Alan Rosenberg
Alan Rosenberg is an actor, born 1950.
Character actors rarely get to keep a character. Alan Rosenberg played Eli Levinson in two different network dramas, Civil Wars and L.A. Law, which says something about how solidly he had made the man exist. Before that he had been working since 1979, starting as Turkey in the Bronx gang picture The Wanderers.
His register is narrow and extremely useful: the decent, aggravated professional. Stuart Brickman on Chicago Hope, Ira Woodbine on Cybill, Alvin Masterson on The Guardian, Clyde Youens on Shameless, Nick DeRossi on Luck, all of them men with a job and a firm opinion about how it ought to be done. Film used him the same way in short sharp doses: Thomas the apostle in The Last Temptation of Christ, a part in the one-bad-night thriller Miracle Mile, the voice of Jack Hammer in Robots, a turn in Righteous Kill. He is the actor a director casts when a scene needs to feel like it is happening among adults.
From 2005 to 2009 he served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, which is a working actor's second career and a thankless one, and he has kept turning up since, in Luck and later in Mo. Taken together the credits are a portrait of American television from the mid-eighties forward, viewed mostly from the third or fourth chair, and never once unconvincing.
Movies (15)
- Robots (2005)
- Righteous Kill (2008)
- The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
- Miracle Mile (1989)
- The Wanderers (1979)
- After Midnight (1989)
- Witch Hunt (1994)
- Stewardess School (1986)
- Parker Kane (1990)
- On the Edge (2001)
- The Preppie Murder (1989)
- Freaky Friday (1995)
- Impulse (1990)
- After the SIlence (1996)
- L.A. Law: The Movie (2002)
TV (10)
Where to start with Alan Rosenberg
L.A. Law and Civil Wars belong together, because the same character exists in both and Eli Levinson is the fullest thing he was ever handed. Watching one man walk between two shows is a genuinely odd pleasure.
For range, The Last Temptation of Christ casts him as the apostle Thomas in a film where everybody spends their time arguing about faith, and The Wanderers catches him at the very start, in a Bronx gang picture funnier and sadder than its poster suggests.
On television, Chicago Hope and Cybill show the two halves of his register, the earnest and the exasperated. His run as Clyde Youens on Shameless is the late-career part most people now know him from, and Robots is the one your children have already seen.