Amy Irving Is Crossing Delancey (2025)

The woman next to me starts crying as Amy Irving walks toward us. We’re on Orchard Street, on the Lower East Side of New York. The lady introduces herself as Cheryl; her daughter owns Sweet Pickle Books, where Irving and I are supposed to talk.

“It all feels full circle,” Cheryl says as she wipes away tears.

This year, 2023, is full of anniversaries for Irving. It’s been almost 40 years since she played Hadass in 1983’sYentl and close to 35 years since the debut ofWho Framed Roger Rabbit—which casual viewers may not realize features Irving singing “Why Don’t You Do Right?” as animated bombshell Jessica Rabbit. It’s also been nearly 35 years since the release ofCrossing Delancey, the rare movie that seems to grow more beloved with age, thanks to its bygone New York charm, its swoony central romance, and especially Irving as a Jewish proto–Carrie Bradshaw.

Cherished as it is by its fans,Crossing Delancey is likely not the first, second, or even third thing a casual moviegoer might associate with Irving. Neither, for that matter, isRoger Rabbit, a blockbuster Irving wasn’t even supposed to be a part of.

“They just needed someone to put down a temp track so that the animators could animate Jessica singing the song.… And I think Steven was producing the film.” That would beSteven Spielberg,Irving’s husband at the time. “Steven toldBob [Zemeckis, the film’s director], ‘I’ve heard Amy sing in the shower. She can do it.’” Irving shrugs. “They got me for nothing, and I only did one take—it was just literally a temp track. And then he liked it, so he used it.”

Nearly 35 years later, Irving is singing the song again. This time it’s the opening track on her debut album,Born in a Trunk, out April 7. “I had no idea I was ever, in my whole life, going to do an album,” she says, then smiles and points at her sonGabriel. “If he hadn’t taken me to dinner and plied me with liquor, I may not have.”

Each track was deliberately chosen to evoke a specific time in Irving’s life. There’s “I Never Dreamed,” which plays during the prom scene inCarrie—Irving’s first big film, where she starred as conflicted cool girl Sue Snell. There’s “I’m Waiting Forever,” written by a costar of Irving’s from the 1980 filmHoneysuckle Rose. Before giving her the greenlight to record, he had one stipulation: “I asked him permission to use it, and he said, ‘Of course. Can I sing on it too?’” Irving said yes; not a hard decision since the songwriter in question wasWillie Nelson.

Amy Irving is the sort of person who inspires songs and happy tears. She’s difficult to forget, and not just because she has one of the greatest pairs of blue eyes in movie history. Yet her filmography is remarkably slim for an Oscar nominee who’s been working in the industry for almost 50 years.

“I was never a viable box office star,” Irving says. “I didn’t open films. I had my cachet. I had my moment. But I don’t think people would ever cast me because they thought they were going to get [a big return at the] box office.”

Yet Irving, the child of the actorPriscilla Pointerand actor-director Jules Irving, grew up obsessed with the idea of craft. She considers herself a stage actor first, and has done everything from Shakespeare to Chekhov to a turn as Mozart’s wife, Constanze, in the original Broadway run ofAmadeus. Making movies just never felt as comfortable to her: “That whole stop-start-stop-start thing, when you grow up in the theater, it’s not natural. I did it, and I tried to do the best I could with it. It’s like apples and oranges—it’s a whole different discipline.”

And she also saw firsthand what a career in the film industry could do to you. “My father had a big, fat career in theater. When he went to Hollywood, he got slammed, and it broke his heart. He died young, winning at the craps table in Reno when he was 54.”

So Irving has been purposely discerning. She worked steadily on the screen from the late 1970s until the 1990s, but it wasn’t what she envisioned doing forever. Her first role was on the 1970s police proceduralThe Rookies, in an episode titled “Reading, Writing and Angel Dust.” When she would finish shooting, she’d rush from the studio to the playhouse. “I didn’t feel at home on set; I felt more at home onstage. I just got swept up in it, and after about five films I needed to get back to the stage,” she says.

Crossing Delancey also started out on the stage, as a play written bySusan Sandler.But the movie script just showed up at Irving’s doorstep one day—literally.At the time, she was tagging along with Spielberg as he filmedEmpire of the Sun in Spain. “It’s really funny, because I keep marrying directors,” she says. “But my least favorite job in the world is location wife.”

Irving was stuck in a house she couldn’t leave; she didn’t want her crying baby son to ruin a take. Then she got a call from the director Joan Micklin Silver. “She says, ‘I’d like to come to Spain, and I have something I want to show you.’ So she flew to Spain, and suddenly that prison didn’t seem like a prison anymore.”

