Jerry Adler
Jerry Adler is an actor, born 1929.
Adler spent the first and longest stretch of his working life in the theatre, as a producer and a director rather than a performer. The screen credits on this page do not begin until 1990, by which point he was in his sixties, which makes him one of the very few actors whose entire filmography is a second career. He died in 2025.
What he brought to it was stillness in rooms full of noise. Hesh Rabkin on The Sopranos is the counsel who is close to the family and never of it, an old friend whose advice carries because he has nothing to prove and no rank to defend, and Adler plays him with the volume permanently three notches below everyone else in the scene. Howard Lyman on The Good Wife is the same instrument tuned for comedy: the senior partner nobody can quite remove, dozing through meetings and then saying the one true thing. He also plays Moshe Pfefferman on Transparent, Sidney Feinberg on Rescue Me and Hillston on Living with Yourself, and Wikipedia adds Howard Lyman's return on The Good Fight and Saul Horowitz on Broad City, neither of which is among the credits listed here.
The film work is a long line of fathers, elders and lawyers: Paul House in Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery, Caden's father in Synecdoche, New York, Lewis Feldman in In Her Shoes, Joseph Mendelsohn in A Most Violent Year, Rodger in Driveways. One detail sums up the durability of the whole thing: he plays Mr. Wicker on Mad About You in 1992 and plays him again in the 2019 revival, twenty-seven years apart.
Movies (13)
TV (14)
Where to start with Jerry Adler
Go to The Sopranos first, because Hesh is the best use anyone ever made of him: a supporting part that never grows, never demands a showcase episode, and is quietly indispensable to how the show sounds. The Good Wife is the comic version and easier to dip into, since Howard Lyman works in isolated scenes. For the film performances, Manhattan Murder Mystery is the most fun and Synecdoche, New York the most demanding, a few minutes of screen time that set the tone for everything after. A Most Violent Year uses him as an old money-man and needs nothing more from him than authority. Driveways is the small, gentle one people miss. If you want the sitcom register, Mad About You has him as the building's maintenance man, a part he returned to nearly three decades later.