Ron Leibman, an actor whose career of more than six decades in film, television and the theater was highlighted by a Tony Award in 1993 for his electrifying performance as Roy Cohn in the first part of “Angels in America,” died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 82.
A spokeswoman for the actress Jessica Walter, his wife, said the cause was pneumonia.
Mr. Leibman already had Drama Desk Awards for “We Bombed in New Haven” (1969) and “Transfers” (1970) as well as an Emmy for the short-lived CBS series “Kaz” (1979) when he took on the role of Cohn in “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s monumental two-part play about homosexuality and the age of AIDS. Cohn, a conservative lawyer and closeted gay man who was once chief counsel to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and who died of AIDS in 1986, is a central figure in the work.
“Mr. Leibman, red-faced and cackling, is a demon of Shakespearean grandeur,” Frank Rich wrote of the performance in “Millennium Approaches,” the first part of “Angels,” when he reviewed its Broadway premiere in The New York Times in May 1993, “an alternately hilarious and terrifying mixture of chutzpah and megalomania, misguided brilliance and relentless cunning. He turns the mere act of punching telephone buttons into a grotesque manipulation of the levers of power.”
The performance brought Mr. Leibman the Tony for best actor in a play, one of four Tonys earned by Part 1. He also portrayed Cohn in Part 2, “Perestroika,” which had its Broadway premiere that November, earning a Drama Desk nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a play.
(Excerpt) Read more in: The New York Times
