Jerry Orbach Biography

Jerome Bernard "Jerry" Orbach (October 20, 1935 " December 28, 2004) was an American actor and singer. He was known for his starring role as Detective Lennie Briscoe in Law & Order, his recurring role as Harry McGraw in Murder, She Wrote, and as the voice of Lumière in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Orbach was also a noted musical theatre star. Prominent character roles that he originated include El Gallo in The Fantasticks, the longest-running musical play in history; Chuck Baxter in Promises, Promises (for which he won a Tony Award); Julian Marsh in 42nd Street; and Billy Flynn in Chicago.

Early life

Orbach was born in the Bronx, the only child of Emily (née Olexy), a greeting card manufacturer and radio singer, and Leon Orbach, a restaurant manager and vaudeville performer. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Hamburg, Germany. His mother, a native of Pennsylvania, was Polish American and Catholic, and Orbach was raised Catholic (a religious background later replicated in his character on Law & Order). Throughout his childhood, the Orbach family moved frequently, living in Mount Vernon, New York; Wilkes-Barre, Nanticoke, and Scranton, Pennsylvania; Springfield, Massachusetts; and Waukegan, Illinois. Orbach attended Waukegan High School in Illinois and graduated in 1952. Orbach played on the football team and began learning acting in a speech class. The summer after graduating from high school, Orbach worked at the theatre of Chevy Chase Country Club of Wheeling, Illinois and enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall. In 1953, Orbach returned to the Chicago area and enrolled at Northwestern University. Orbach then left Northwestern before his senior year and moved to New York City in 1955 to pursue an acting career and study at the Actors Studio. Among his instructors at the Actors Studio were Lee Strasberg.

Career

Orbach was an accomplished Broadway and Off Broadway actor. His first major role was El Gallo in the original cast of the decades-running hit The Fantasticks, and Orbach became the first to perform the show's signature song and pop standard "Try To Remember". He also starred in The Threepenny Opera, Carnival!, the musical version of the movie Lili (his Broadway debut), in a revival of Guys and Dolls (as Sky Masterson, receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical), Promises, Promises (as Chuck, receiving a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical), the original productions of Chicago (as Billy Flynn, receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical), 42nd Street, and a revival of The Cradle Will Rock. Orbach made occasional film and TV appearances into the 1970s.

In the 1980s, he shifted to film and TV work full-time. Prominent roles included a superb performance as tough, effective, but "allegedly corrupt" NYPD officer Gus Levy in Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City; he was the 1981 runner-up for the NSFC Best Supporting Actor award. He also portrayed Jennifer Grey's father in Dirty Dancing and a gangster in the Woody Allen drama Crimes and Misdemeanors. In 1985 he became a regular guest star as a private detective on "Murder, She Wrote" which led to him starring in the short-lived 1987 crime drama The Law and Harry McGraw. He also appeared as a celebrity panelist on both What's My Line? and Super Password, and guest starred on the sitcom The Golden Girls.

In 1991, Orbach starred in the Academy Award-winning animated musical Beauty and the Beast, as the voice (both singing and speaking) of the candelabrum Lumière, a role he would reprise in the film's direct-to-video sequels and some of its video game spin-offs. That same year, he played an NYPD police lieutenant of detectives in Steven Seagal's Out for Justice and appeared as a defense attorney in the Law & Order episode "The Wages of Love". In 1992, Orbach joined the main cast of Law & Order as world-weary, wisecracking, streetwise NYPD police detective Lennie Briscoe. He remained on the show until 2004 and became one of its most popular characters. TV Guide named Briscoe one of their top 50 television detectives of all-time. Orbach was signed to continue in the role on Law & Order: Trial by Jury, but appeared in only the first two episodes of the series. Both episodes aired in March 2005, after his death. The fifth episode of the series, "Baby Boom", and the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode, "View from Up Here", were dedicated to his memory.

