Jerry Adler, who has died aged 96, was best known for his role in The Sopranos as Herman “Hesh” Rabkin, Tony Soprano’s unofficial consigliere, whose twinkling eyes disguised a ruthless business mind, and later as Howard Lyman in The Good Wife.
Adler was already 70 when he began on The Sopranos; he had been in show business since he was 21, but had spent more than four decades as a stage manager and director, first on the stage and then in television, before he moved in front of the cameras.
Jerry (Jerome) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Philip, a theatre manager on Broadway and for touring shows, and Pauline (nee Goldberg), known as Polly. Philip was part of the Yiddish theatre family headed by his uncle, the Ukrainian-born Jacob Pavlovich Adler, whose children included the acting coach Stella Adler, six of whose siblings or half-siblings became actors.
She was a founding member of the influential Group Theatre; her brother Luther was arguably the family’s most successful actor on screen and Philip Adler became general manager of the company.
“I am a creature of nepotism,” Jerry said. He attended Samuel J Tilden high school in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, then Syracuse University. One day in 1950 he left university when his father called to offer him a job as assistant stage manager on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Carol Channing.
A revival of the George S Kaufman/Gershwin brothers Of Thee I Sing followed in 1952, and then he worked on the original My Fair Lady production, in 1956, with Rex Harrison and a 20-year-old Julie Andrews. His later work included Mike Nichols’s 1966 The Apple Tree, with Alan Alda, and the 1967 Broadway debut of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming.
He moved seamlessly into directing with Sammy Cahn’s one-man show Words & Music (1974) and was nominated for a Drama Desk award for the revival of My Fair Lady (1976), 20 years after the original he had stage managed.
The same year he did a less successful revival, of Hellzapoppin starring Jerry Lewis, and in 1979 was the production supervisor on Richard Rodgers’ musical I Remember Mama, the last work before Rodgers’ death.
In 1983 Adler moved to Los Angeles to be closer to his children, moving to the small screen, as stage manager of the daytime soap opera Search for Tomorrow; during which time he did the same on the 1985 Tony Awards. The next year, he moved to another soap opera, Santa Barbara, and directed the TV movie Class of ’86.
While still stage managing Santa Barbara, he made the move to acting in 1991, when a friend got him to meet the director Howard Franklin, who immediately said Adler reminded him of his own father, and cast him in The Public Eye (1992), starring Joe Pesci as character based on Weegee, the famed New York newspaper photographer.
Before the movie opened, he got his first television role, in Brooklyn Bridge, a coming of age comedy set in the 1950s. He then appeared in one of his best remembered roles, in Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), cast as a man Allen suspects of having murdered his wife (played by Lynn Cohen). The same year he was in a well-received TV movie, The Odd Couple: Together Again, with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall.
Adler became an in-demand character actor, in series such as Spin City and Law and Order, and moved into recurring parts, as a rabbi in Northern Exposure (1994-95) and on the soap One Life to Live (1995). He became a third-billed regular on Hudson Street (1995-96), a crime series set in Hoboken, New Jersey; The Sopranos followed in 1999.
During the eight years he was involved with The Sopranos, he returned to Broadway, this time on stage, in Elaine May’s Taller Than a Dwarf (2000), and also did two seasons as the live-in father of Bob Saget’s single parent in the comedy series Raising Dad. The Sopranos ended in 2007, and that year he was in the film The Memory Thief, followed by Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), in which he and Cohen again played husband and wife.
He also played the fire chief Sidney Feinberg in Rescue Me, from 2007 to 2011, and then joined the legal and political drama The Good Wife (2011-16) with two more seasons on its successor series The Good Fight. He played Jeffrey Tambor’s father in Transparent (2017-19) and had a recurrent part as the handyman in Mad About You in the 90s; his final screen credit came in the series’ 2019 revival.
In 2008 he wrote the script for a TV documentary, Medal of Honor, and returned to the stage in 2015, in Larry David’s Fish in the Dark. Adler’s 2024 memoir, Too Funny for Words: Backstage Tales from Broadway, Television and the Movies was an engaging book which did just what it said on the cover.
“You know what’s interesting?” he said in 2017. “You spend your whole career backstage. Nobody knows who you are, or even knows your name … Then you do a television show and suddenly you’re a celebrity and everyone knows your face.”
Adler is survived by his third wife, Joan Laxman, a psychologist, whom he married in 1994, and four daughters, Laura, Alisa, Amy, and Emily, from his earlier two marriages.