Alan Mandell | |
---|---|
Born | Albert Mandell December 27, 1927 Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
Nationality | Canadian/American |
Occupation | actor |
Alan Mandell (born Albert Mandell on December 27, 1927) is a Canadian-American actor known for playing Rabbi Marshak in the Coen Brothers' 2009 film A Serious Man . With several decades of experience as a stage actor, he is especially acclaimed as an interpreter of the works of Samuel Beckett. [1]
Albert Mandell was born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario in 1927. [2] He acted on stage in both Canada and the United States, building a reputation in San Francisco's theater scene in the 1950s. [3] In 1968 he legally changed his given name to Alan to avoid being confused with noted mobster Albert Anastasia. [2]
Mandell's association with Beckett began in 1957, with a production of Waiting for Godot at the San Francisco Actor's Workshop. He subsequently played Lucky in a production of Godot directed by Beckett himself. [4]
Outside of Beckett, Mandell has acted in productions of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land and Arthur Miller's The Price . [3] In 2007 he appeared as Juror #9 in a Los Angeles production of Twelve Angry Men , directed by Scott Ellis and costarring Richard Thomas and George Wendt. [5]
Year | Title | Role | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1988 | Illegally Yours | Juror #8 | |
1991 | The Marrying Man | Murch | |
1993 | Midnight Witness | Shaw | |
2001 | Hedwig and the Angry Inch | Patron at Bar | Uncredited role |
2006 | Shortbus | Tobias, the Mayor | |
2009 | A Serious Man | Rabbi Marshak | |
2013 | Herblock: The Black & the White | Herbert Block | documentary |
2015 | Addicted to Fresno | Arthur Lupka | |
2019 | Velvet Buzzsaw | Ventril Dease |
Year | Title | Role | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1974 | Great Performances | District Police Inspector | Episode: "Enemies" |
1975 | The Invisible Man | Senator Baldwyn | Episode: "Man of Influence" |
1975 | Cannon | Billings | Episode: "Fall Guy" |
1976 | The Six Million Dollar Man | Technician | Episode: "The Secret of Bigfoot: Part 2 " |
1976 | Baretta | Assistant DA Merriman | Episode: "The Left Hand of the Devil" |
1976 | Baretta | Richmond | Episode: "Runway Cowboy" |
1977 | Man from Atlantis | Grant Stockwood | Episode: "The Death Scouts" |
1978 | 79 Park Avenue | Dr. George Waldheim | TV miniseries |
1978 | Eight is Enough | unknown | Episode: "Cinderella's Understudy" |
1980 | Breaking Away | Pinball player | Episode: "Grand Illusion" |
1991 | Sisters | Owen Glendower | Episode: "One to Grow On" |
2010 | Grey's Anatomy | Henry Stamm | Episode: "Shiny Happy People" |
Waiting for Godot is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett's reworking of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled "a tragicomedy in two acts".
Krapp's Last Tape is a 1958 one-act play, in English, by Samuel Beckett. With a cast of one man, it was written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue". It was inspired by Beckett's experience of listening to Magee reading extracts from Molloy and From an Abandoned Work on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957.
Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is an absurdist, tragicomic one-act play about a blind, paralyzed, domineering elderly man, his geriatric parents and his doddering, dithering, harried, servile companion in an abandoned house in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, who mention they are awaiting some unspecified "end" which seems to be the end of their relationship, death, and the end of the actual play itself. Much of the play's content consists of terse, back and forth dialogue between the characters reminiscent of bantering, along with trivial stage actions; the plot is held together by the development of a grotesque story-within-a-story that the character Hamm is relating. An aesthetically profound part of the play is the way the story-within-story and the actual play come to an end at roughly the same time. The play's title refers to chess and frames the characters as acting out a losing battle with each other or their fate.
David Michael Schramm was an American actor. He was best known for playing the role of Roy Biggins, the curmudgeonly rival airline owner in the TV series Wings.
Alan Schneider was an American theatre director responsible for more than 100 theatre productions. In 1984 he was honored with a Drama Desk Special Award for serving a wide range of playwrights. He directed the 1956 American premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny Alice; the American première of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane, Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, as well as Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, The Collection, and a trilogy of Pinter's plays under the title Other Places ; Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle; You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running; and Michael Weller's Moonchildren and Loose Ends.
Quad is a television play by Samuel Beckett, written and first produced and broadcast in 1981. It first appeared in print in 1984 where the work is described as "[a] piece for four players, light and percussion" and has also been called a "ballet for four people."
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The Actor's Workshop was a theatre company founded in San Francisco in 1952. It was the first professional theatre on the west coast to premiere many of the modern American classics such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and the world dramas of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter. For the 1953–1954 season, the Workshop offered six plays: Lysistrata, by Aristophanes; Venus Observed, by Christopher Fry; Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller; a revival of Playboy; The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov; and Tonight at 8.30, by Noël Coward. On April 15, 1955, the Actor's Workshop signed the first Off-Broadway Equity contract to be awarded outside New York City.
The Impossible Itself is a 2010 documentary film produced and directed by Jacob Adams, covering the 1957 San Francisco Actor's Workshop production of the Samuel Beckett stage play Waiting For Godot that was taken to San Quentin Prison and performed before its inmates, with an examination of an earlier incarnation of Godot as performed by inmates at the Luttringhausen Prison in Germany in 1953.
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