Personal life and death

Orbach was married in 1958 to Marta Curro, with whom he had two sons, Anthony Nicholas and Christopher Benjamin; they divorced in 1975. Elder son Tony is a crossword puzzle constructor for The New York Times. Younger son Chris Orbach, who is an actor and singer, played Lennie Briscoe's nephew Ken Briscoe on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In 1979, Jerry Orbach married Broadway dancer Elaine Cancilla, whom he met while starring in Chicago.

Orbach lived in a high-rise on 53rd Street off Eighth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen and was a fixture in that neighborhood's restaurants and shops. His glossy publicity photo hangs in Ms. Buffy's French Cleaners, and he was a regular at some of the Italian restaurants nearby. As of 2007, the intersection of 8th Avenue and 53rd Street was renamed in honor of Orbach. The plans met with some resistance by local planning boards, but were overcome thanks to his popularity and his love of the Big Apple.

In early December 2004, it was announced that Orbach had been receiving treatment for prostate cancer. He died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York on December 28, 2004 at the age of 69. His agent, Robert Malcolm, announced at the time of his death that Orbach's prostate cancer had been diagnosed more than 10 years before. The day after his death, the marquees on Broadway were dimmed in mourning, one of the highest honors of the American theatre world. In addition to his sons, wife and ex-wife, Orbach was survived by his mother Emily Orbach and two grandchildren, Peter and Sarah Kate Orbach, his older son Tony's children. His mother died on July 28, 2012 at the age of 101. The season 14 episode "C.O.D.", the last Law & Order episode featuring Orbach, was re-aired in his memory on December 29, 2004. Due to his having perfect 20/20 vision his whole life, one of his wishes while he was alive was to have his eyes donated after his death. His wish was granted when two individuals " one who needed correction for a nearsighted eye and another who needed correction for a farsighted eye " received Orbach's corneas. Orbach's likeness has been used in an ad campaign for Eye Bank for Sight Restoration in Manhattan. The interment of his remains was at Trinity Church Cemetery.

Honors

In addition to his Tony Award and nominations, Orbach was named a "Living Landmark", along with fellow Law & Order castmate Sam Waterston, by the New York Landmarks Conservancy in 2002. He quipped that the honor meant "that they can't tear me down". On February 5, 2005, he was posthumously awarded a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series.

On September 18, 2007, a portion of 53rd Street, near Eighth Avenue, in New York City, was renamed in Orbach's honor as Jerry Orbach Way.

Also in 2007, the Jerry Orbach Theatre was named for him in the Snapple Theater Center on 50th Street and Broadway, in New York City. The naming occurred as a tribute to him during a revival of The Fantasticks at the theatre.

From others

Law & Order executive producer, René Balcer, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal on May 21, 2010: "I always think about the show as before Jerry and after Jerry...You saw the weariness of 25 years of crime-fighting in New York written on his face."

Author Kurt Vonnegut was a fan of Orbach, and during an Australian radio interview in 2005, he said, "People have asked me, you know, 'Who would you rather be, than yourself?', and he replied "Jerry Orbach, without a question...I talked to him one time, and he's adorable."

Patrick Swayze once said in an interview:

With Jerry Orbach, his life in many ways has paralleled mine. We were on a certain level, born into musical theatre. And as time goes on... for my training in musical theatre, I considered that was the school of presentational acting. When I was gonna transition into film acting, all of sudden I had to learn what organic looked like. Jerry Orbach has been one of the most successful actors who ever lived to make that transition from musical theatre into real, organic, break-your-heart kinds of reality in his work as a film actor, but transition back and forth seamlessly. I just did Billy Flynn in Chicago, which Jerry Orbach originated, which felt like a legacy to me. But it was a very interesting time for me, when I was shooting Dirty Dancing, I think probably the eyes I trusted if I was real, and it worked, and I had nailed it, was Jerry Orbach's eyes. I would go over to him and under my breath 'What did you think?' and he goes "No, go there further, I think there's more you can get'. He would say little things like "courage", and it gives me goosebumps to say that. I really, really respected that man. I watched his career from the time I was little. I think it was a great loss when he passed.

