Jerry Orbach

Broadway musical comedy star who played Lennie Briscoe in 'Law and Order'

Though internationally known for his recurring role as the sardonic police officer Lennie Briscoe on the television crime series Law and Order, Jerry Orbach spent most of his career as one of Broadway's prime stars of musical comedy. He created the roles of the wily lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago (1975) and the theatre director Julian Marsh in the stage version of 42nd Street (1980), and he was the original leading man in such shows as The Fantasticks (1960) and Promises, Promises (1968), winning a Tony Award for the latter.

Jerome Bernard Orbach, actor: born New York 20 October 1935; married 1958 Marta Curro (two sons; marriage dissolved 1975), 1979 Elaine Cancilla; died New York 28 December 2004.

Though internationally known for his recurring role as the sardonic police officer Lennie Briscoe on the television crime series Law and Order, Jerry Orbach spent most of his career as one of Broadway's prime stars of musical comedy. He created the roles of the wily lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago (1975) and the theatre director Julian Marsh in the stage version of 42nd Street (1980), and he was the original leading man in such shows as The Fantasticks (1960) and Promises, Promises (1968), winning a Tony Award for the latter.

His fame on the Broadway stage rather than in movies or television had him often compared with such other theatrical luminaries as Alfred Drake and John Raitt. Though his craggy, clownish features and hooded eyes made him a less dashing figure than Drake or Raitt, he had an equally powerful voice and that indefinable charisma that commanded a stage. The actress Adrienne Angel, who worked with him in Promises, Promises, said:

Jerry Orbach wasn't really right for the part in some ways. But he was such an ingratiating personality, and such a gifted comic performer, that you accepted him.

The son of a restaurant manager, Orbach was born in 1935 in the Bronx, New York, though he grew up in Waukegan, Illinois. While studying drama at Northwestern University he worked in summer stock, and immediately after graduation he headed for New York, sharing a tiny flat with a friend while he looked for work. "We got by on peanut butter, beer and whatever food my friend brought back from parties," he recalled. "I went to folk-singing parties where there wasn't any food."

His first major break was in an off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera (1955), which starred Lotte Lenya, Scott Merrill and Beatrice Arthur:

I got that through a friend - you know this business is like one big network of friends. Jo Wilder (Joel Grey's wife) was playing Polly and she got me the job as the Streetsinger's understudy. Then I went on in that role and played a lot of smaller roles. Eventually I understudied Mack the Knife and got to go on in that role. Interesting to have a 20-year-old playing opposite Lotte Lenya!

During his three years with the show, he studied acting with Lee Strasburg and Mira Rostova, and singing with Mazel Schweppe. He also married another of the show's understudies, Marta Curro. (In 1979 he married his second wife, the actress Elaine Cancilla, who was in the cast of Chicago.)

A starring role followed in another off-Broadway hit, The Fantasticks (1960), in which, as El Gallo, he introduced its hit song, "Try to Remember". The whimsical musical (a flop in London) opened to poor reviews and business, but the publicising by celebrated devotees such as Anne Bancroft, Richard Rodgers and Jerome Robbins, its winning the Vernon Rice Award as best off-Broadway musical, and the popularity of "Try to Remember", turned it into a hit that was to become the longest-running show in the world (over 41 years).

Orbach moved to the Broadway stage for a starring role in Carnival (1961), with a score by Bob Merrill and direction by Gower Champion. It was based on the 1953 film Lili, with Orbach as the crippled puppeteer (played by Mel Ferrer on screen) whose latent warmth and compassion are brought out by a fey orphan. In 1964 Orbach played Sky Masterson to Sheila MacRae's Sarah Brown in a City Center revival of Guys and Dolls, and two years later he was Charley Davenport in a Lincoln Center revival of Annie Get Your Gun starring Ethel Merman. But it was his performance in Promises, Promises that put him into Broadway's top echelon.

In this Neil Simon adaptation of the 1960 film The Apartment, he played the young executive (Jack Lemmon in the movie) who offers his apartment to his bosses for their extra-marital trysts. The score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David included the hit song "I'll Never Fall in Love Again", introduced by Orbach and Jill O'Hara, both of whom were described by Bacharach as "terrific . . . the audience were rooting for the people on stage - very important". Variety, calling Orbach "superb", hailed his interpretation as "half slickie, half schlemiel, but always endearing - especially in a funny series of audience asides Simon has created for him".

The show made Orbach a star and won him the Tony as Best Actor in a Musical. His propensity for hit shows became remarkable. In his foreword to a recent book on Broadway musicals, he writes,

I guess I was naïve, but for a while I thought that every show that came my way would be a hit - then I made my straight play début in The Natural Look (1967), and our opening night was also our closing night.

He had greater success with lauded comic performances in Bruce Jay Friedman's Scuba Duba (1967), in which he was the neurotic Jewish intellectual Harry Wonder, and Bob Randall's hit comedy 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972). He received another Tony nomination for his portrayal of the flamboyant agent Billy Flynn in Chicago, in which he introduced the song "Razzle Dazzle", and held his own with two powerhouse leading ladies, Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera.

In 42nd Street he was the dedicated stage director who tells the inexperienced leading lady plucked from the chorus, "You're going out there a youngster but you've got to come back a star!" The show had a legendary first night when the producer David Merrick controversially went on stage to quell the cheering audience and to announce that the director-choreographer Gower Champion had died that afternoon. The playwright Leonard Melfi later recalled that, after the gasps of surprise and grief from cast and audience, there was a stunned silence broken here and there by sobs, and it was Orbach who looked offstage right and said, "Bring it down", and then again, "BRING IT DOWN!" As the curtain slowly began to descend, he said respectfully to the audience, "Good night."

Orbach's confidence and composure had been noted by Adrienne Angel during the run of Promises, Promises:

One night, in previews, the scenery fell down. And he just talked to the audience and said, "We're having a little problem here", and he would just go on. He could forget lines and it wouldn't bother him at all. Nothing seemed to affect him. One night there was a fire in the alley next to the theatre. Smoke started filling the theatre and the audience was getting nervous, so Jerry was asked by the stage manager to make an announcement. So he just stepped out of character and said, "I've been asked by the management to tell you that there's no fire in the theatre. It's in some garbage out in the alley so let's just get on with the show. But let's take it from after where he hits me. I don't want to do that again." He even made that work for him.

Orbach made his screen début as the leader of a street gang in the New York-made Cop Hater (1958), and had his first top-billed role in the pastiche mob movie The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971). Other notable screen appearances included Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City (1981), F/X (1986), Dirty Dancing (1987), in which he played Jennifer Grey's supportive father, and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1990).

On television, he starred in The Law and Harry McGraw (1987), a spin-off series from Murder, She Wrote. In 1990 he received an Emmy nomination for a guest appearance on The Golden Girls, and the following year he made a big hit providing the voice for Lumiere, the candelabra, in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, singing the show-stopping "Be My Guest". And in 1992 he was given the role of the divorced detective and recovering alcoholic Briscoe in Law and Order, a role he was to play for 12 seasons. He called the part "wonderful security, rare in the life of an actor".

Orbach had filmed several episodes of the spin-off series, Law and Order: Trial by Jury before being overtaken by prostate cancer. "The climb to the stop seems short," he once said:

I was never forced into a job I didn't want, and I've had a good time on the way. I don't seem to have problems with people that a lot of people do, and I've never been in awe of the people I was working with - not even Ethel Merman. We're all in the same business and that's what it is, a business that just happens to also be a lot of fun.

Tom Vallance