Not only was it nice having the company of a director she respected, but the script Silver brought with her was contemporary—and, more importantly, not like anything else in movie theaters. Irving was born in California, but she’s the child of two New Yorkers and also lived there as a teenager.Crossing Delancey felt instantly familiar to her. It gave Irving a chance to work with a director who, like her, had a slim but respected list of films to her name (including the surprise hitHester Street, starringCarol Kane as a Jewish immigrant trying to navigate America at the turn of the century, right up the street from whereCrossing Delancey takes place), and it also gave her the opportunity to play her first lead role: Isabelle Grossman, who has a good job, a rent-controlled apartment, and no idea how to fit a man into her life.

“An actor’s life…is [being] at the mercy of other people,” says Irving. Performers don’t often get to handpick their roles. If a script or project really stands out, Irving says, “you go,I would like to fight for that.”

Though its characters are Jewish rather than Italian,Crossing Delancey has a similar feel to 1987’sMoonstruck, which took home three Oscars earlier in 1988. The year 1987 also saw the release ofBroadcast News andThe Princess Bride;Crossing Delanceyhit theaters a few months afterComing to America,and almost 10 months beforeWhen Harry Met Sally… It was a great era for romantic comedies, but also a crowded one. Maybe that’s why the film wasn’t as big as its contemporaries. Or maybe it wasCrossing Delancey’s subject matter.

“It was the woman’s film, as opposed to a couple or a love story,” Irving says. “This was a woman’s story. It was written by a woman, directed by a woman, [and] about women.” It also likely didn’t help that the movie was deeply Jewish, in a way that people who aren’t part of the Tribe (or at least New Yorkers) might not appreciate. The actor who played the sweet bubbe who just wants to find her granddaughter a nice husband was Reizl Bozyk, a well-known actor in the Yiddish-theater world. The matchmaker she hires was played by Sylvia Miles, the actor and friend of Andy Warhol who could steal any scene with a single facial expression. There are Yiddishisms peppered throughout, including a mention of Isaac Bashevis Singer and a scene where Peter Riegert and Bozyk sing “Chiribim Chiribom,” likely one of the most famous Yiddish songs in American history.

Today, tropes like overbearing matriarchs or tossing in the stray “oy vey” are common—even played out—in Jewish stories being presented to a wider audience. InCrossing Delancey, it’s all very natural. So is Irving’s Isabelle, a young woman born in the US after the Holocaust. She’s obviously Jewish, but she’s also an American, a New Yorker. She’s modern, nonobservant, and, as she says to her grandmother, she has many female friends “who are doing tremendous things with their lives and don’t need a man to feel complete.” Isabelle is the bridge between what was and what is; hers is the classic first- or second-generation American story.

Maybe in 1988, this was all too niche. But over the years,Crossing Delancey has become more universal. Isabelle is a beautiful young woman who doesn’t know what she wants, aside from a desire to concentrate on her work. But eventually, she falls in love. And whom does she fall for? A handsome guy who owns his own artisanal food business on the Lower East Side. In 2023, that sounds sort of like a dream scenario.

It’s a funny thing to watch a nearly 35-year-old film grow its audience over the decades. Irving frequently meets latter-day Isabelles—“If I got a nickel for every time someone said they found their pickle man,” she says with a laugh—and people who have an intense connection to her work, like Cheryl. And Irving clearly still feels the connection herself. A few minutes into our conversation, I realize the flannel shirt she’s wearing has the same blue checks as the one she wore inCrossing Delancey.

For Irving, the film is part of a larger story—one she’s still telling, albeit now by singing. And while this might seem like a change of pace for her, Irving sees it as a continuation of the trade she was trained in from an early age. “Actors are interpretive. We interpret other people’s art,” she says. “At different times in your life, you’re somebody else.”

As we walk out of the used bookstore, I realize we’re on Essex Street—right near the pickle stand fromCrossing Delancey. It would be the perfect place for her to get recognized. But Irving says that doesn’t happen to her much, “which is fine.”

We end up underneath the signs at Delancey and Essex, and I ask Irving if I can take a picture. She obliges. Then a funny thing happens: A small crowd stops and smiles at her. Irving, who supposedly doesn’t get recognized often, has been spotted. And clearly, her presence means a lot to the group. That much is clear from the woman I see pulling out her phone as Irving says goodbye to me and saunters away.

“Oh, my God, Mom,” she says excitedly. “I just saw Amy Irving, and she was crossing Delancey!”

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