UD has begun watching, at home, the YUGE backlog of excellent foreign and domestic films she has failed to watch over many years. Her old friend Lisa Nesselson, who has done little other than watch films most of her life, finds UD‘s neglect of films outrageous, and UD agrees that it is. So here she goes.
Yesterday she watched Wizard of Lies, about Bernie Madoff, the miz and the kids. She was mesmerized by Robert De Niro’s performance, in which he seemed somehow to have crawled inside the skin of the man, but she also took note of the last name of the actor playing one of the sons: Nivola.
Nivola… Wasn’t there a sculptor by that name, and wasn’t he a friend of UD’s father-in-law Jerzy Soltan?
Yup. They had in common Le Corbusier, the Harvard Graduate School of Design… When she mentioned the name to Mr UD, he said:
The Nivolas were away, and we stayed in their New York apartment one Christmas. I was eleven. At some point I figured out how to lock their bathroom with no one in it. So I did this and then sat in a nearby chair watching various family members eventually, politely, and increasingly desperately, begin asking if everything was okay, if they could maybe…
The actor is Nivola’s grandson.