Sylvia Miles

Sylvia Miles, born Sylvia Scheinwald on September 9, 1924, in Greenwich Village, New York City, was an American actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television across more than six decades. The second daughter of Belle (née Feldman) and Reuben Scheinwald, a furniture maker, Miles grew up in a Jewish household in the city where she would spend her entire life. She received her education at Washington Irving High School and the Actors Studio, and began her professional stage career in 1947, moving into television and film work by 1954.

Miles appeared on Broadway between 1963 and 1976, with her most prominent credit being the 1976 revival of The Night of the Iguana. She also appeared in The Act. Beyond Broadway, she accumulated an extensive Off-Broadway record, which by 1975 included 26 productions. Among her Off-Broadway work was a 1992 appearance in Ruthless! The Musical at the Players Theatre in New York City, where she played Sylvia St. Croix, a role originally performed by Joel Vig in drag, making Miles one of the few women to take on the part. In 1981, she starred in a one-woman musical based on her own life, titled It's Me, Sylvia!, and her life was also the subject of a documentary, I Was Always Sylvia, which aired on New York public television channel WNET as part of The 51st State series.

Her film career produced two Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress. The first came for Midnight Cowboy (1969), in which she played a middle-aged Park Avenue woman who invites Jon Voight's character Joe Buck to her penthouse apartment — a performance that occupied roughly six minutes of screen time. The second nomination followed for Farewell, My Lovely (1975), a slightly longer role of approximately eight minutes. Miles also starred in Andy Warhol's underground feature Heat (1972) alongside Joe Dallesandro, and appeared in the Indian suspense film Shalimar (1978) and the Agatha Christie adaptation Evil Under the Sun (1982), in which she portrayed a Broadway producer. She played real-estate agent Dolores in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), a role she returned to in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). Additional film credits included 92 in the Shade, Critical Condition, The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday, Crossing Delancey, and the 1989 comedy She-Devil, in which she played the mother of Meryl Streep's character. In her later years she appeared in Go Go Tales and had television roles on Sex and the City and One Life to Live.

Earlier in her career, Miles played Sally Rogers in the pilot episode of what would become The Dick Van Dyke Show, a role subsequently taken by Rose Marie for the series. Her early television work also included appearances in three episodes of Naked City and two episodes of Route 66.

Miles was married three times: to William Myers from 1948 to 1950, to Gerald Price from 1952 to 1958, and to radio disc jockey Ted Brown from 1963 to 1970, with Brown citing her lack of desire to have children as the primary reason for the divorce. During the 1970s she was in a relationship with model Rudolf Martinus. A competitive chess player in the 1960s and 1970s, she was a member of the Manhattan Chess Club. In 1973, she poured a plate of food onto critic John Simon's head at a New York restaurant in response to his negative review of a play in which she had appeared. In 1975, she publicly addressed being typecast as a prostitute across the majority of her film roles to that point.

Miles died on June 12, 2019, at the age of 94 while being transported to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. She had been in nursing home care in her final months, having experienced declining health marked by anemia and respiratory issues.