(22 June 1941 - 8 April 2023)
The American actor Michael Lerner, who has died aged 81 following brain seizures, was very successful playing character roles in his sixty-year career. He was in US films beginning with Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland and then worked with Michael Ritchie, Bob Rafelson, Eddie Murphy, the Coen brothers, Jon Favreau, Anthony Hopkins and Bryan Singer.
He was born in New York City to the antique dealer George Lerner and his wife Blanche. Studying to be an English professor, he played Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman which inspired him to take up acting instead. He read drama at Berkeley and also trained at Lamda in London. Sharing a flat with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he was in Ono’s film Smile and her Bottoms compilation of human buttocks, including Lennon’s.
Returning to San Francisco, Lerner joined the American Conservatory Theatre and also worked in Los Angeles. He had appeared on television in Dr Kildare and later on appeared in Ironside, Night Gallery, The Streets of San Francisco, The Odd Couple, Rhoda, The Rockford Files, Kojak, Hart to Hart, Hill Street Blues, Glee and eighteen episodes of Clueless.
After his first film in 1970 he then did The Candidate, St Ives, The Postman Always Rings Twice and the Coens' Barton Fink, the last earning him an Academy Award nomination. The character he played in the film was studio boss Jack Lipnick, based on the MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. Lerner was writing a screenplay about Mayer but it remained unfinished. He was a rare book collector, too, a passionate cigar smoker and good at poker.
In many of his films Lerner often played professional or authority figures such as politicians, doctors and judges, plus the occasional villain. He was Dr Froll in Joseph Sargent’s Coast to Coast, a romcom with Dyan Cannon and Robert Blake, Dr Young in National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, the racketeer Arnold Rothstein in John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, the Warden in No Escape, Mayor Ebert in Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla, Dr Lupus in Woody Allen’s Celebrity, Mr Greenway in Elf, Solomon Schlutz in the Coens’ A Serious Man and Senator Brickman in X-Men: Days of Future Past. His last appearance was in the mockumentary short Frankenstein’s Monster’s Monster, Frankenstein, released in 2019.
MICHAEL DARVELL
