then won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature. In addition to writing and directing the movie, Noonan played the lead male role opposite actor Karen Sillas. Noonan also won Sundance’s Waldo Salt screenwriting award for the script.

The next year, his feature “The Wife” — a dark comedy once again written, directed by and starring Noonan — was a nominee for the same Sundance Grand Jury Prize. Described by the New York Times as a “bleakly funny evisceration of modern marriage,” the movie co-starred Karen Young, who was Noonan’s wife from 1992 to 1999.

And Noonan’s 2015 movie “The Shape of Something Squashed” was born out of confusion and some despair after his agent called him with what initially looked like a part in one of the “Mockingjay” installments of “The Hunger Games” franchise. When he got the script, though, he saw only one role for someone his age, and that job — playing President Snow — already belonged to Donald Sutherland.

Turns out there never had been a part in the offing. Sutherland was just busy, and Jennifer Lawrence and the rest of the “Hunger Games” cast needed someone to rehearse with them for a week.

After recovering from a brief emotional tailspin, Noonan knocked out the script for “The Shape of Something Squashed” — then directed and acted in the film.

He was preceded in death by his older brother, “A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking” playwright John Ford Noonan Jr., who died in 2018 at age 77.

Former Times staff writer Steve Zeitchik contributed to this report.

A BRITAIN’S Got Talent star was accused of a child sex offence just days before she was found dead at home, an inquest heard.

Kerri-Anne Donaldson, 38, reached the semi-final of the ITV show in 2014 as part of the group Kings and Queens.

An inquest heard today Kerri-Anne was arrested on suspicion of “child sex offending” but no further details were revealed.

The dancer was detained on June 4, 2023, and questioned at a police station.

She was discovered dead at home in Farnborough, Hampshire, three days later by her sister Cara Donaldson.

There was a note at the top of the stairs urging Cara not to come inside alongside photos of her dog and family.

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The song “You are so Beautiful” was also playing when Kerri-Anne was found, the inquest heard.

The court was told the performer’s cause of death was given as hanging.

A post mortem also found she had non-fatal levels of medication in her blood, which were consistent with an overdose.

The inquest heard evidence yesterday from Detective Constable Benjamin Harris, of Hampshire Constabulary, who led the investigation into the unknown accusation against Kerri-Anne.

He said her accuser had let police know the dancer threatened to take her own life “if someone finds out” about the allegation.

Det Con Harris said he had considered the possibility her comments could be a “form of control” against the complainant.

He said: “In my experience in some offences it can often be said without wanting to carry it out.”

The officer told the inquest the suggestion of self-harm was “something we take very seriously” and he reported it to his senior officers and advised his colleagues who arrested Kerri-Anne.

He said following the interview, he graded the dancer’s risk of self-harm as “standard”.

The officer added: “When I spoke to Kerri, which was after the interview, in the cell she presented to me at that time that she was fine, so normal.

“She had no indication that she wanted to take her own life, when that was spoken about with her she gave no indication that would happen.”

Det Con Harris said Kerri-Anne told him she had seen a counsellor previously and added: “She knew how to get help and she was in no way considering harming herself.”

But he told the court “with the benefits of hindsight” he should have included a question about the complainant’s comments when making the risk assessment.

The inquest heard yesterday how following her release from custody, Kerri-Anne failed to return home – causing her family to report her as a missing person.

She was later found at a Travelodge hotel in Woking, Surrey, after taking an overdose.

Cara said her sister told an emergency doctor at St Peter’s Hospital in Surrey that she had wanted to kill herself.

Recalling the tragic statement, she continued: “I just wanted to hug her.”

Psychiatric liaison nurse Serina Juru, who carried out a mental health assessment after the overdose, said today she assessed Kerri-Anne as at a “high and imminent risk of suicide” and rated her risk as level 10 out of 10.

She told the court the dancer said she could be sent to prison if convicted of the offence and that she “could not face that”.

The nurse added: “She wanted to end her life because she was embarrassed about what had happened.”

