Jerry Adler, the behind-the-scenes Broadway veteran who served because the stage supervisor on the unique My Truthful Girl earlier than performing on such reveals as The Sopranos, The Good Spouse and Rescue Me, died Saturday, his household introduced. He was 96.
Adler didn’t turn into an actor till he was in his early 60s — this even supposing his cousin was famed performing instructor Stella Adler.
The Brooklyn native performed Herman “Hesh” Rabkin, consigliere to James Gandolfini‘s mob boss Tony, on HBO’s The Sopranos, and he was the boorish regulation accomplice Howard Lyman on CBS’ The Good Spouse. On FX’s Rescue Me, he recurred as NYFD station chief Sidney Feinberg.
Viewers know Adler as Rabbi Alan Schulman on CBS’ Northern Publicity, the handyman Mr. Wicker on NBC’s Mad About You and Moshe and the daddy of Jeffrey Tambor’s Maura Pfefferman on Amazon’s Clear. He additionally performed a spry Holocaust survivor on the ultimate season of Comedy Central’s Broad Metropolis.
Adler was a pupil at Syracuse College in 1950 when his father, Philip, then the GM of the Group Theater engaged on the Carol Channing musical Gents Favor Blondes, referred to as to supply him a job as assistant stage supervisor. “I’m a creature of nepotism,” Adler admitted in a 2015 interview for the web site TheaterMania.
He adopted with gigs as stage supervisor, manufacturing supervisor or manufacturing supervisor on a 1952 revival of Of Thee I Sing, directed by George S. Kaufman and starring Jack Carson; 1956’s My Truthful Girl, starring Julie Andrews, then a really nervous 19, and Rex Harrison; 1966’s The Apple Tree, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Alan Alda and Barbara Harris; and 1967’s The Homecoming, written by Harold Pinter.
Alongside the best way, he additionally was backstage for the unique productions of Annie and Hal Holbrook‘s Mark Twain Tonight!, helped Zero Mostel evade a subpoena from the Home Un-American Actions Committee and labored with the likes of Arthur Miller, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Angela Lansbury, John Gielgud, Noël Coward, Joan Rivers, Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, Milos Forman, Richard Rodgers, Liv Ullmann and Richard Burton.
He had an excellent story about Katharine Hepburn portraying Coco Chanel on Broadway in 1969.
“We opened chilly in New York Metropolis, and so they have been constructing the Uris throughout the road from the theater,” he advised the Hartford Courant in 2011. “She had this little quiet tune to her father, and through the first matinee, you possibly can hear them banging away from throughout the road. I knew she was actually pissed off, so on the finish of the present when she got here offstage, she requested me to return to her dressing room, the place she advised me to go throughout the road and inform them they need to cease work when she sings that one tune as a result of it’s too noisy.
“So I went over to the engineering hut, bought a maintain of the boss and stated I used to be the stage supervisor of the present throughout the road starring Katharine Hepburn and she or he wish to cease work on the constructing when she sings this tune. They thought I used to be a [expletive] lunatic.
“So I am going again to her and inform her it’s not possible after which she goes out, goes throughout the road, will get in a kind of open development elevators and arranges with the employees herself on each ground that after I come out of the stage door and provides them the sign, they cease work after which restart after I come out once more. They did that at each matinee for her.”
Adler additionally directed a handful of Broadway reveals.
He was a stage supervisor on the cleaning soap opera Santa Barbara in Los Angeles when he took a name from a pal who was casting the 1992 Joe Pesci movie The Public Eye.
“My pal needed me to satisfy with the director [Howard Franklin], and the very first thing he stated to me was how a lot I reminded him of his father,” he recalled in 2015. “I used to be truly stunned. I’d by no means acted earlier than. I’d by no means entertained the concept of performing; it was an uncommon factor. However I used to be on the point of retire from the manufacturing finish, anyway. So it grew to become type of fascinating.”
Adler appeared onscreen for the primary time on a 1991 episode of the Gary David Goldberg sitcom Brooklyn Bridge on CBS and later landed common roles on three different short-lived sequence: ABC’s Hudson Road, starring Tony Danza, and The WB’s Alright Already and Elevating Dad (as Carol Leifer and Bob Saget‘s father, respectively).
Adler additionally would go on seem on the large display in Manhattan Homicide Thriller (1993), Getting Away With Homicide (1996), In Her Footwear (2005), Synecdoche, New York (2008) and A Most Violent Yr (2014).
“You recognize what’s fascinating?” he stated in a 2017 interview. “You spend your entire profession backstage. No person is aware of who you might be and even is aware of your title. They don’t know something about you. And you then do a tv present and out of the blue you’re a star and everybody is aware of your face. It’s so bizarre.”
Issues got here full circle when he returned to Broadway in 2000, not as a stage supervisor however as an actor within the Elaine Might comedy Taller Than a Dwarf. He was again once more in 2015, portraying Larry David’s bed-ridden dad in Fish within the Darkish.
Survivors embody his spouse, psychologist Joan Laxman, whom he married in 1994.