Jerry Adler, the behind-the-scenes Broadway veteran who served as the stage manager on the original My Fair Lady before acting on such shows as The Sopranos, The Good Wife and Rescue Me, died Saturday, his family announced. He was 96.
Adler didn’t become an actor until he was in his early 60s — this despite the fact that his cousin was famed acting teacher Stella Adler.
The Brooklyn native played Herman “Hesh” Rabkin, consigliere to James Gandolfini‘s mob boss Tony, on HBO’s The Sopranos, and he was the boorish law partner Howard Lyman on CBS’ The Good Wife. On FX’s Rescue Me, he recurred as NYFD station chief Sidney Feinberg.
Viewers know Adler as Rabbi Alan Schulman on CBS’ Northern Exposure, the handyman Mr. Wicker on NBC’s Mad About You and Moshe and the father of Jeffrey Tambor’s Maura Pfefferman on Amazon’s Transparent. He also played a spry Holocaust survivor on the final season of Comedy Central’s Broad City.
Adler was a student at Syracuse University in 1950 when his father, Philip, then the GM of the Group Theater working on the Carol Channing musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, called to offer him a job as assistant stage manager. “I’m a creature of nepotism,” Adler admitted in a 2015 interview for the website TheaterMania.
He followed with gigs as stage manager, production manager or production supervisor on a 1952 revival of Of Thee I Sing, directed by George S. Kaufman and starring Jack Carson; 1956’s My Fair Lady, starring Julie Andrews, then a very nervous 19, and Rex Harrison; 1966’s The Apple Tree, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Alan Alda and Barbara Harris; and 1967’s The Homecoming, written by Harold Pinter.
Along the way, he also was backstage for the original productions of Annie and Hal Holbrook‘s Mark Twain Tonight!, helped Zero Mostel evade a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee and worked with the likes of Arthur Miller, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Angela Lansbury, John Gielgud, Noël Coward, Joan Rivers, Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, Milos Forman, Richard Rodgers, Liv Ullmann and Richard Burton.
He had a great story about Katharine Hepburn portraying Coco Chanel on Broadway in 1969.
“We opened cold in New York City, and they were building the Uris across the street from the theater,” he told the Hartford Courant in 2011. “She had this little quiet song to her father, and during the first matinee, you could hear them banging away from across the street. I knew she was really pissed off, so at the end of the show when she came offstage, she asked me to come to her dressing room, where she told me to go across the street and tell them they should stop work when she sings that one song because it’s too noisy.
“So I went over to the engineering hut, got a hold of the boss and said I was the stage manager of the show across the street starring Katharine Hepburn and she would like to stop work on the building when she sings this song. They thought I was a [expletive] lunatic.
“So I go back to her and tell her it’s impossible and then she goes out, goes across the street, gets in one of those open construction elevators and arranges with the workers herself on every floor that when I come out of the stage door and give them the signal, they stop work and then restart when I come out again. They did that at every matinee for her.”
Adler also directed a handful of Broadway shows.
He was a stage manager on the soap opera Santa Barbara in Los Angeles when he took a call from a friend who was casting the 1992 Joe Pesci film The Public Eye.
“My friend wanted me to meet with the director [Howard Franklin], and the first thing he said to me was how much I reminded him of his father,” he recalled in 2015. “I was actually surprised. I’d never acted before. I’d never entertained the idea of acting; it was an unusual thing. But I was getting ready to retire from the production end, anyway. So it became kind of interesting.”
Adler appeared onscreen for the first time on a 1991 episode of the Gary David Goldberg sitcom Brooklyn Bridge on CBS and later landed regular roles on three other short-lived series: ABC’s Hudson Street, starring Tony Danza, and The WB’s Alright Already and Raising Dad (as Carol Leifer and Bob Saget‘s father, respectively).
Adler also would go on appear on the big screen in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Getting Away With Murder (1996), In Her Shoes (2005), Synecdoche, New York (2008) and A Most Violent Year (2014).
“You know what’s interesting?” he said in a 2017 interview. “You spend your whole career backstage. Nobody knows who you are or even knows your name. They don’t know anything about you. And then you do a television show and suddenly you’re a celebrity and everyone knows your face. It’s so weird.”
Things came full circle when he returned to Broadway in 2000, not as a stage manager but as an actor in the Elaine May comedy Taller Than a Dwarf. He was back again in 2015, portraying Larry David’s bed-ridden dad in Fish in the Dark.
Survivors include his wife, psychologist Joan Laxman, whom he married in 1994.