Ms Juru said she offered Kerri-Anne an “informal” admission to hospital for further assessment or home care support but she refused both that day leading her to start a “high-risk care plan”.

She said the performer also told her that if she was discharged into the care of her sister Cara, she would wait for her to leave to look after her children and then take her own life.

The inquest heard Kerri-Anne was discharged from hospital the following day into Cara’s care when Ms Juru was not on duty.

Psychiatrist Dr David Enright, who had assessed her, said she was “calm” and no longer thinking about suicide.

But Cara said when she drove her sister home on June 6, the dancer told her she had made the decision to take her own life.

She claimed the family had not been given any care plan or advice on how to assist the star when they left the hospital.

Cara also said she asked her sister about the allegation and was told she was not guilty and that it had “all been constructed”.

She said she spent the evening with her sister and was reluctant to leave her alone, saying: “If you do anything, Kerri, that will always be on my shoulders.”

Cara continued: “[Kerri-Anne] joked ‘I am not going to do that’, so I left.

“One of the last messages was ‘Thanks for everything today’ and she gave a heart emoji, I just thought she was OK.”

But when Kerri-Anne did not answer the phone the next morning, Cara went round to her home and discovered her dead.

Describing her sister, she said: “Heart of gold, full of fun, brought happiness to life, especially mine, career-driven, adored her family, adored her friends, fantastic dance teacher, everyone loved her.”

She said Kerri-Anne had been on television a few times and added: “Her main passion was to choreograph dancing.”

The Kings and Queens Latin dance troupe were a big hit with BGT fans, making it all the way to the semi-final of the ITV show.

Kerri-Anne performed alongside Neil and Katya Jones and Kai Widdrington, all of whom became professionals on Strictly Come Dancing.

Following her death, Neil said: “Kerri Anne Donaldson – remember that name and please never forget it because it belongs to a woman who loved to dance, create and perform, she had the cheekiest laugh and a heart of gold.

“She hated getting in the car with me, but would always listen to my crazy ideas, we shared so many moments and stories and she was always the voice of reason.

“Kerri you were my friend and like my big sister.”

Ex-Strictly dancer Joanne Clifton also paid her respects to the “beautiful dancer”.

She said: “I have no words… This is just heartbreaking.. truly devastating.

“We’ve known you and shared the dance floor with you basically all our lives.

“Dance up there with the angels Kerri.. you beautiful dancer, you beautiful soul.”

Amy Dowden echoed those sentiments, writing: “So shocked and sad. Such a beautiful dancer and kind soul.

“Sending love to all your family and friends. Heaven has certainly gained an angel. Keep dancing up there lovely.”

If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please call the Samaritans for free on 116123.

THE cause of death of Victoria Jones, the daughter of Hollywood legend Tommy Lee Jones, has been revealed after more than a month.

The 34-year-old was tragically found dead at a luxury San Francisco hotel in the early hours of New Year’s Day.

Officials have now confirmed the former child star died from a cocaine overdose.

A harrowing 911 call came in to emergency services at 2:52am on January 1 saying a woman had suffered a suspected overdose.

Staff thought Jones had been drinking when they found her lying on the ground on the 14th floor of the ritzy Fairmont hotel.

She was spotted by a guest who thought she “might be drunk”, a source told The Daily Mail.

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Paramedics rushed to save her, but desperate attempts to revive her failed and she was pronounced dead at the scene.

The initial investigation ruled out foul play and stated that there were no signs of drugs around the body.

Today, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in San Francisco announced that Victoria’s death was due to the “toxic effects of cocaine” and ruled it an accident.

Victoria Kafka Jones was the daughter of the actor Tommy and his ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley, who divorced in 1996.

Her heartbroken family spoke out the day following her death, saying: “We appreciate all of the kind words, thoughts, and prayers.

“Please respect our privacy during this difficult time. Thank you.”

Victoria acted as a child, appearing in Men in Black II and later The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. 