Former co-worker Elisabeth Röhm was asked about any crazy memories she had of Orbach at the 2007 Dragon Con:

You know, it's hard to say a specific, kind of crazy story, because Jerry was all about golf. The first day I showed up to work, he was like "Hey kid, I got a golf game, so I hope you're gonna get it done quick," and I was like "Alright...". But that was one of the great things I learned from Jerry, is to like... number one, no matter how lucky or how special we are to do what we do, Jerry taught me it's a job. And so I went from being like "I'm an actress" to "I've had a great job and I love my job and I'm lucky that I got a job that I love with all my heart and I didn't wimp out and say I'm not gonna go after my dreams, but my job isn't any better than anyone else's job." That's what I learned from Jerry. Jerry was a human being first, and he loved his job and it paid him well... better than me... he was not better than anyone else because he was famous or because he was an actor and he touched people's hearts, he was just a regular guy. That's why the show is good. Because, here he was, this regular guy. you believed he was this regular guy. You believed he was a cop. He was just somebody you felt like if you sat down and had coffee with him, he wouldn't be like "I don't have time for this"... he wouldn't be like that, he was so warm and so charming. You know what's interesting about Jerry and I, and I have to say I have put this in my back pocket and from everybody I have ever worked with I've learned something really important is everybody has their disappointment and pain and nobody's life is perfect. And I suppose that's a good thing so you don't feel bad about the things that are going on or aren't working out and taking them too seriously. For instance, just like with Sam Waterston, he has his sob story about why he's not Robert Redford. Jerry's is why he's not Al Pacino and the grass is always greener and it looks like somebody else's life worked out tons better, but he'd be the first to say this is what's meant for me. He worked his ass off and he was in the right movies, and he did all the right things, even a little bit for him, some of his dreams he didn't achieve. So it's never perfect. He was really real in that way.

Filmography

Film

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1955	Marty	Ballroom extra	Uncredited
1958	Cop Hater	Gang Leader
1961	Mad Dog Coll	Joe Clegg
1961	Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman's Life	Cristoff	Television movie
1964	Ensign Pulver	Unknown
1965	John Goldfarb, Please Come Home	Pinkerton
1967	Annie Get Your Gun	Charles Davenport	Television movie
1971	The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight	Kid Sally
1972	A Fan's Notes	Fred
1975	Fore Play	Jerry Lorsey
1977	The Sentinel	Michael Dayton
1981	'Underground Aces	Herbert Penlittle
1981	Prince of the City	Gus Levy	Nominated"?National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor Nominated"?New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor
1983	The Special Magic of Herself the Elf	King Thorn	Television movie
1983	An Invasion of Privacy	Sam Bianchi	Television movie
1985	Brewster's Millions	Charlie Pegler
1986	The Imagemaker	Byron Caine
1986	F/X	Nicolas DeFranco
1986	Dream West	Capt. John Stutter	Television movie
1987	Dirty Dancing	Dr. Jake Houseman
1987	Someone to Watch Over Me	Lt. Garber
1987	Out on a Limb	Mort Viner	Television movie
1987	Love Among Thieves	Spicer	Television movie
1988	I Love N.Y.	Leo
1989	Last Exit to Brooklyn	Boyce
1989	Perry Mason: The Case of the Musical Murder	Blaine Counter	Television movie
1989	The Flamingo Kid	Phil Brody	Television short
1989	Crimes and Misdemeanors	Jack Rosenthal
1990	Kojak: None So Blind	Tony Salducci	Television movie
1990	In Defense of a Married Man	Alan Michaelson	Television movie
1991	Perry Mason: The Case of the Ruthless Reporter	Vic St. John	Television movie
1991	Dead Women in Lingerie	Bartoli
1991	California Casanova	Constantin Rominoffski
1991	Out for Justice	Capt. Ronnie Dozinger
1991	Toy Soldiers	Albert Trotta	Uncredited
1991	Delusion	Larry
1991	Delirious	Lou Sherwood
1991	Beauty and the Beast	Lumiere
1992	A Gnome Named Gnorm	Unknown
1992	Straight Talk	Milo Jacoby
1992	Neil Simon's Broadway Bound	Jack Jerome	Television movie Nominated"?Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie
1992	Quiet Killer	Dr. Vincent Califano	Television movie
1992	Mastergate	Clifton Byers	Television movie
1992	Universal Soldier	Dr. Christopher Gregor
1992	Mr. Saturday Night	Phil Gussman
1993	The Cemetery Club	Unknown	Uncredited
1996	Aladdin and the King of Thieves	Sa'luk	Direct-to-video
1997	Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas	Lumiere	Direct-to-video
1998	Beauty and the Beast: Belle's Magical World	Lumiere	Direct-to-video
1998	Exiled: A Law & Order Movie	Detective Lennie Briscoe	Television movie
1999	Temps	Announcer
2000	The Acting Class	Unknown
2000	Chinese Coffee	Jake Manheim
2000	Prince of Central Park	Businessmes
2002	Manna from Heaven	Waltz Contest Announcer
2003	Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There	Himself
2003	Try to Remember: The Fantasticks	Himself
2003	Mickey's PhilharMagic	Lumiere	Short film
2004	Protesters	Police Investigator

