“She made a movie comprised of bare asses walking on a treadmill,” he said. He intended to become an English professor but accepted a Fulbright Scholarship to study theater for two years at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art. Lerner attended Brooklyn College (future director Joel Zwick was a classmate) and played Willy Loman in a production of Death of a Salesman, then got his master’s from UC Berkeley. To help out his family, he worked at the Zei-Mar delicatessen owned by his older brother in Brighton Beach. His father, George, “liked to think he was an antiques dealer, but in all actuality he was a junk dealer,” he said.Ī sports nut, Lerner appeared as a “quiz kid” at age 13 on a local TV program hosted by sportscaster Bert Lee Jr., then was sports editor of the school newspaper at Lafayette High School. ”īorn on June 22, 1941, Lerner was raised in a housing project in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook. “I played a character that is quite repulsive, but it was a great. “I had been advised by my managers at the time not to do that part because it was so unflattering,” he said. In a 1992 interview for NPR’s Fresh Air, he told Terry Gross that one of the best films he ever did was the Spain-produced horror movie Anguish (1987), in which he portrayed an ophthalmologist assistant who’s hypnotized by his mother (Zelda Rubinstein) to go on a killing spree so he can save his flailing eyesight. ![]() “It’s fun for an actor to do that.”Ī bit earlier, Lerner made his mark as racketeer Arnold Rothstein, the architect of baseball’s 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, in John Sayles’ Eight Men Out (1988), then played the cold-blooded gangster Bugsy Calhoune for Eddie Murphy in Harlem Nights (1989). “I looked at a lot of documentary footage, I selected a pair of eyeglasses that were exactly the kind he wore, and I picked up on some mannerisms he had,” he said. He based Lipnick on legendary MGM producer Louis B. I came in, I did the first big speech and walked out.” Joel and Ethan Coen were on the ground, laughing and crying in hysterics, and I just walked out of there. I auditioned in character, talking a mile a minute. “They said the character was a Michael Lerner type, but they didn’t have me come in until the last minute,” he told Cigar Aficionado magazine in a 1999 interview. He had auditioned for the brothers before - he didn’t get hired for Miller’s Crossing - but arrived this time with a purpose. Lerner received his Oscar nomination for his performance as the brash 1930s studio mogul Jack Lipnick in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink (1991). Michael Lerner as movie mogul Jack Lipnick in 1991’s Barton Fink Everett Dave Starsky on ABC’s Starsky and Hutch (Paul Michael Glaser got the job, of course) and wound up sticking around as the lowlife criminal Fat Rolly on the first two episodes. senators in Poster Boy (2004) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). The actor also played the callous book publisher Fulton Greenway in Elf (2003), the mayor of New York City named for Roger Ebert in Roland Emmerich’s remake of Godzilla (1998) and U.S. And Lerner also stood out opposite Anthony Hopkins and John Cusack in Alan Parker‘s The Road to Wellville (1994) and with Allison Janney in Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime (2009). In Bob Rafelson’s redo of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Lerner was the lawyer for Jessica Lange’s character (Hume Cronyn portrayed the attorney in the 1946 original). He made heads turn with a stint as White House press secretary Pierre Salinger on the 1974 ABC telefilm The Missiles of October and as the killer Jack Ruby on the 1978 CBS docudrama Ruby and Oswald. “His characters have a layer of charm, a thin skin of bonhomie over the blubber of the natural bully,” is how The Guardian once described them.īefore he got to Hollywood, Lerner appeared in an experimental film directed by onetime London housemate Yoko Ono, then played the speechwriter for Robert Redford’s character in Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate (1972). ![]() A post shared by Sam Lerner in a Brooklyn housing project as a son of a junk dealer, Lerner specialized in playing authority figures like cops, crooks, politicians and Hollywood tycoons.
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