She also made a one-episode appearance on One Tree Hill.

Although she stepped away from acting, Victoria still appeared with her father at public events.

In the year before her death, Victoria was arrested at least twice, court records show.

A police report was made in April last year by her husband, Navek Ceja, 44, who alleged she had been taking cocaine, the Daily Mail reports.

He claimed his wife had been using the drug over a 48 hour period while staying at his family’s luxury winery in Napa.

Cops arrived at the scene and said Jones was talking quickly and “was fighting with her body movements”.

She tried to fight away the officers and claimed the 911 call was a mistake, the report adds.

Jones later admitted to using cocaine and was taken to a local jail where officers found a white powder inside her coat.

She was charged with being under the influence of drugs, resisting arrest and possessing a controlled substance.

Two months later, Jones and Ceja reportedly got into a heated fight at the Carneros Resort and Spa in Sonoma.

Ceja, 44, told police that they got into an argument after he confronted her about her drug and alcohol use.

Jones allegedly slapped Ceja around the face twice.

Police were called and Jones was arrested and taken back to the Napa County Jail where she was charged with a misdemeanour domestic violence charge.

Both of the cases were never resolved with Jones due to be in court on the domestic violence count on January 20.

When Robert Duvall was floundering around in college, his father, a career Navy man who retired with the rank of rear admiral, told him to shape up — and start acting.

“I wasn’t pushed into it but suggested into it,” Duvall once told an interviewer. “They figured I did skits around the house. They figured I had a calling, or whatever, in that line.”

They figured correctly. With his weathered face and receding hairline, he did not stand out for his movie star looks but for the intensity and depth he brought to his craft. New York Times film critic Vincent Canby in 1980 called him “the best we have, the American Olivier.”

Duvall, a veteran of many leading roles but best known for his sharp portrayal of supporting characters such as “The Godfather’s” Irish American consigliere and the unhinged Army colonel who loved the smell of napalm in the morning, died at 95 on Sunday, his wife, Luciana Duvall, announced on Facebook.

“Bob passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by love and comfort,” she wrote.

Although he could play comic characters such as Maj. Frank Burns, the priggish Army doctor who was obsessed with nurse “Hot Lips” Houlihan in “MASH,” Duvall specialized in tightly wound tough guys.

In “The Great Santini,” he was a Marine fighter pilot who was as overbearing and explosive with his family as with the men under his command. In “The Apostle,” he was a preacher who killed his wife’s lover with a baseball bat. In “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II,” he was Tom Hagen, a buttoned-down attorney who was loyal to his mob bosses and lethal to those who got in their way. He was an expert, one critic said, in playing “self-controlled men who should not be pushed too far.”

Duvall was known for pouring himself into his characters. He could move with the grace of the tango aficionado he became or with the slow, pained gait of the cancer-ridden editor he played in “The Paper.” He was a keen student of dialect; doing movies in the South, he meandered down backroads, learning just the right way to frame a question in rural Mississippi or deliver a compliment in west Texas.

He loved playing country people and particularly loved westerns.

“That’s our genre,” he said in a 2011 interview with the News and Advance in Lynchburg, Va., near his home on a 362-acre horse farm. “The English have Shakespeare, the French Moliere, and the Russians Chekhov. The western is ours.”

When asked about his acting technique, Duvall would describe it as simply as his favorite character — Augustus McCrae, the wry trail boss on the TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove” — might have described riding a horse.

“It’s just talking and listening,” Duvall told The Times in 2006. “Nothing’s precious. Just let it sit there and find its own way.”

Nominated seven times for an Academy Award, Duvall won lead actor honors in 1983 for his role as Mac Sledge, a broken-down country singer in “Tender Mercies.” A guitar player since childhood, he did his own singing and wrote two of the songs.

Turning down his studio’s offer of a cast party at glitzy Studio 54, Duvall hosted a heartfelt hoedown in his New York City apartment. The crowd ate down-home food cooked by character actor Wilford Brimley, who had flown in from Tennessee. As the party ended at 3 a.m., an exuberant Duvall had everyone join hands for a chorus of “Amazing Grace.”