Television

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1973	Love American Style	Homer	Episode: "Love and the Hoodwinked Honey"
1975	Medical Center	Josh	Episode: "The Captives"
1975	Kojak	Brubaker	Episode: "A Question of Answers"
1980	Buck Rogers in the 25th Century	Lars Mangros	Episode: "Space Rockers"
1985	Our Family Honor	Brian Merrick	2 episodes
1985-1991	Murder, She Wrote	Harry McGraw	6 episodes
1986	The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers	Zachary Foxx	7 episodes
1987	Tales from the Darkside	Robert	Episode: "Everybody Needs a Little Love"
1987-1988	The Law and Harry McGraw	Harry McGraw	16 episodes
1988	Simon & Simon	Harrison/Malcolm Stanley III	Episode: "Ain't Gonna Get It From Me, Jack"
1990	Hunter	Sal Scarlatti	Episode: "Son and Heir"
1990	The Golden Girls	Glen O'Brien	Episode: "Cheaters" Nominated"?Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series
1990	Who's the Boss?	Nick	Episode: "Starlight Memories"
1991	Law & Order	Frank Lehrmann	Episode: "The Wages of Love"
1992	Empty Nest	Arthur	2 episodes
1992-2004	Law & Order	Detective Lennie Briscoe	274 episodes Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series Nominated"?Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series Nominated"?Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series (1995-2004) Nominated"?Viewers for Quality Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Quality Drama Series (1998-2000)
1996	Frasier	Mitch	Episode: "High Crane Drifter"
1996-1999	Homicide: Life on the Street	Detective Lennie Briscoe	3 episodes
1999-2000	Law & Order: Special Victims Unit	Detective Lennie Briscoe	3 episodes
2001	Law & Order: Criminal Intent	Detective Lennie Briscoe	Episode: "Poison"
2005	Law & Order: Trial by Jury	Detective Lennie Briscoe	2 episodes

Stage

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1955-1961	The Threepenny Opera	Streetsinger
1960	The Fantasticks	El Gallo
1961-1963	Carnival!	Various
1964	The Cradle Will Rock	Larry Foreman
1965	Guys and Dolls	Sky Masterson	Nominated"?Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical
1965	Carousel	Unknown
1966	Annie Get Your Gun	Charlie Davenport
1967	The Natural Look	Malcolm
1967	Scuba Duba	Harold WOnder
1968-1972	Promises, Promises	Chuck Baxter	Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical
1972-1973	6 Rms Riv Vu	Paul Friedman
1975-1977	Chicago	Billy Flynn	Nominated"?Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical Nominated"?Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical
1980-1989	42nd Street	Julian Marsh

Video Games

• Law & Order: Dead on the Money (2002)
• Law & Order: Double or Nothing (2003)
• Law & Order: Justice is Served (2004)

Books

His love poems to his wife Elaine were published in Remember How I Love You: Love Letters from an Extraordinary Marriage (Touchstone, 2009). Another biography, Jerry Orbach, Prince of the City: His Way From The Fantasticks to Law & Order by John Anthony Gilvey, was published on May 1, 2011.