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Jerry Orbach
1935–2004
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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Jerry Orbach made a spectacular first appearance as Lennie Briscoe, the hard-boiled veteran detective on NBC’s Law & Order, in a late-November 1992 episode called "Point of View." Arriving at a homicide some minutes after his partner, Mike Logan (Chris Noth), Briscoe starts blasting one cop for his treatment of the crime scene before he’s even got both feet out the cab door, his seasoned sarcasm ringing like old-fashioned tommy-gun fire. This star entrance unsettles Logan, who isn’t sure he likes Briscoe’s commanding, been-around-the-block style and who’s still convinced that his old partner, Phil Cerretta (Paul Sorvino), who’d been shot in the previous week’s episode, will be back on his beat as soon as the hospital releases him. But if Logan had to get used to Briscoe’s mordant wise-acre humor, audiences took to it immediately, and for 11 and a half seasons, the show’s writers framed the show’s pre-credits sequence so that Orbach, like a stand-up version of a one-man Greek chorus, provided the punch line. His death from prostate cancer on December 28 at the age of 69 came as a shock to the millions of Law & Order fans who, disappointed by his decision to leave the show at the end of last season, were waiting it out, buoyed by the promise of seeing him again in the spring on the program’s latest spinoff, Trial by Jury. Orbach, who’d been considered earlier both for Sorvino’s role and for that of Sorvino predecessor, George Dzundza, came to the series with a full battery of theatrical skills. His marvelous weathered look — he was the handsomest sad sack in the business — was a gift from the gods, but he’d had years of hard work to determine what he could do with it. His deceptive throw-away style, which masked how deftly he wrung all the juice out of a line first, was honed in his days as an aspiring young actor in Manhattan in the ’50s when he used to hang around with Lenny Bruce and the other master comics of the era. His immediacy on camera, his ability to suggest a complete character in a few moments on screen and to deepen it as the weeks passed and we got a fuller picture of Briscoe’s past (his failed marriages, his bouts with liquor, his strained relationship with his daughter, mostly rendered in unapologetic confessional quips), and his big baritone, insistent as a foghorn, were the consequence of a long and successful career on the New York stage, principally in musical comedy. He originated the role of El Gallo, the narrator figure in Off Broadway’s longest-running show, The Fantasticks, in 1960, introducing the bittersweet ballad "Try To Remember"; and touchingly young as he sounds on the album, you can already hear the combination of brashness and soulfulness that was Lennie Briscoe’s trademark. I was tremendously fortunate to catch him on stage half a dozen times. My parents took me, as a child, to his first Broadway musical, Carnival! As a college freshman, I saw his triumphant usurpation of the Jack Lemmon role in the musical adaptation of The Apartment, Promises, Promises, where, in an ebullient number called "She Likes Basketball," he bounced delightedly around the stage at discovering a bond with the girl (Jill O’Hara) his character had eyed longingly from afar. And with all respect to his worthy legatees, James Naughton and Richard Gere, he was incomparable in the role he created in Bob Fosse’s 1975 Chicago, the lawyer Billy Flynn, who wore his corrupt soul like a silk hankie peeking insouciantly out of his breast pocket. He never became a movie star, though anyone who’s seen his supporting performance in the 1981 cop drama Prince of the City might wonder why not. But nothing he might have done on the big screen could have made him as beloved as his weekly jaunts in Lennie Briscoe’s worn-soled shoes. His most memorable episode was the seventh-season "Corruption," where the instincts and the idealism of his young partner, Rey Curtis (Ben Bratt, Noth’s replacement), flog away at Lennie’s solid-blue loyalty to a pal on the force who turns out to be on the take — and a murderer. The corrupt cop frames Lennie; Orbach’s star turn reaches its peak when an old girlfriend jeopardizes her marriage to testify on his behalf and is raked over the coals by a Ken Starr–like judge (Josef Sommers). Heartsick, Briscoe watches his former lover’s life get torn apart by the judge; then, leaping over his place in the legal hierarchy, he almost decks her tormentor in the men’s room afterward. It’s a beautifully modulated piece of acting from a man who embodied the phrase "old pro."
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