Jerry Orbach

Lower right picture/ headline with full obit in section one. Jerry Orbach was the real deal.

The New York Times
December 29, 2004
Jerry Orbach, Star of ‘Law & Order,’ Dies at 69
By BEN BRANTLEY and RICHARD SEVERO

Jerry Orbach, who won fame on the New York stage as one of the last
bona fide leading men of the Broadway musical and global celebrity on
television as a New York detective on NBC’s “Law & Order,” died on
Tuesday night. He was 69.

Mr. Orbach died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The cause was prostate cancer, his manager, Robert Malcolm, said.

In performances that spanned a half century, the Bronx-born Mr. Orbach
came to embody two beloved New York archetypes: the musical matinee
idol, to which he gave a refreshingly modern spin with his rugged and
idiosyncratic persona, and the shrewd, irascible cop, a role he honed
to a razor’s edge as Detective Lennie Briscoe on “Law & Order.”

After playing that role for 12 seasons, Mr. Orbach left the show at the
end of last season with plans to star in “Law & Order: Trial by
Jury,” a spinoff that is scheduled to have its debut on NBC in the
spring. His illness, which he made public earlier this month, figured
in the switch. Dick Wolf, the creator of “Law & Order,” said the
new show, on which Mr. Orbach was to appear only occasionally, was less
taxing.

Whether singing “Try to Remember” as the dashing narrator of “The
Fantasticks” in 1960 or trading barbs with fellow detectives and
reluctant witnesses on television in recent years, Mr. Orbach exuded a
wry, ragged masculinity that was all his own. As a star of musicals, he
created a new kind of hero who was leagues away from suave, swaggering
Adonises like John Raitt, Howard Keel and Alfred Drake (though like
them, he sang in a resonant baritone). And he flourished at a time when
the Broadway musical hero was fast becoming an endangered species.
There were plans to dim the lights along Broadway in his memory last
night, said Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theaters
and Producers.

In shows like “Promises, Promises” (Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach’s
1968 adaptation of the movie “The Apartment”) and “42nd Street” in
1980, Mr. Orbach registered as a musical answer to the shaggier leading
men who had begun to emerge on American movie screens, actors like
Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson. His rough-edged individuality may
account for his endurance on the Broadway stage in an era when other
promising musical actors – including Larry Kert, Robert Goulet and
Robert Morse – proved unable to follow through on their breakthrough
successes.

Mr. Orbach may have been the last of a breed: no male star since has
matched the breadth and continuity of his career in musicals. Though he
originated the part of the corrupt, silver-tongued lawyer Billy Flynn
in Bob Fosse’s 1975 production of the musical “Chicago,” Mr. Orbach was
at his best as a tough cookie with a melting center.

Writing in The New York Times of “Promises, Promises,” the critic Clive
Barnes said of Mr. Orbach’s portrayal of the haplessly ambitious,
morally bewildered hero: “He makes gangle into a verb, because that is
just what he does. He gangles. He also sings most effectively, dances
most occasionally, and acts with an engaging and perfectly controlled
sense of desperation.”

Yet he was equally persuasive as the dictatorial director in David
Merrick’s Broadway version of the movie “42nd Street,” in which Mr.
Orbach instilled new vitality in the hoariest of showbiz clichés. When,
at the conclusion of the show’s opening-night performance, Merrick
shocked the audience and cast by announcing that its director, Gower
Champion, had died, it was Mr. Orbach who had the taste and authority
to request that the curtain come down. Mr. Orbach’s other important
stage roles included Mack the Knife in the landmark Off Broadway
production of “The Threepenny Opera” in the late 1950’s and El Gallo,
the benevolently interactive narrator in “The Fantasticks,” which was
staged at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in 1960 and became the
longest-running musical in New York. Walter Kerr, writing about that
performance in The New York Herald Tribune, said, “Mr. Orbach is no
doubt on his way.”

He also appeared as the puppeteer in “Carnival!” in the early 1960’s
and was nominated for a Tony Award for playing Sky Masterson in the
1965 revival of “Guys and Dolls.” He won the Tony for best actor in a
musical for “Promises, Promises.”

