Another was Paul McCartney.īack in the Bay Area, he joined the American Conservatory Theatre company in San Francisco, and got bit parts in five TV shows, but it was in a Los Angeles production of Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders that he caught the eye of a fellow-Brooklynite, the director Paul Mazursky, who cast him in his 1970 Hollywood satire Alex in Wonderland.īy the time he played Robert Redford’s speechwriter in The Candidate (1972), he was busy in television, appearing in anything from M*A*S*H to The Rockford Files to The Odd Couple. ![]() Lerner appeared in Yoko’s Film No 4, aka Bottoms, as “one of the bare asses walking on a treadmill”. He found himself sharing a house with Yoko Ono and eventually John Lennon. He gained an MA in theatre at the University of California, Berkeley, then won a Fulbright grant and attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He studied drama at Brooklyn College, playing Willy Loman in a production of Death of a Salesman, and in 1963 had a small uncredited TV part in an episode of Dr Kildare. ![]() Madonna, left, as Loren, Michael Lerner, right, as Manny and Debora Weston as Phyllis in Up for Grabs at Wyndham’s theatre, London, in 2002. Pretty soon I owned the game, and those guys came to me with their hats in their hands.” They said sit down fat boy, maybe you’ll learn something. His mother, Blanche (nee Halpern), worked as a secretary, and his elder brother, Arnold, had a delicatessen in Brighton Beach, where young Michael cut off the end of an index finger slicing a tongue sandwich.Īn unathletic sports fan, he appeared as a “quiz kid” on the sportcaster Bert Lee’s radio quiz show, then became sports editor of the paper at Lafayette high school.Īs Rothstein, he explained to a former boxing champ involved in the baseball fix that “I was the fat kid they wouldn’t let play. Lerner was born in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, New York, where his father, George, sold what he called antiques in what was “really a junk shop”. “I’d been a working character actor for 20 years, then all of a sudden I got nominated and my price went up.” He lost the Oscar to Jack Palance in City Slickers, but did not complain. “I auditioned in character, talking a mile a minute.” Wearing a pair of glasses he had found in a junk shop that made him look like the MGM boss Louis B Mayer, “I fucking blew them away,” he said. Lerner had auditioned for a gangster part in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing, but though the brothers described Lipnick as a “Michael Lerner type”, for Barton Fink “they didn’t have me come in until the last minute”. The critic Philip French recognised the “layer of charm, the thin skin of bonhomie” he brought to his roles, the most famous of which were the gangster Arnold Rothstein, fixing baseball’s World Series in John Sayles’s Eight Men Out (1988), or the studio boss Jack Lipnick in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991), in which his displays of alternating intimacy and threat get him what he wants, and which earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. ![]() Michael Lerner, who has died aged 81, was a versatile character actor whose specialty was imbuing heavies with nuanced depth.
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