R.I.P. Michael Lerner

I don’t know if it registers with younger viewers (I’m not sure how it could) but when Michael Lerner (1941-2023) showed up in his Oscar nominated turn in Barton Fink (1991) his casting read, intrinsically as a (much appreciated) stunt.

We had seen him play movie producers (or agents) before, lots of times. He played Jack Warner in the TV movie This Year’s Blonde (1980); Harry Cohn in Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess (1983). While he actually had a pleasing personality and voice (at least I thought as much) he was frequently cast as loathsome characters: ambulance chasing lawyers, crooked accountants, thieving politicians, stool pigeons. On numerous occasions he played gangsters. He wasJack Ruby in Ruby and Oswald (1978), Arnold Rothstein in Eight Men Out (1988), a guy named Bugsy Calhoune in Harlem Nights (1989). In What’s a Nice Girl Like You…? (1971) he was Fats Detroit; on Starsky and Hutch he was Fat Rolly, in Safe Men (1998), Big Fat Bernie Gayle.

The second reaction upon seeing him in that role was one that you sometimes get when you see a very familiar TV actor in a prestige theatrical film, a combination of mild surprise and skepticism. There’s no logic in that emotion. Frequently, as in Lerner’s case, you’re talking about a highly capable and well-respected actor who just happens to have been overexposed. Familiarity breeds contempt. I never had contempt for this terrific character actor, of course, just maybe inadequate appreciation, having seen him throughout the course of my entire life in guest shots, on, like, everything: The Brady Bunch, That Girl, The Odd Couple,The Bob Newhart Show,Ironside,The Rockford Files, Rhoda, Harry O,Wonder Woman, Kojak,etc etc .And classic TV movies like The Missiles of October (1974) in which he played Pierre Sallinger (JFK’s P.R. flack) and Sarah T.: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975).

It’s not for me to judge whether his roles were anti-Semitic. Obviously he himself was Jewish, and he found a niche in Hollywood playing roles that could be read as stereotypical, just a couple of notches shy of Shylock. It’s fun to scan the names of the characters he played over the years: Myron Green, Sternberg, The Weasel, Mr. Katz, Manny Green, Artie Cohen, Marvin Bernstein, Solomon Schultz, Cy Rosenthal, Harvey Wiener, Sid Bagby, Mr. Marvin, Dr. Fine, Rebbe Quecksilber, Sidney Greene, Morty Berger. If you wanted to telegraph something, and didn’t have the time or inclination to be subtle, he was your go-to hire. Not that he wasn’t capable of subtlety! But because of the image that he established.

Raised partly in Brooklyn, partly in Solon, Ohio, Lerner’s career was interesting from the very beginning. Early roles include Willy Loman in a Brooklyn College production of Death of a Salesman, a role in Yoko Ono’s experimental film Smile (1968) and the L.A. premiere of Jules Feiffer’s play Little Murdersin 1969.

Besides credits we’ve mentioned he also appeared in the films Alex in Wonderland (1970), The Candidate (1972), St. Ives (1976), The Other Side of Midnight (1977), the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Newsies (1992), Radioland Murders (1994), Godzilla (1997), Woody Allen’s Celebrity (1998), Elf (2003), the Coen’s A Serious Man (2009), Atlas Shrugged, Part One (2011), X Men: Days of Future Past (2014), and many others.

His very last screen credit was in the 2022 movie Pervvy Oskar, and his role, appropriately enough, was Louis B. Mayer.

His younger brother Ken Lerner and nephew Sam Lerner are also actors.