His film work was less gratifying, though he appeared to good advantage
as Gus Levy in “Prince of the City,” Sidney Lumet’s biting 1981 movie
about corruption in the New York City Police Department, and as Jack
Rosenthal in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” in 1989. (His work
in film also led to an unlikely friendship with the mobster Joey Gallo,
after Mr. Orbach portrayed a character modeled on Gallo in the 1971
movie “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”)

It wasn’t until the 1990’s, when he started appearing as Lennie Briscoe
in “Law & Order,” that Mr. Orbach became a familiar name throughout
the country. The rough edge that distinguished him on Broadway eased
his transition to character roles like Briscoe, the recovered alcoholic
who seemed to greet the discovery of each episode’s crime with a
world-weary shrug.

Jerome Bernard Orbach was born in the Bronx on Oct. 20, 1935, the only
child of Leon Orbach, a restaurant manager with some experience in
vaudeville, and the former Emily Olexy.

The Orbachs moved to Waukegan, Ill., when Jerome was in the seventh
grade. In 1952, after graduating from Waukegan High School, he attended
the University of Illinois, but stayed only a year. He transferred to
Northwestern, where he studied drama. He remained there for about two
years, but left without earning a degree.

Mr. Orbach did menial work for stock companies before being awarded
small parts; later, he said that the stock experience helped him learn
to control his voice and “not to do too much with my eyebrows.”

In 1955 Mr. Orbach headed to New York and found a job almost
immediately as the understudy for the role of the Street Singer in an
acclaimed Off Broadway production of “The Threepenny Opera.” He
remained with the company for three years, eventually taking on Scott
Merrill’s role of Mack the Knife. He studied acting with Herbert
Berghof, Mira Rostova and Lee Strasberg. After leaving “Threepenny” in
1959, he worked with stock companies in Ohio, appearing in “Mister
Roberts,” “The King and I” and “Harvey.”

But it was the now-fabled “Fantasticks” that established Mr. Orbach as
a star. Soon after, he moved on to Broadway in “Carnival!” The critic
Frances Herridge called him a “rare combination of powerful male actor
and singer.”

Mr. Orbach remained busy with varied stage work in New York, including
“The Cradle Will Rock” (1964), revivals of “Carousel” and “Annie Get
Your Gun” in the mid-1960’s, Bruce Jay Freidman’s comedy of neurosis
“Scuba Duba” (1967) and “6 Rms Riv Vu” (1972). His films include
“Brewster’s Millions” (1985), “Dirty Dancing” (1987) and “Last Exit to
Brooklyn” (1989). On television he appeared on “The Shari Lewis Show,”
“The Jack Paar Show,” “The Nurses” and “Bob Hope Presents.”

Mr. Orbach married Marta Curro in 1958. They were divorced in 1975. In
1979 he married Elaine Cancialla, who survives him. He is also survived
by his sons by his first marriage, Anthony, of New Jersey, and
Christopher, of Manhattan; and two grandchildren.

After appearing in “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” Mr. Orbach
received a call from Joey Gallo, the mobster. “A cop that he knew had
met us and told him that he’d met the guy who supposedly played him in
the movie, that he was a nice guy, not like an actor,” Marta Orbach
recalled shortly after Gallo was gunned down in 1972. Through the
Orbachs, Gallo briefly became one of the stranger fixtures of the
showbiz social scene in Manhattan and was working on a memoir with
Marta Orbach at the time of his death. Gallo lived in the Orbachs’
Chelsea brownstone for a month and was married there a month before his
murder.

With his portrayal of Lennie Briscoe on “Law & Order,” Mr. Orbach
achieved a worldwide fame that had previously eluded him. He became the
face of a typical New York cop, and the police liked what they saw. Mr.
Orbach took the role seriously, so much so that he appeared in 2001 at
a demonstration in which police officers demanded higher wages from
Mayor Giuliani’s administration.

“All I can do is try and represent you guys on a TV screen and make you
look as good as I can,” Mr. Orbach was quoted as saying in Newsday. “I
could never go out and not know if I’m coming home that night the way
you do.”

Mr. Orbach lived in a high-rise off Eighth Avenue in Clinton and was a
fixture in that Manhattan neighborhood’s restaurants and shops. His
glossy publicity photo hangs in Ms. Buffy’s French Cleaners, and he was
a regular at some of the unpretentious Italian restaurants nearby.

Besides the “Law & Order” reruns that appear in an endless cycle on
cable television, Lennie Briscoe lives on in several episodes of “Trial
by Jury,” scheduled for broadcast in the spring. As does Mr. Orbach’s
baritone. Anthony Colon, manager of the Virgin Megastore in Union
Square, said there was a spike yesterday in sales of the Broadway cast
albums of some of the shows in which Mr. Orbach appeared, like “42nd
Street” and “Chicago.”

Ben Sisario contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company