Willie Nelson — who sang duets with Duvall at the party — told Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell that “Tender Mercies” was dead-on accurate.

“These people Bobby portrayed in his movie, I grew up in those parts and know each of them personally,” he said. “And I’ll probably be that character he plays someday if I don’t take care of myself.”

Many of Duvall’s characters had hardscrabble backgrounds, but Duvall grew up in privilege. Born in San Diego on Jan. 5, 1931, he was raised in places around the U.S. where his naval officer father was posted.

When he was 10, the future star of so many westerns rode his first horse and got to know his first Texans on a family trip to see his mother’s relatives.

By his teen years in Annapolis, Md., Duvall had become an excellent mimic, absorbing dialects and mannerisms wherever he happened to be. He did hilarious impressions of people like his cousin Fagin Springer, a singing evangelist from Virginia, and the tough old cowhands on his uncle’s Montana ranch. Years later, on the set of “The Godfather,” he did impressions of Marlon Brando.

In his more than 85 movies, many of his characters were heavy drinkers, but not Duvall. He went to a Christian Science boarding school in St. Louis and to Principia College, a Christian Science college in Elsah, Ill., and never smoked or drank.

When the affable, athletic Duvall was nearly kicked out of college for poor grades, administrators summoned his parents for an emergency meeting. Everyone agreed he was miscast as a history major. The boy’s only talent, besides tennis, appeared to be acting.

Switching to drama — a decision supported by his parents, who wanted him to stay in school — he turned his academic career around.

In a college production of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” Duvall so deeply merged into the character of a ruthless businessman haunted by a bad decision that he found himself crying. “That clinched it,” wrote Judith Slawson in “Robert Duvall: Hollywood Maverick,” a 1985 biography. “Acting was for him.”

Graduating in 1953, Duvall was drafted into the Army. He trained in radio repair at Camp Gordon in Georgia but spent his off-duty time with a community theater group in nearby Augusta. When he left the service in 1955, he studied at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, a training ground for such top talents as Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen and Jon Voight.

Sanford Meisner, the school’s legendarily demanding director, was impressed.

“There are only two actors in America,” he told playwright David Mamet years later. “One is Brando, who’s done his best work, and the other is Robert Duvall.”

In New York, Duvall worked night shifts at the post office, washed dishes and kept auditioning. He shared an apartment at Broadway and West 107th Street with a fledgling actor named Dustin Hoffman. The two also palled around with Gene Hackman and James Caan.

Over coffee at Cromwell’s Drugstore, the yet-to-be-discovered actors would discuss the mumbling, moving technique of another young actor.

“If we mentioned Brando once, we mentioned him 25 times,” Duvall told The Times in 2014.

After several years of off-Broadway productions, summer stock and roles in TV dramas such as “Naked City” and “The Twilight Zone,” Duvall landed his first Hollywood role in 1962.

As Boo Radley, a mysterious recluse in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Duvall was on-screen for less than five minutes at the film’s end and had no lines. But he played a pivotal character and the film launched a cinematic career that lasted more than five decades.

In the 1979 Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now,” he delivered one of the most famous lines in the history of film. As the swaggering Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, he orders U.S. helicopters to destroy a coastal Viet Cong-held village so he and his men could surf there.

“You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that,” Kilgore says nonchalantly as the village before him erupts in flame. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Kilgore’s chilling monologue topped the list of best movie speeches in a 2004 BBC poll. Duvall later said he had no idea people would remember it.

Duvall seldom played leading men, but Mac Sledge, in “Tender Mercies,” was a notable breakthrough.

“This is the only film where I’ve heard people say I’m sexy,” he told an interviewer. “It’s real romantic — rural romantic. I love that part almost more than anything.”

