R.I.P. Jerry Adler

Thanks, Eve Golden, for the sad intel that Jerry Adler (1929-2025) breathes no more. 96 years old! He must have had the same doctor as Fyvush Finkel! Strange…I had cause to mention him here just two days ago.

As we wrote here in 2022, Adler was a member of one of America’s greatest theatrical dynasties. Jerry’s granduncle, Jacob Adler, was the patriarch. The famous acting teacher Stella Adler and her brother Luther were his cousins. Jerry himself didn’t turn to acting until he was in his sixties. Prior to that he had been a Broadway stage manager, production manager, producer and director on scores of shows both major and minor, going back to 1950. He was ushered into the business as an A.S.M. by his father Philip, who had been a company manager with the Group Theatre.

After decades of immersion in the theatre arts, Adler stepped in front of the klieg lights himself when he was in his mid ’60s. He was a VERY useful type (because apparently rare in the casting rolls), a sort of rough-hewn, working class, older Jewish man. If you live in New York, this type of guy is not unknown to you at all, but the motion picture arts had abandoned the kind of realism that depicted such characters decades earlier. The man’s got a gut, and a nose that looks like it has been broken, but somehow he’s more loveable than scary. If his character is well-heeled, his station rose as he went through life. He voice sounds like Brooklyn; the real Jerry Adler was indeed born there.

Adler became one of our most beloved and ubiquitous character actors a little over 30 years ago. He played the plum role of the secret wife-killer in Woody Allen’sManhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and went on to continued visibility as a regular on Mad About You (1993-1999), The Sopranos (1999-2007), Raising Dad (2001-02, a co-starring role opposite Bob Saget), Rescue Me (2007-2011), The Good Wife (2011-2016, with two later appearances on The Good Fight through 2018), and Transparent (2017-2019). He was even on Broad City, one of his last credits.

Adler published his memoir last year: Too Funny for Words: Backstage Tales from Broadway, Television and the Movies. I’m so glad he did. Whew! Talk about “just under the wire”!