Louis Zorich, Familiar Actor on TV and Stage, Dies at 93
He was not on the list.
Louis Zorich, a busy actor who appeared on Broadway with
stars like Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, on television in the comedy
“Mad About You” and in numerous projects with his wife, the Oscar-winning
actress Olympia Dukakis, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.
His son Peter confirmed his death.
In a career of some 60 years, Mr. Zorich played scores of
roles, mostly of the character-actor variety. He was the father to Paul Reiser’s
character on NBC’s “Mad About You” from 1993 to 1999 and the grandfather on
“Brooklyn Bridge,” a well-regarded CBS series that ran for two seasons earlier
in the 1990s.
But he also occasionally tackled the big roles. The year
before “Brooklyn Bridge” made its debut in 1991, he played King Lear in a
production at the Whole Theater in Montclair, N.J., of which he and Ms. Dukakis
were founding members. In 2004 he portrayed the title character in an Off
Broadway version of Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” by the Aquila Theater Company,
opposite Ms. Dukakis’s Clytemnestra.
Mr. Zorich continued to work into his 90s, so there is some
irony in the fact that his final film appearance was in “No Pay, Nudity”
(2016), a bittersweet comic drama by Lee Wilkof about the troubles older actors
have finding work.
Louis Michael Zorich was born on Feb. 12, 1924, in Chicago.
His parents — Christ, a stationary engineer, and the former Anna Gledj, a homemaker
— were immigrants from Yugoslavia.
Mr. Zorich was drafted into the Army at 18 and served in an
engineering firefighting platoon attached to Gen. George S. Patton’s command
during World War II. After returning to Chicago from Europe he attended
Roosevelt College under the G.I. Bill, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1951.
He earned a bachelor of fine arts from the Goodman School of Drama in 1958.
“I never had to do anything outside the theater since the
day I left acting school,” he reminisced in a 1991 interview with the Newhouse
News Service. “I never had to drive a cab like everybody does. I never had to
wait on tables like people do, or work in temporary office work. It was just
sheer luck.”
His first television credits were in 1958, including two
Canadian anthology series, “Encounter” and “On Camera.” He made his Broadway
debut in 1960 in a small role in “Becket,” with Olivier as Thomas Becket and
Anthony Quinn as King Henry II.
Those early credits set the pattern for a career that would
mix a lot of television and a lot of theater, with the occasional film thrown
in. His movie roles included a constable in the 1971 film version of “Fiddler
on the Roof.”
On television, he was seen on episodes of “Route 66,” “Naked
City,” “Columbo,” “Law & Order” and the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.” But he
most loved to work in the theater.
“I don’t know why or how people cannot want to go to
theater,” he once said. “I don’t understand that. It’s not like TV, it’s not
like the movies.”
One theater audition he went to in 1961 proved particularly
life-changing. It was for an Off Broadway play called “The Opening of a
Window.”
“My dad was up for the part of the husband,” Peter Zorich
said by email. “The wife was already cast — Olympia Dukakis. He read for the
part but didn’t get it — can’t make that up. They moved in together.”
They married the next year.
Mr. Zorich received a Tony Award nomination for best
featured actor in a play for his 1969 performance in “Hadrian VII.” In 1984 he
played Uncle Ben in a “Death of a Salesman” revival that starred Mr. Hoffman as
Willy Loman; he reprised the role in a well-regarded TV version on CBS the next
year.
His other Broadway credits included the 2001 revival of
“Follies” and, most recently, the 2003 revival of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
Though Mr. Zorich and Ms. Dukakis were in many high-profile
stage productions, they frequently worked in smaller theaters, both in New York
and beyond, individually and together. Sometimes their collaborations would
turn into family affairs, as in 2001, when Mr. Zorich and his brother-in-law,
Apollo Dukakis, jointly directed “The Cherry Orchard” for the Pacific Repertory
Theater in Carmel, Calif. The cast included Ms. Dukakis and Christina Zorich,
the couple’s daughter.
A particularly enduring collaboration was the Whole Theater
Company in Montclair, where the couple lived for many years. They were part of
a group that formed the company in 1970. It staged its first Montclair
production, “Our Town,” in 1973, and brought numerous actors, known and
unknown, to Montclair before closing in 1990. Mr. Zorich and Ms. Dukakis’s home
became something of a gathering spot.
“It was like growing up in the circus,” Peter Zorich told
The Montclair Times in 2015, when the troupe held a reunion. “There was someone
living in the basement, in the garage, in the carriage house.”
In addition to Ms. Dukakis, his son Peter and his daughter,
Christina, Mr. Zorich is survived by another son, Stefan; a sister, Helen
Cochand; and four grandchildren. He is the uncle of former NFL player Chris Zorich,
In 1991 Mr. Zorich spoke of the one play he and Ms. Dukakis
had done that he would not want to revisit: Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?” They played George and Martha, the warring couple at the
play’s center, in a 1979 production in Montclair and, he said, had gotten a
little too into their characters.
After playing the show for a few weeks, he said, he marched
into her dressing room and asked, “Why are you going after me like that?,” only
to hear her explain that she was merely playing the role. After another week or
two, she confronted him with the same sort of accusation.
“I’ll never forget that,” he said. “We almost got divorced.”
Filmography
Year Title Role Notes
1966 Gamera, the
Giant Monster Russian Ambassador
1968 What's So Bad
About Feeling Good? Uncredited
1968 Coogan's
Bluff Taxi Driver
1969 Popi Penebaz
1971 Cold Turkey Douglas Truesdale Uncredited
1971 They Might Be
Giants 2nd Sanitation Man
1971 Fiddler on
the Roof Constable
1971 Made for Each
Other Pandora's Father
1973 The Don Is
Dead Mitch DiMorra
1974 The Rehearsal
1974 For Pete's
Sake Nick
1974 Newman's Law Frank Lo Falcone
1974 Sunday in the
Country Dinelli
1976 W.C. Fields
and Me Gene Fowler
1977 A Good
Dissonance Like a Man George W. Chadwick
1977 The Other
Side of Midnight Demonides
1980 The
Changeling Stewart Adler Uncredited
1980 Up the
Academy Sheik Amier
1984 The Muppets
Take Manhattan Pete
1985 Death of a
Salesman Ben Loman TV movie
1985 Walls of
Glass Lerner
1986 Club Paradise
Swiss Businessman
1986 Where Are the
Children? Kragopoulos
1988 Cheap Shots Louie Constantine
1988 Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels Greek
Millionaire
1989 Bloodhounds
of Broadway Mindy
1991 City of Hope Mayor Baci
1991 Missing
Pieces Ochenko
1997 Commandments Rudy Warner
1997 Kiss &
Tell Louis
1998 A Fish in the
Bathtub Morris
1999 Joe the King Judge
2001 Friends and
Family Marvin Levine
2004 A Hole in One
Sammy
2007 Running Funny
Stan
2009 Run It Angelo
2011 Detachment Grampa
2011 A Bird of the
Air Stowalski
2011 The Tall Man Lou
2015 Emily &
Tim Tim Hanratty (segment 'Attachment')
2016 No Pay,
Nudity Lester's Father (final film role)