Duvall was married three times before meeting Luciana Pedraza, a young woman who was dared by her friends to approach him on a Buenos Aires street and invite him to a tango gathering. She played opposite him in “Assassination Tango,” a 2002 film in which he portrays a hit man dispatched to Argentina. They married in 2005 and for years practiced tango on a dance floor they installed in one of their barns.

In addition to his wife, Duvall is survived by his older brother William, an actor and music teacher. His young brother John died in 2000.

Duvall’s legacy includes a wide range of films, from “True Grit” to “True Confessions.” He played a retired Cuban barber in “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway”; a cynical TV executive in “Network”; a dirt-poor Mississippi farmer in “Tomorrow”; a quietly effective corporate attorney in “A Civil Action”; a middle-aged astronaut in “Deep Impact”; a grizzled cattleman in “Open Range”; a tobacco company bigwig in the satirical “Thank You for Smoking”; and in the miniseries “Ike,” he was Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He also tackled some less commercial projects. In 1977, he directed a documentary about a Nebraska rodeo family, “We’re Not the Jet Set.” In 1983, he wrote and directed “Angelo, My Love,” a drama inspired by and starring Romani whom Duvall came to know in New York City.

He worked well into his later years. In the 2009 film “Get Low,” he was a backwoods hermit who staged his own funeral. Two years later, he was a rancher and ex-golf pro who takes a young golfer under his wing in the spiritual drama “Seven Days in Utopia.” And four years after that, he played an alcoholic and abusive justice in “The Judge,” earning a supporting actor Oscar nomination — the oldest actor at the time to do so.

In “A Night in Old Mexico” (2014), he played an ill-tempered rancher preparing for suicide after losing his land to foreclosure. His plans change when he meets an adult grandson he never knew he had and the two wander across the border into bars and bordellos and reflect on life.

“No one plays wise old coots more convincingly,” the New York Times said.

Duvall drew on his inner curmudgeon throughout his career.

As an actor who prided himself on an up-close, deep-down knowledge of his characters, he sometimes bristled at direction.

“If I have instincts I feel are right, I don’t want anyone to tamper with them,” he told After Dark magazine in 1973. “I don’t like tamperers and I don’t like hoverers.”

Horton Foote, who adapted “Mockingbird” for the movies and wrote “Tender Mercies,” became one of Duvall’s few lifelong friends in the industry.

When Duvall was checking out Southern churches as he researched “The Apostle,” which he wrote, directed and starred in, the two were frequently in touch on the phone.

“I could always tell he’d been with a different preacher,” Foote told The Times in 2006, “because he’d try out these different voices.”

Authenticity was so important to Duvall that he gave some key roles in “The Apostle” to local people with little or no acting experience.

Rick Dial, who played a small-town radio reporter in the film, was actually a local furniture salesman.

“Rick improvised a lot of his dialogue,” Duvall told Backstage magazine in 2001. “At the end of ‘The Apostle’ when they cart me off, his skin turned a certain color of grief. I don’t know who told him to do that. He just did it.”

For Duvall, known as an actor who “just did it” in film after film, that was the highest kind of praise.

Chawkins is a former Times staff writer.

Michael Silverblatt, the longtime host of the KCRW radio show “Bookworm” — known for interviews of authors so in depth that they sometimes left his subjects astounded at his breadth of knowledge of their work — has died. He was 73.

Silverblatt died Saturday at home after a protracted illness, a close friend confirmed.

Although Silverblatt’s 30-minute show, which ran from 1989 to 2022 and was nationally syndicated, included interviews with celebrated authors including Gore Vidal, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Foster Wallace, Susan Orlean, Joan Didion and Zadie Smith, the real star of the show was the host himself, the nasal-voiced radio personality who more than once in life was told he did not have a voice for his medium.

His show represents one of the most significant archives of conversations with major literary powerhouses from the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

But Silverblatt knew that he was as much a character as the people he interviewed.

“I’m as fantastical a creature as anything in Oz or in Wonderland,” he said during a talk in front of the Cornell University English department in 2010. “I like it if people can say, ‘I never met anyone like him,’ and by that they should mean that it wasn’t an unpleasant experience.”

