Jerry Adler was in his 60s and what he joked was the “twilight of a mediocre career,” as a stage manager and director on Broadway, when he fell by happenstance into a long and respected second act in show business as an actor of scene-stealing versatility.
By the time he died on Saturday in Manhattan at 96, Mr. Adler had amassed 60 film and television credits as well as the acclaim of his peers. His death was confirmed by his daughter Alisa Adler, who was also his agent.
After years of sitcom work, Mr. Adler came to wider attention on the hit HBO crime-family drama “The Sopranos” as Herman Rabkin, known as Hesh, a music mogul, loan shark and trusted associate of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini).
The character was supposed to be a one-off for the 1999 pilot, but David Chase, the show’s creator, found Mr. Adler so compelling that he kept bringing him back for six seasons.
As a Jew, Hesh had no shot of becoming a made member of an Italian crime family. But he remained an inner-circle presence, providing strategic and psychological advice to Tony and huddling with the paisanos in the backroom of Satriale’s Pork Store and the Bada Bing! strip club.
Other highlights in Mr. Adler’s acting career included a supporting part as an kindly-seeming older neighbor whose wife suddenly dies in Woody Allen’s film “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993) and a largely buffoonish role as a lazy, sexist law-firm partner (and later judge) on the 2009-16 CBS legal political drama “The Good Wife,” starring Julianna Margulies, as well as the spinoff “The Good Fight.”
Robert King, who co-created both shows, wrote on the social media site X that Mr. Adler skillfully transformed a minor character into a recurring part.
“The intent,” he noted, “was only to have him for one episode of ‘The Good Wife,’ but he was so funny in a diner scene” — with a foul-mouthed rant about ice cream — “we had him back for six years of ‘Good Wife’ and three years of ‘Good Fight.’”
In addition to guest appearances on “The West Wing,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and other shows, Mr. Adler had a regular role on “Rescue Me,” the FX comedy-drama about firefighters starring Denis Leary. He was 90 when he popped up as a Holocaust survivor on Comedy Central’s “Broad City.”
Although he became a prolific and visible face on the small screen, Mr. Adler spent the first decades of his career behind the scenes. He worked on more than 50 Broadway shows, largely as a stage manager, although he also directed and produced.
He moved to California in the 1980s and served as the stage manager on the NBC soap opera “Santa Barbara.” In what he later called a “fluke,” Donna Isaacson, a casting director who was a friend of one of his children, hired him to portray a gruff newspaper columnist with a compassionate side in “The Public Eye” (1992), a film starring Joe Pesci as a tabloid photographer modeled on Weegee.
“When the director describes the character,” he recalled Ms. Isaacson telling him, “it’s like he’d describing you.”
“I’d never acted before,” Mr. Adler told the Jewish newspaper The Forward. “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.”
With his hangdog air and a rubbery face that could veer from avuncular to coldly calculating, he had a “wonderful kind of Everyman quality,” Juliet Taylor, who cast him in “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” told The New York Times in 1992. He delivered his lines, she said, with “authority.”
He became a frequent presence on network television in the 1990s, notably as Mr. Wicker, a New York building superintendent, on NBC’s popular sitcom “Mad About You,” starring Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt, and as Rabbi Alan Schulman on the CBS comedy-drama “Northern Exposure.”
Mr. Chase was the executive producer on “Northern Exposure,” and he soon asked Mr. Adler if he was available for his upcoming pilot. “He said, ‘You’re going to love it, it’s called “The Sopranos,”’” Mr. Adler recalled in a 2019 video interview. “I said, ‘I’d love to do it, but I’ve got to warn you in advance: I don’t sing.’”
Jerome Adler was born on Feb. 4, 1929, in Brooklyn, the eldest of two sons of Pauline (Goldberg) and Philip Adler. His father was the general manager of the Group Theater, a collective founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg that built a foundation for method acting.
Stella Adler, the influential acting teacher and method guru, and her brother, the actor Luther Adler, were distant cousins.
After graduating from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, Mr. Adler was studying at Syracuse University when his father hooked him up with what became his first job on Broadway: as an assistant stage manager on the musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” starring Carol Channing, in 1950.
“I’m a creature of nepotism,” he joked decades later to the website TheaterMania.
In 1956, he helped stage-manage the original production of the hit musical “My Fair Lady,” starring Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle.
His subsequent credits included production stage manager of “The Apple Tree” (1966), a musical directed by Mike Nichols, and production supervisor for “Dear World” (1969), for which Angela Lansbury received a Tony Award for best actress in a musical.
In 1973, Mr. Adler directed Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in “Good Evening,” a satirical revue that earned a special Tony Award. Three years later, he directed a “My Fair Lady” revival that ran for 377 performances.
The revival, which starred Ian Richardson and Christine Andreas, brought Mr. Adler a Drama Desk Award nomination and earned George Rose a Tony for his supporting role as Eliza’s often-inebriated father.
In addition to his daughter Alisa, Mr. Adler is survived by his wife, Joan (Laxman) Adler, three other daughters, Amy, Laura and Emily Adler, from an earlier marriage, to Dolores Parker, which ended in divorce in 1974; and a grandson.
Particularly at the outset of his acting career, Mr. Adler said he found it unsettling to see his face onscreen. “It’s really very weird,” he told The Times in 1992. But beyond the obvious perks — the luxury hotels and limousines — he found a deeper significance in the celluloid life: “I’m immortal.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
Ali Watkins covers international news for The Times and is based in Belfast.
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