“It changed me.” René, who died in 1996, was one of them. “I lost some of my greatest friends to AIDS,” Cassidy says. ” Cassidy remembers audiences “audibly weeping” at early screenings - particularly during Bruce Davison’s bedside goodbye to his dying partner, in a role that earned Davison an Oscar nomination (the Academy’s first recognition of AIDS, predating Philadelphia by four years).Īudiences wept for the finale, too, a fantasy where the dead and living reunite on Fire Island’s shores. We knew we were doing something very important. “I lived in New York City from ’81 to ’86 straight,” Cassidy recalls. Patrick Cassidy was 26 when he was cast as Howard, a soap star who loses his partner to AIDS. And the film, which spans the first eight years of the epidemic, begins with its cast of then mostly unknowns - including Dermot Mulroney, then 25, Campbell Scott, 27, and Mary-Louise Parker, 24 - relaxing on Fire Island and discussing a Times report identifying a “rare cancer” in “41 homosexuals.” The title referred to a euphemism employed by The New York Times for surviving partners of AIDS victims. Written by playwright Craig Lucas and helmed by theater director Norman René, it was only the second mainstream film to address AIDS (the first was the 1985 TV movie An Early Frost). In 1995, an award named for the film was presented to the Video Industry AIDS Action Committee for its fundraising efforts.
