Magician, actor Ricky Jay dies at 72
NEW YORK >> While other magicians breathed fire, sawed women in half or made entire buildings disappear, Ricky Jay performed remarkable feats using little more than the pads of his fingers. These were, strictly speaking, nothing more than tricks or illusions, sleights of hand performed by a master magician.
But to those who witnessed Jay up close, turning over a row of red Bee playing cards to reveal an unexpected hand, or flinging them across the room like wild projectiles, his magic tricks were nothing less than works of art, head-scratching, wonderinducing achievements that made him “perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive,” as journalist Mark Singer wrote in a 1993 article for the New Yorker.
Jay, who was also an actor, film consultant and renowned scholar of confidence tricksters and exotic entertainers, was 72 when he died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. His manager, Winston Simone, said the precise cause was not immediately known.
A heavyset figure who sported dark suits and a short gray beard, Jay followed his mentor Dai Vernon, a Canadian magician known as the Professor, in treating a deck of cards as a living being, to be carried with seriousness and handled with sensitivity.
Nonetheless, he was also prone to toss a card into the air like a boomerang, then slice it with scissors as it returned toward his hand. In some shows, he impaled a watermelon rind with a card thrown at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour.
Raised in New York City, Jay began performing magic tricks at age 4, and went on to hone his act on TV variety shows and on tours with musicians such as Ike and Tina Turner. Long celebrated by fellow magicians, he began to reach an international audience by the early 1990s, receiving a special Obie Award citation for “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants,” which premiered off-Broadway in 1994.
Originally directed by his friend David Mamet, the one-man show featured a nonstop comic patter from Jay, who invited audience members onstage as he performed tricks with playing cards, a ball and cup and a menagerie of windup toys.
“Instead of a magician’s cloak, he wears an authoritative, invisible mantle of accumulated traditions,” wrote New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley. Jay, he added, was “equally at home reciting a melodramatic broadsheet ballad about a card shark and his son, a translation of a poem by François Villon about how a gambler’s money disappears, and the grittier lingo of the contemporary con artist.”
His work was informed by a deep knowledge of “deception in all its forms,” as Jay once put it. A collector of decaying dice, faded advertisements for circus artists and magic books that dated to the 16th century, he probably knew “more about the history of American conjuring than anyone else,” Marcus McCorison, a former president of the American Antiquarian Society, told the New Yorker.