Nehemiah Persoff, a ubiquitous character actor whose stern voice and knack for conveying a menacing air has magnified a series of portrayals of sinister types, notably half a dozen Prohibition-era gangsters, died Tuesday in San Luis Obispo, California. was 102.
His grandson, Joey Persoff, said the cause was heart failure.
For decades, Mr. Persoff was one of the most recognizable faces on television for his face, if not his name; It has been seen in hundreds of shows since the late 1940s. He often played a supporting character, sometimes kind, sometimes malicious, but often with a vague foreign accent due to his talent for dialect.
“Gunsmoke”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Route 66”, “Gilligan’s Island”, “Mission: Impossible”, “Hawaii Five-O” and “Columbo” in the very rugged series of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and continued with “Law & Order” and “Chicago Hope” in the 1990s.
Jerusalem-born Mr. Persoff, who immigrated to the United States at the age of 9, was an amiable father of four, who in real life had been married to the same woman for seventy years and became a successful painter when he retired.
Among her most notable roles were three caring parents: a Jewish refugee who fled the Nazis and hopes to be reunited with her daughter in Havana in 1976’s “Voyage of the Damned”; In Barbra Streisand’s film “Yentl” (1983), he is the father of an Orthodox Jewish girl dressed as a boy so that he can work in a yeshiva in Poland in the early 20th century; and in the 1986 animated film “An American Tail” and its sequels, he is the voice of the father of Fievel Mousekewitz, a Russian Jewish mouse who emigrated to the United States to escape marauding cats.
Yet he was most associated with the elegant gangsters he portrayed in movies and on television. In the 1959 movie “Al Capone,” starring Rod Steiger, he was the underworld boss Johnny Torrio. He played two different real-life gangsters in the TV series “The Untouchables”: Jake Guzik, the financial mastermind of Capone’s moonshine gang, in several episodes, and New York’s outlaw beer tycoon Waxey Gordon in the 1960 episode, when Tommy cheerfully points his gun at an opponent’s barrel.
His most memorable supporting role may be an oversized parody of gangster Little Bonaparte in the classic Billy Wilder comedy “Some Like It Hot” (1959). His two lines in this movie are often quoted by movie buffs.
Addressing a mob convention disguised as an opera-lovers convention, he says: “We made one hundred and twelve million dollars before taxes last fiscal year…we just didn’t pay taxes!”
And after a hitman popped out of a huge birthday cake and machine-gunned another gangster, played by George Raft, and his entourage, Mr. Persoff says to an inquiring detective, “There was something about that cake that didn’t agree with.” em.”
Mr. Persoff once said that he loved working on “The Untouchables” because he was able to tie horns with federal agent Elliot Ness, played by Robert Stack as an honest hauteur.
“Bob Stack was so snobbish, so true and superior, so aristocratic that he brought out my inner rebellion without any effort on my part,” he told Cinema Retro magazine. “Rage struck a vein in me, anger that is a very important part of what makes a gangster in my mind.”
Nehemiah Persoff was born in Jerusalem on August 2, 1919, during the years when the region passed from Ottoman rule to British mandate. His father, Shmuel, a silversmith, goldsmith, and art teacher, decided his hopes would rise in America and emigrated on his own. Six years later he brought his wife Puah (Holman) Persoff, who became a housewife, and their three sons and two daughters.
This was the onset of the Depression and the family lived in a cold water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, but they eventually moved to the Bronx.
Nehemiah went to the Hebrew Technical Institute to study the electrician trade, and his first job was a signal maintenance worker on the old IND subway line. He paid her $38 a week, more than her father earned.
It was by chance that he met acting: He was asked to perform in a play, which is the most important feature of the function of a Zionist organization. Experience planted an idea, and after completing three years in the state’s Army in the Army, she took a leave of absence from subway work and began studying acting.
Mr. Persoff was among the first students of Actors Studio, which was taught by method acting proponents Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. Other students included Julie Harris, Martin Balsam, Cloris Leachman, and Kim Hunter.
His first small role was in the 1948 film noir “The Naked City,” but it was another minor episode that garnered widespread attention for his face: he was the silent taxi driver in the memorable taxi scene in On the Waterfront (1954). Marlon Brando tells Rod Steiger: “I could have taken lessons, I could have been a competitor. I could have been someone instead of a punk, and that’s what I am.”
He often starred in small supporting pieces, but often turned them into characterization gems. One was Leo, the crooked accountant in Humphrey Bogart’s latest film, “The Harder They Fall” (1956); He coolly tells an enraged Bogart that $1 million in the door for a championship fight will take the story’s over-matched boxer $49.07.
In 1951, Mr. Persoff married his distant relative, Thia Persov, who had nursed with the Palmach, a Zionist military group, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He died of cancer last year. In addition to his grandson, Mr. Persoff has three surviving sons, Jeffrey, Dan, and Perry; daughter Dahlia; and four grandchildren. He lived in the town of Cambria on the coast of central California.
While acting in Hollywood, Mr. Persoff held his hand in live theater. On Broadway in 1959, Mr. He starred as newspaper editor and essayist Harry Golden in a short-lived adaptation of Golden’s folk book “Only in America.” It was the last of more than a dozen Broadway shows.
In his 80s in California, he starred as a grumpy socialite in the Herb Gardner comedy “I’m Not Rappaport” and the milkman Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
For almost two decades, he appeared as the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, the creator of Tevye, in a one-man show from which the author adapted five of his fables. In 1975, he was awarded the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his supporting role in “The Dybbuk” at the Mark Taper Forum.
When high blood pressure and other health problems forced him to reduce his workload, Mr. Persoff began painting, studying in Los Angeles and painting watercolors that were displayed in galleries in Northern California. He continued to paint until the last week of his life. He published a memoir in 2021, “The Many Faces of Nehemiah.”
He had an impressive philosophy about acting beyond dialects and accents. He once said, “If I’m playing a good guy, I’ll try to show that he’s a little bad in it.” “If I’m playing a bad guy, I’ll give him some dignity and love.”
Alex Traub contributed to the reporting.