Many thanks to Kevin Spacey for taking over this space last week and delivering a fine tribute to his former acting teacher, Marian Seldes.
His column generated plenty of e-mail, so much so that, should his budding acting career not pan out, he may try his hand at theater journalism — in which case my days might be numbered.
The most affecting response Spacey received came from his “House of Cards” co-star, Michel Gill, who plays President Walker.
Like Spacey, Gill studied acting with Seldes at Juilliard. As soon as Gill’s first class was over, he called his father, who was living in Switzerland, to tell him about “this extraordinary creature I had experienced in Marian Seldes.”
Gill’s father hadn’t heard of her, but wondered if she was related to Gilbert or George Seldes. Gilbert was a cultural critic; his brother George, an investigative journalist.
In fact, Marian was Gilbert’s daughter and George’s niece. When Michel told his father that, there was a long pause on the other end of the line.
Finally, his father said, “Please tell her how deeply grateful I am to her father.”
And then he told his son this story.
As a young man, James Vladimir Gill fled Nazi Germany in the ’30s and escaped occupied France in 1940, eventually making his way to the United States. One night he and an older woman with whom he was in love attended a party in New York. He was asked to sign a register.
“Little did he know,” Michel writes, “that he had sealed his fate on a communist manifesto of some kind.”
In 1950, his name came to the attention of Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran, a fervent anti-communist. McCarran wanted to deport foreign-born communists, and James Gill was on his list. Gill defended himself in a long letter titled “Testament of a Youth Facing Exile.”
Gilbert Seldes read the letter and, as Michel told Spacey, “was responsible for getting it published in the New York Post — the very same paper in which you have written your eloquent tribute.”
A civil rights lawyer read the article in The Post and took up Gill’s cause, saving him from expulsion.
“Although my father couldn’t leave the US for a decade, and only after that time received his very first passport ever, he was eternally grateful to Gilbert Seldes,” Michel writes.
“And there I was, 30-plus years later, receiving wings of a different kind from his magical and beautiful and unforgettable daughter.”
As we like to say here at the paper, The Post gets action!