Ron Leibman, Actor in 'Angels in America,' 'Where's Poppa?' and
'Friends,' Dies at 82
The Hollywood Reporter
By Chris Koseluk
12/6,/2019
He won a Tony and an Emmy and also stood out in
'Slaughterhouse-Five,' 'The Super Cops' and 'Norma Rae.'
Ron Leibman, the dependable actor known for his Tony Award-winning
performance in
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and
for his turns in such films as
Where's Poppa?,
Slaughterhouse-Five and
Norma
Rae, died Friday. He was 82.
Robert Attermann, CEO of Abrams Artists Agency, confirmed his death.
Survivors include his wife, Emmy-winning actress Jessica Walter, whom he
married in 1983. (They met at a party hosted by actress Brenda Vaccaro, and he
joined her in the cast of
Archer in 2013.) From 1969-81, he
was married to actress Linda Lavin.
Leibman, a native New Yorker who also played Rachel's (Jennifer
Aniston) nasty, no-nonsense father on
Friends, received an
Emmy Award in 1979 for portraying a former car thief turned criminal attorney
on the CBS series
Kaz. Despite critical acclaim, the
sophisticated drama, which he co-created, was canceled after only 23 episodes.
As Leibman explained it in a 2011 interview for The A.V. Club: "I
didn't know much about television then, because I was a theater actor who had
been snatched up and taken out there. And suddenly I was on this television
show, which I'd helped write. It was my idea, basically, a guy who had been in
prison and then gets out and joins a law firm. A man haunted by his past. A
sort of
Les Misérables theme.
"I had no idea if it was going to be successful, but when it went on
the air and I saw the commercials, they were for trucks. And I said, 'Wait a
minute, the audience watching this show ain't buying trucks.' I'm sitting at my
desk now, and there's an Emmy award right in front of me that I got from that.
I got an Emmy, and the show was canceled two weeks later. [
Laughs.]
What a business, huh?"
Leibman won his Tony in 1993 for playing a fictional version of Roy Cohn,
Sen. Joseph McCarthy's infamous chief counsel, in Tony Kushner's
Angels
in America: Millennium Approaches. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play
imagines the final days of the attorney, who died of AIDS in 1986.
"Mr. Leibman, red-faced and cackling, is a demon of Shakespearean
grandeur, an alternately hilarious and terrifying mixture of chutzpah and
megalomania, misguided brilliance and relentless cunning," Frank Rich wrote
in his
New York Times review. "He turns the mere act of
punching telephone buttons into a grotesque manipulation of the levers of
power, and he barks out the most outrageous pronouncements ('I brought out
something tender in him,' he says of Joe McCarthy) with a shamelessness worthy
of history's most indelible monsters."
Leibman made his big-screen debut in
Where's Poppa? (1970),
Carl Reiner's dark comedy about an aging mother (Ruth Gordon) driving her
attorney son Gordon (George Segal) batty as he tries to honor his father's
dying wish not to put mom in a home.
As Gordon's hapless younger brother, Sidney, Leibman can't stay out of
trouble. Rushing to the aid of his mother, Sidney
takes a shortcut through Central Park and runs
afoul of a street gang. They instruct him to run, and each time they catch him,
they're going to take an article of his clothing. "You remember
Cornel Wilde? You remember
The Naked Prey? Well, you better start
prayin', 'cause you gonna be naked," the gang leader (Joe Keyes Jr.) tells
Sidney.
By the time Sidney
reaches the other end of the park, the only thing he's wearing is his glasses.
After it happens again, Sidney
goes home wearing a gorilla suit Gordon had bought in the hopes of scaring his
mother to death. The gang sees him and forces Sidney, still dressed as a gorilla, to accost
a woman. His victim turns out to be an undercover cop.
"There's a funny supporting performance by Ron Leibman as Segal's
brother. He keeps dashing across Central Park
to save his mother after Segal makes threats over the phone," Roger Ebert wrote. "And
he keeps getting mugged. Never mind how he got into that gorilla suit. Never
mind about anything in the movie, really. Reiner goes for laughs with such a
fanatic dedication that there's no time for logic, plot, character. And why
should there be?"
Leibman also was quite funny as the mustachioed Captain Esteban, who
fumbles in his attempt to capture the hero (George Hamilton), in the
campy
Zorro, the Gay Blade (1981).
In Gordon Parks'
The Super Cops (1974), Leibman enjoyed
one of his few leading movie roles as he and David Selby played real-life
renegade New York City
policemen.
