Michael Lerner, a prolific screen actor who brought a gruff charisma to his portrayals of gangsters, street thugs and other Hollywood heavyweights, most notably in his Oscar-nominated performance as the imposing movie mogul in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink, died April 8 in a hospital in Burbank, California. He was 81.
The cause was brain attacks, said his brother Ken Lerner, who is also an actor.
Mr. Lerner racked up more than 180 film and television credits in a career that spanned 60 years. He said he was content with being known as a character actor — “every role is a character role,” he once remarked — and developed a reputation as a reliable scene thief, even when his scenes were short.
“His characters have a layer of charm, a thin skin of bonhomie over the natural bully’s bacon,” wrote Philip French, film critic for the London Observer. “Cops, politicians, gangsters and Hollywood tycoons are his forte, and he’s brought a number of them to memorable lives.”
Mr. Lerner played and was a fictional speechwriter in Robert Redford’s political comedy The Candidate (1972). the nonchalant White House press secretary Pierre Salinger in The Missiles of October (1974), a made-for-TV film about the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later recalled that after watching the film, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis told him, “Mr. Lerner, you outed Pierre’d Pierre.”
“I love playing real people,” Mr. Lerner once told the Los Angeles Times. “It gives me a chance to become that person for a while.”
He had what he considered his first major role in Ruby and Oswald (1978), a television film about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, starring Frederic Forrest as assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Lerner played Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who fatally shot Oswald after he was taken into custody.
Mr. Lerner later appeared in two made-for-television movies as a real-life movie executive, playing Warner Bros. Jack Warner in the Marilyn Monroe biopic This Year’s Blonde (1980) and Columbia Pictures’ Harry Cohn in Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess. (1983).
But for many critics, his best performance was Barton Fink (1991), a historical play about a New York playwright (John Turturro) trying to launch a screenwriting career in 1940s Hollywood. Mr. Lerner played the fast-talking, hard-hitting film executive Jack Lipnick, a character he said was modeled after MGM’s Louis B. Mayer.
“I even found a pair of glasses in a junk shop that were identical to the ones he was wearing,” said Mr. Lerner. “As soon as I put them on, I felt like Mayer.”
In three scenes of around 15 minutes, Mr. Lerner created a lively portrait. “I figured you can’t put Lipnick down,” he told the Knight-Ridder News Service. “I had to find that line between charisma and truth. And I found it through its ego, through its needs, through its desires. Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. I, I, I, I, I.”
When Mr. Lerner was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, many peers and film viewers felt the recognition was overdue. The nomination earned Mr. Lerner attention he wasn’t used to, including an invitation to Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday party at Disneyland.
Mr. Lerner eventually lost to actor Jack Palance for City Slickers.
He carved an enduring place in the tradition of Santa Claus with a role in Elf (2003), a comedy starring Will Ferrell as a human being raised by Santa’s elves at the North Pole who returns to New York to find him holiday movie watching his birth father (James Caan). Mr. Lerner plays Caan’s Boss, a formidable publishing executive desperate for a blockbuster Christmas book to revitalize his ailing business.
Michael Charles Lerner, the middle of three brothers, was born on June 22, 1941 in Brooklyn to a Jewish family of Romanian descent. His mother was a secretary, and his father “liked to think he was an antique dealer, but he was actually a junk dealer,” the Hollywood Reporter quoted Mr. Lerner as saying.
Mr. Lerner became active in theater while studying English at Brooklyn College, where he played Willy Loman in a campus production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
“I looked in the mirror as I was putting makeup on,” he told the Miami Herald, “and I said to myself — I remember it vividly — ‘Oh my god… I’m an actor.'”
Mr. Lerner received a bachelor’s degree in 1963. He later studied drama and drama at the University of California, Berkeley and at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a Fulbright scholarship. In London he was roommates with Yoko Ono before she married John Lennon of The Beatles. Mr. Lerner appeared in Ono’s experimental short film Smile (1968), which she co-directed with Lennon.
Mr. Lerner later acted in San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theater before moving to Los Angeles and venturing into television and film. Early in his career, he appeared on shows such as The Brady Bunch and The Doris Day Show before winning a role in the film Alex in Wonderland (1970), starring Donald Sutherland and Ellen Burstyn.
Mr. Lerner has appeared on television shows such as MASH, The Odd Couple and Hill Street Blues. In the 1990s, he played the protagonist’s father in Clueless, a TV show inspired by the earlier Alicia Silverstone film. He later starred in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Entourage, and Glee.
Mr. Lerner had a notable role in the film Harlem Nights (1989), in which director Eddie Murphy cast him as the fictional crime boss and nightclub owner Bugsy Calhoune.
He also starred in the remake of the 1998 monster Godzilla as the bumbling Mayor Ebert of New York – an unsubtle nod to film critic Roger Ebert, who took his defeat in stride. (“They left us unscathed; I fully expected to be crushed like a bug by Godzilla,” he wrote.)
Mr. Lerner’s other films include The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and A Serious Man (2009), which he co-wrote with filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen brought together .
Mr. Lerner’s nephew Sam Lerner appears in the television series The Goldbergs and his niece Jenny Lerner is also an actress. A full list of survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Lerner found that after a career that hasn’t been entirely in the dark, but neither has it been in the spotlight, there were benefits to being nominated for an Oscar that went beyond the honor. “For a long time,” he told the Herald, “I went through this whole thing of being mistaken for Michael Learned, who played the mother on The Waltons. … I don’t think that mistake will happen very often now.”