Born in 1952, the Brooklyn native learned to love reading as a child when he was introduced to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Neighbors would see him walking the streets of Brooklyn with his head in a book and would sometimes call his parents out of fear he might get hurt.

But until he left home for the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, at the age of 16, Silverblatt has said, he had never met an author.

His college, however, was filled with such famous authors as Michel Foucault, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and J.M. Coetzee, who were all working as professors.

Silverblatt was shy and too embarrassed to speak during class because of his inability to clearly pronounce the letter “L,” which appears three times in his own name. Yet he considered the authors to be his friends, even if they did not know it yet, he said during the Cornell talk.

He would approach them after class to speak about their work.

Despite his interest in literature, Silverblatt’s parents wanted him to become a mail carrier, he said. The summer after his freshman year, Silverblatt worked a New York City mail route, delivering letters to the mayor’s mansion on an Upper East Side route that took him past numerous old bookstores and used-books shops. During that job, he said in the Cornell talk, he purchased the complete works of Charles Dickens.

Silverblatt moved to Los Angeles after college in the mid-1970s and worked in Hollywood in public relations and script development.

Like many young writers in Los Angeles, he wrote a script that never got made.

It was in Los Angeles that Silverblatt met Ruth Seymour, the longtime head of KCRW.

Seymour had just returned to the United States from Russia and was at a dinner party where everyone was discussing Hollywood. There, she and Silverblatt became immersed in a one-on-one discussion of Russian poetry.

“He’s a great raconteur and so the rest of the world just vanished,” Seymour told Times columnist Lynell George in 1997. “Afterward I just turned and asked him: ‘Have you ever thought about doing radio?’”

For the next 33 years, that’s exactly what he thought about.

“Michael was a genius. He could be mesmerizing and always, always, always brilliant,” said Alan Howard, who edited “Bookworm” for 31 years.

“It’s an extraordinary archive that exists, and I don’t think anyone else has ever created such an archive of intelligent, interesting people being asked about their work,” Howard said. “Michael was very proud of the show. He devoted his life to the show.”

Silverblatt once dreamed of being on the other side of the microphone, as a writer in his own right, Howard said. But he faced bouts of writer’s block through his 20s and gave up writing.

“Eventually, he came to find peace with the reality of that,” Howard said.

Instead of writing, he became an accumulator of a vast amount of other writers’ work — in his library as well as the repository in his head. He had an incredible memory for the books he read.

Silverblatt converted the apartment next to his Fairfax apartment into a library where he kept thousands of books, Howard said.

“It was heaven,” he said. “It was a fabulous library.”

“He was such a singular person,” said Jennifer Ferro, now the president of KCRW. “He had a voice you would never expect would be on radio.”

Alan Felsenthal, a poet who considered Silverblatt a mentor, called Silverblatt’s voice “sensitive and tender.”

Felsenthal said the show was about creating a space of “infinite compassion,” where writers could share things they might not share in everyday conversation.

“Michael was one of a kind, truly singular. And his voice is too,” Felsenthal said.

One of the most important tenets of Silverblatt’s approach was that he not only read the book he was discussing on his show that day, but also read the entire oeuvre of the authors he interviewed.

“A significant writer would come in and be bowled over by Michael’s depth of vision of the work at hand,” Howard said.

David Foster Wallace, in one interview, said he wanted Silverblatt to adopt him.

Silverblatt said he strove to read an author’s entire body of work, but he never claimed to have read it all if he hadn’t.

“In general I try to read the author’s complete work. … That’s not always true, and I never say it if it isn’t true. But more often than not, I have, at least, read the majority of the work. And sometimes it’s a superhuman challenge,” he said in the 1997 Times column.

The voracious reader said that the best books, those that brought him happiness, were not the ones that ease our way in this strange and difficult world.

“The books I love the most made it harder for me to live,” he said.

Silverblatt is survived by his sister, Joan Bykofsky.