Alan Rachins, who delighted TV watchers by playing two very different kinds of histrionic middle-aged men in two hit shows, “L.A. Law” and “Dharma & Greg,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 82.
The death, at a hospital, was caused by heart failure, his family said.
After spending decades trying to break through as an actor, Mr. Rachins (pronounced RAY-chins) became widely recognizable for his roles on the two shows. Each character, an officious lawyer and an aging hippie, was acerbic and eccentric, but in extremely different ways.
Mr. Rachins first came to public attention by appearing on nearly every episode of “L.A. Law,” which ran on NBC for eight seasons, from 1986 to 1994.
The show was created by Terry Louise Fisher and Steven Bochco, who a few years earlier had helped create “Hill Street Blues,” a critically acclaimed police drama. “L.A. Law” used a similar formula: It mixed drama and comedy, employed an ensemble cast and was generally credited as being more realistic and daring than the average show.
“L.A. Law” was popular enough that several lawyers at the time worried how recent episodes would affect juries’ behavior. In 1990, one lawyer told The New York Times, “Any lawyer who doesn’t watch ‘L.A. Law’ the night before he’s going to trial is a fool.”
The show concerned a law firm called McKenzie, Brackman. Mr. Rachins played Douglas Brackman Jr., a senior partner whose father had helped found the firm. He was eloquent, mercenary and obnoxious — traits that set up the character for frequent humiliations.
In front of an audience that reached 14 million weekly viewers, Mr. Rachins’s character got hung upside down in a hospital room, lost his toupee in an aerobics class while trying to impress the instructor, was arrested in a sushi bar and had a Slinky caught in his braces.
Fans often told him they loved hating his character. “I’d say, ‘Well, thank you,’” Mr. Rachins recalled to The Los Angeles Times in 2014.
In 1988, Mr. Rachins was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series.
Mr. Rachins’s wife, Joanna Frank, played his wife on the show, Sheila. In real life, she was also the sister of Mr. Bochco.
“Where we started initially was we wanted a guy who was really sort of pompous and self-important, who we could make fun of,” Mr. Bochco told The New York Times in 1990. “But now you put Alan in there and he turns out to have this wonderfully quirky, idiosyncratic way about him.”
That quirkiness was even more apparent in “Dharma & Greg,” which ran for five seasons on ABC, from 1997 to 2002. It portrayed the sudden marriage of Greg, a buttoned-up son of the moneyed upper class, to Dharma, the daughter of hippies. Mr. Rachins played her father, Larry Finkelstein.
Mr. Finkelstein inveighed against the Girl Scouts as “a paramilitary organization with cookies” and bragged about being so far off the grid that he did not have a Social Security number.
Some called the show’s jokes clichéd, but The Times wrote in 1997 that Mr. Rachins was “apoplectic and endearing as Dharma’s father.”
Alan Lewis Rachins was born in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 3. 1942, and grew up in Brookline, Mass. His father, Edward, ran Snow Crest Finer Foods, which produced an early bear-shaped honey dispenser. His mother, Ida (Schindler) Rachins, often took Alan to the movies after school.
Edward’s factory was in Salem, Mass., and he came home only on weekends. Ida died when Alan was 11. Afterward, he often found himself eating dinner alone. He had a revelation when he saw the movie “Rebel Without a Cause” at age 13.
“He saw a young man expressing all this anger at his father, and he thought, ‘I can’t do it in life, but I could do it in the movies,’” Ms. Frank said in an interview on Sunday. “That’s what began his yearning to be an actor.”
He attended the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, Wharton, for about two years, then dropped out against his father’s wishes to try acting.
He got small roles on Broadway and in Off Broadway shows, including in the original 1969 production of “Oh! Calcutta!,” the musical revue that infamously included nude actors.
“You’re not just naked, you’re vulnerable,” Mr. Rachins recalled to The New York Times on the show’s 50th anniversary. “I felt extremely vulnerable.”
After his father’s death, around 1970, he briefly tried his hand at the family business, then sold his share to his uncle. He attended the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and began writing TV scripts.
In July 1977, he met Ms. Frank in an acting class. They married in March 1978. In addition to her, he is survived by their son, Robert.
Writing in 1993 for the newspaper of Brookline High School, where he was an alum, Mr. Rachins reflected on achieving the ambitions of his boyhood.
“May the parts of your childhood ignite into a dream,” he wrote. “May the torch from that dream guide you through your life.”
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