A mere six minutes of screen-time in John Schlesinger’s 1969 counter-cultural hit Midnight Cowboy was all it took to land Sylvia Miles her first Oscar nomination. For the 1975 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, which brought her second Oscar nod, she still failed to clock up more than 10 minutes on screen. But then Miles, who has died aged 94, knew how to make every second count, filling her life as well as her performances with incident and vitality.
Midnight Cowboy demonstrated her extraordinary way with character, conveying the depth of her character’s complex life in a handful of concentrated gestures. Briskly applying her lipstick in the mirror, she is oblivious to the awkward attempts by the greenhorn hustler Joe (Jon Voight) to broach the subject of payment after sex.
When the penny drops, it is with the force of an H-bomb. “You were gonna ask me for money?” she croaks. “Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with? Some old slut on 42nd Street?” She declares herself “one hell of a gorgeous chick” before diving, sobbing, in the direction of the nearest box of tissues.
“I become the character at the time I’m doing it, so it doesn’t matter if it’s two minutes or 200 hours,” Miles later explained. Bob Dylan had been commissioned to write the film’s theme song but failed to deliver it in time; nevertheless it was always Miles’s contention that the eventual result, Lay Lady Lay, was inspired by her.
She was no less memorable in Farewell, My Lovely as a boozy ex-showgirl briefly revived by the knowledge of her own usefulness, however fleeting, to the private detective Philip Marlowe (Robert Mitchum). In between those two films she had the rare chance to play a lead, and responded with some of her fiercest work: Heat (1972), produced by Andy Warhol and directed by Paul Morrissey, was a loose update of Sunset Boulevard in which she took the Gloria Swanson role of the faded star.
Dazed non-professionals were Warhol and Morrissey’s preferred collaborators and the presence for the first time in one of their movies of a skilled and vivid performer with her own baggage gave the film an extra kick.
Miles brought the same degree of commitment to everything that came her way, be it a part or a party, and the suggestion that she might not be welcome at the latest shindig was far likelier to provoke her ire than a mere bad notice.
After the critic John Simon referred to her in print in 1973 as “one of New York’s leading party girls and gate-crashers”, she dumped her dinner on his head in a restaurant. Most reports claimed it was a plate of paté, steak tartare, brie and potato salad; Miles added coleslaw and cold cuts in her own re-telling, which ended with her advising Simon: “Now you can call me a plate-crasher, too!” Decades later she was still smarting from the slight. “How could I crash anything? I was invited to everything!”
She was born in New York to Bella (nee Feldman) and her husband Reuben Scheinwald, a furniture-maker and factory owner . As a child she played chess with her father in Washington Square Park, and continued to do so competitively.
She was educated at Washington Irving high school and Pratt Institute, and also attended the Actors Studio. She appeared in countless off-Broadway shows in her career, beginning in 1954 with A Stone for Danny Fisher, starring Zero Mostel.
In 1957, a year into its run, she joined the cast of The Iceman Cometh, starring Jason Robards, in the production generally credited with fortifying that play’s reputation. She was also in the US premiere of Jean Genet’s The Balcony in 1960, for which her dresser was said to be Barbra Streisand. In 1981 she mounted a poorly received one-woman show, It’s Me, Sylvia!, derived from articles she had written for the SoHo Weekly News and performed on a set modelled on her own notoriously cluttered apartment.
Her career in the 1960s was dominated by theatre and television before Midnight Cowboy led film-makers to notice her. She was briefly seen in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) and starred with Peter Fonda in the thriller 92 in the Shade (1975).
In Michael Winner’s tasteless horror The Sentinel (1977), she was a German zombie lesbian ballet dancer. She remained in that genre to play a fortune teller in The Funhouse (1981), then starred as James Mason’s wife in the Agatha Christie adaptation Evil Under the Sun (1982). In Wall Street (1987), she was a brassy real estate agent, decked out in leopard print with sunglasses wedged in her platinum hair; she returned briefly in the 2010 sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Her boisterous turn as the chicken-chomping, lip-smacking matchmaker in Crossing Delancey (1988) was among her funniest work.
She was reunited with Morrissey on Spike of Bensonhurst (1988), in which he cast her as a coke-snorting politician. In Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales (2007), starring Willem Dafoe and Bob Hoskins, she was a landlady who considers turning a pole-dancing club into a branch of Bed Bath and Beyond.
“I’m always thought of as controversial or avant garde or erotic or salacious,” she once reflected. “But there isn’t anybody I know who wouldn’t live my life if they could.” Her days were spent “going out, working, getting laid,” and she flitted from one companion to the next with aplomb and enthusiasm. She was married three times by the age of 40; each marriage ended in divorce. “What’s wrong with younger men?” she asked when questioned about the disparity in age between her and most of her partners. “They have less problems, less bitterness and more stamina.”
She carried her own press clippings with her wherever she went, and lived the life of “an elegant mole” in a museum-like New York City apartment filled with so many cherished mementoes – photographs, dolls and other knick-knacks and artefacts – that she rarely received guests for fear they might dislodge some cherished keepsake from its place.
“People disappoint you. Lovers disappoint you. But theatrical memorabilia stays with you, as long as you keep it under clear plastic,” she said.
She is survived by a sister, Thelma.
• Sylvia Miles, actor, born 9 September 1924; died 12 June 2019