He held his own alongside Robert Redford and Segal as crooks pulling off a
gem heist in the comedy
The Hot Rock (1972) and was powerful
as a volatile prisoner of war in George Roy Hill's
Slaughterhouse-Five (1972).
And he brought fire to New York
union rep Reuben Warshowsky, inspiring Sally Field's character to stand up
for her rights in Martin Ritt's
Norma Rae (1979).
Yet despite a solid film résumé that also included
Your Three Minutes
Are Up (1973),
Phar Lap (1983),
Rhinestone (1984),
Sidney Lumet's
Night Falls on Manhattan (1996), Paul
Schrader's
Auto Focus (2002) and
Garden State (2004),
a breakthrough role always eluded him.
"Everybody thought I'd have more of a film career," he told
Entertainment
Weekly in 1993. "I don't look for answers anymore. It's
pointless because there are no answers. I don't know how I'm perceived in Hollywood. Or
if I'm
perceived in Hollywood."
Ronald Leibman was born on Oct. 11, 1937, and raised in Manhattan, the son of Murray Leibman, a
garment businessman, and Grace, a homemaker. At age 6, he spent several
months in the hospital with polio; a bit later, his parents divorced.
In 1954, he enrolled in Ohio
Wesleyan University
to study acting. While in college, he became a member of The Compass Players,
an improv troupe that also served as the training ground for Mike Nichols,
Elaine May, Ed Asner, Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller.
Leibman returned to New York
in 1958, studied at the Actors Studio and appeared off-Broadway in
Camino
Real,
Legend of Lovers and
A View From the
Bridge. He made his Broadway debut in 1963 in
Dear Me, The Sky Is
Falling and became romantically involved with Lavin when both starred
in the two-hander
Cop-Out in 1969.
He also was honored with Drama Desk Awards in 1969 and '70 for his performances
in
We Bombed in New Haven and
Transfers;
originated the role of Herb in Neil Simon's
I Ought to Be in
Pictures in 1980 (he replaced Tony Curtis); and played Lenny Ganz in
1988's
Rumors, another Simon comedy (Walter was in that as
well).
Leibman said his experience with Kaz soured him on television, but he kept
returning to the small screen, turning up on such series as
Murder,
She Wrote;
Law & Order; and
Law & Order:
SVU. He also appeared on three 2006 episodes of HBO's
The
Sopranos as Tony's (James Gandolfini) doctor. "Whoa, I've just
found Jimmy Hoffa," his character, Dr. Plepler, once cracked as he
attended to Tony's gunshot wound.
In his A.V. Club chat, Leibman admitted that he relished the opportunity to
torment Ross (David Schwimmer), Rachel's romantic interest, as Dr. Leonard
Green on NBC's
Friends. He originally passed on the role.
"It sounded stupid to me, so I turned it down. And my daughter, then,
who was of that age, said, 'No, you have to do it, you have to do it! I love
that show, and I want to meet those kids,' " Leibman said. "I said,
'All right. I'll do it. I'll do it once, but that's all I'm doing.' So I did
and had a very nice time, and they asked me back, and my daughter did get to
meet those kids, so I was a big hero in the house. It's amazing, the power of
the tube. I've done all this body of work, and they say, 'Oh yes, Rachel's
father.' I go, 'Give me a break.' "
When the opportunity arose, Leibman and Walter tried to work together. In
1986, they starred in a Los
Angeles Theatre Center production of the Molière
comedy
Tartuffe and appeared on a 1996 episode of
Law
& Order and in the 2002 film
Dummy.
In season four of the FX animated comedy
Archer, Leibman
joined the cast as Ron Cadillac, the shady new husband of Malory Archer (Walter),
the boozy mother of master spy Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin).
"There are no egos when it comes to our work. We don't compete, we're
not trying to prove anything to each other," Walter told the
Los
Angeles Times in 1986. "I think that's why we got married: We'd
both reached a point in our lives where we weren't fighting."
Survivors also include his stepdaughter Brooke Bowman, a TV programming
executive.
LEIBMAN, Ron (Ronald Leibman)
Born: 10/11/1937,
New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Died: 12/6/2019, Manhattan, New
York, U.S.A.
Ron Leibman’s
western – actor:
Zorro: The Gay Blade – 1981 (Esteban)
René Auberjonois Dies: ‘Benson’ And ‘Star Trek’ Actor
Was 79
