Jerry Orbach

Early life

Orbach was born on October 20, 1935, 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 emigrant from Hamburg, Germany. Orbach stated that his father was descended from Sephardic refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. His mother, a native of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, was a Roman Catholic of Polish-Lithuanian descent, and Orbach was raised in her faith (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 (having skipped two grades in elementary school due to his high IQ). He 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 left Northwestern before his senior year and moved to New York City in 1955 to pursue acting and to study at the Actors Studio, where one of his instructors was the studio's founder, Lee Strasberg.

Career

Orbach was an accomplished Broadway and off-Broadway actor. His first major role was El Gallo in the original 1960 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 Baxter, winning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical), the original productions of Chicago (as Billy Flynn, receiving another Tony Award nomination), 42nd Street, and a revival of The Cradle Will Rock. Orbach made occasional film and TV appearances into the 1970s and appeared as a celebrity panelist on both What's My Line? and Super Password.

In the 1980s, Orbach shifted to film and TV work full-time. Prominent roles included a superb performance as tough, effective, but "allegedly corrupt" NYPD narcotics detective 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 gangsters in both the action-thriller F/X and the Woody Allen drama Crimes and Misdemeanors (the latter of which also featured his future Law & Order co-star Sam Waterston). In 1985, Orbach became a regular guest star on Murder, She Wrote as private detective Harry McGraw, which led to him starring in the short-lived spin-off series The Law & Harry McGraw. In 1987, he was featured in the hit film Dirty Dancing as Dr. Jake Houseman, the father of Jennifer Grey's character "Baby". He also made further TV appearances on popular shows such as The Golden Girls (for which he received his first Emmy nomination), Who's the Boss?, and Frasier (as a guest caller).

In 1991, Orbach starred in Disney's Academy Award-winning animated musical Beauty and the Beast, as the voice (both singing and speaking) of the French-accented candelabrum Lumière, which according to Orbach, he played "halfway between Maurice Chevalier and Pepé Le Pew". At the 64th Academy Awards, Orbach performed a live-action stage rendition of the Oscar-nominated song, "Be Our Guest", that he sang in Beauty and the Beast. He later reprised his voice role of Lumière for the film's direct-to-video sequels, multiple episodes of Disney's House of Mouse, and the previously-deleted song ("Human Again") that was added to the Beauty and the Beast 2002 IMAX re-release. In 1992, Orbach joined the main ensemble cast of Law & Order as the world-weary, wisecracking, streetwise NYPD homicide detective Lennie Briscoe. He had previously guest-starred as a defense attorney on the series, and was subsequently cast as the new "senior detective" following Paul Sorvino's departure. Orbach's portrayal of Detective Briscoe was based on his similar role from Prince of the City years before, which Law & Order creator Dick Wolf had personally suggested to him at the time of his casting.

Orbach starred on Law & Order for 12 years, ultimately becoming the third longest-serving main cast member (behind S. Epatha Merkerson and Sam Waterston) in the show's 20-year-run history, as well as one of its most popular. During Orbach's tenure on Law & Order, the series won the 1997 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series among other accolades, made multiple crossover episodes with fellow NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street, and spawned a franchise that included the TV film Exiled: A Law & Order Movie, the spin-off series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent (both of which featured Orbach in guest appearances), and three video games. Orbach himself was nominated for a 2000 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (losing to James Gandolfini for The Sopranos). TV Guide named Lennie Briscoe one of their top-25 greatest television detectives of all time. Also during his time on Law & Order, Orbach co-starred with Al Pacino in the independent film Chinese Coffee, which was filmed in the summer of 1997 and released three years later.

Personal life

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 and also guest starred on the Law & Order episode "Doubles" as a reporter. Younger son Chris Orbach, who is an actor and singer, played Lennie Briscoe's nephew Ken Briscoe during the first season of 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.

Death

In January 1994 (less than two years into his stint on Law & Order), Orbach was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He initially received radiation therapy as treatment, but by December 1994, the cancer had returned and metastasized; at that point, he went on hormone therapy, on which he remained over the next decade until the treatment ran out in March 2004. Following his departure from Law & Order that year, Orbach went through chemotherapy, but he ultimately succumbed to his cancer on December 28, 2004, at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York (at age 69). Despite being diagnosed with the cancer more than a decade before his death, Orbach's illness was not revealed to the general public until just weeks before he died. Prior to his death, Orbach was signed to continue in the role of Lennie Briscoe on the new spin-off Law & Order: Trial by Jury (which was to accommodate his illness by giving him a lighter workload than he had on the original series), but he was only featured in the first two episodes of the series (both of which aired in March 2005, after his death).

The day after Orbach's death, the marquees on Broadway were dimmed in mourning, one of the highest honors of the American theatre world, while NBC re-aired the Law & Order episode "C.O.D." (the last episode of the original series to feature Orbach) in honor of him. The Criminal Intent episode "View from Up Here" and the Trial by Jury episode "Baby Boom" were dedicated to Orbach, and the Law & Order episode "Mammon" featured a pictorial memorial of him.

In addition to his sons, wife, and former wife, Orbach was survived by his mother and two grandchildren, Peter and Sarah Kate Orbach, children of his older son Tony. His mother died on July 28, 2012, at the age of 101. His wife Elaine died in 2009 (at age 69), and his former wife Marta died in 2012 (at age 79). Having had perfect 20/20 vision his whole life, Jerry Orbach requested that his eyes be 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. His 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, Jerry Orbach is also a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame, having been inducted in 1999. In 2002, Orbach was named a "Living Landmark" by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, along with his Law & Order co-star Sam Waterston. Orbach 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 for his longtime role on Law & Order. His wife Elaine accepted the award on his behalf.

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

Also in 2007, the Jerry Orbach Theatre was named for him in the Snapple Theater Center at 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

After Law & Order was cancelled in 2010, executive producer René Balcer was quoted by The Wall Street Journal: "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."

New York Times writers Ben Brantley and Richard Servero analyzed the breadth and scope of Orbach's career:

Whether singing "Try to Remember" as the dashing narrator of "The Fantasticks" in 1960 or trading barbs with fellow detectives and reluctant witnesses on television in recent years, Mr. Orbach exuded a wry, ragged masculinity that was all his own. As a star of musicals, he created a new kind of hero who was leagues away from suave, swaggering Adonises like John Raitt, Howard Keel, and Alfred Drake... And he flourished at a time when the Broadway musical hero was fast becoming an endangered species... His rough-edged individuality may account for his endurance on the Broadway stage in an era when other promising musical actors - including Larry Kert, Robert Goulet, and Robert Morse - proved unable to follow through on their breakthrough successes. Mr. Orbach may have been the last of a breed: no male star since has matched the breadth and continuity of his career in musicals... It wasn't until the 1990s, when he started appearing as Lennie Briscoe in "Law & Order," that Mr. Orbach became a familiar name throughout the country. The rough edge that distinguished him on Broadway eased his transition to character roles like Briscoe, the recovered alcoholic who seemed to greet the discovery of each episode's crime with a world-weary shrug.

Dirty Dancing co-star Patrick Swayze memorialized Orbach after his death:

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... 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, [were] 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.

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.