Nehemiah Persoff

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Nehemiah Persoff (born August 2, 1919 in Jerusalem , Palestine ) is an American actor and painter . Between 1948 and 1999 he played in almost 200 film and television productions, mostly in prominent supporting roles.

Acting career

Nehemiah Persoff's exact year of birth is controversial: Most sources mention the year 1919, but 1920 is also mentioned again and again. In 1929 the Jewish Persoff emigrated with his parents from the city of his birth, Jerusalem, to the United States , where he first attended the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York City . Persoff then earned his first living as an electrician on the New York City Subway , where it was his job to maintain the signal lights. However, he has always been interested in acting, and from an early age he appeared in amateur theater groups. His personal motivation to try it as a professional actor, so the later reasoning of Persoff, was the rising anti-Semitism in Europe, and the prevailing opinion that Jews would get nowhere.

Persoff won a scholarship for a New York drama school and should be in the Cort Theater his Broadway debut with the war drama The Eve of St. Mark of Maxwell Anderson give. However, he was released shortly before the premiere. It wasn't until 1940 that he first appeared on stage in The Emperor's New Clothes . In 1942, like other men, Persoff had to do his military service in World War II and served three years in European theaters of war. After retiring from the United States Army , Persoff was discovered and promoted by the influential actress Stella Adler . In 1947 he was back on stage in Charles Laughton's stage production Galileo by Bertolt Brecht and in the same year was also one of Elia Kazan's first acting students . In 1948 Persoff made his film debut in City Without Mask , directed by Jules Dassin , in which he only took on a small role that was neither mentioned in the credits nor had spoken text.

His career includes roles in nearly 200 television series and feature films. In the 1950s he had small roles in Elia Kazan's Fist in the Neck - as a taxi driver during Marlon Brando's famous "Contender" scene - or in Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man in the role of Henry Fonda's brother-in-law Gene Conforti . In 1959, he played one of his best-known roles as Mafia boss Little Bonaparte in Billy Wilder's classic film Some Like It Hot , which Persoff deliberately created as a Mussolini parody. In the following years he played the fictional high priest Shemia in the lavish Bible adaptation The Greatest Story of All Time and in 1968 in The Day of the Owl , a film about the Italian mafia based on the novel by Leonardo Sciascia . He often played rogue roles and characters from foreign ethnic groups. In 1976 he worked as the husband of Maria Schell in the film drama Reise der Verdammten and starred in Yentl in 1983 , based on the short story Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy by Isaac Bashevis Singer , the father of the title character played by Barbra Streisand . In 1988 he was the rabbi in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and as a professor in the comedy Twins, alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito .

In addition to cinema appearances, Persoff was also a very busy television actor, particularly between the 1950s and 1980s, who made a name for himself as a guest actor in numerous television series. He took on roles in series classics such as Columbo , Murder is Her Hobby , Hawaii Five-Zero , Our Little Farm , Charlie's Angels , Smoking Guns , Merciless City , Law & Order and Starship Enterprise: The Next Century . Although Nehemiah Persoff never actually played leading roles in his film and television career and did not win any film awards, he built a reputation as a versatile character actor of supporting roles. Towards the end of his acting career, in the 1990s, he spoke the role of Papa Mousekewitz in the Feivel cartoons .

Private life and painting

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In 1999 Persoff retired from acting and has since devoted himself to painting pictures. His over 100 works , most of them Impressionist, have been exhibited in numerous Californian cities. He has been married to his wife Thia since 1951, and Persoff has four children with her. He now lives in the small town of Cambria, California . There he celebrated his 100th birthday in August 2019 with over 140 guests.

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ EXCLUSIVE! INTERVIEW WITH ACCLAIMED ACTOR NEHEMIAH PERSOFF - Celebrating Films of the 1960s & 1970s. Retrieved April 7, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Jeffrey Meyers: The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe . University of Illinois Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-252-07854-5 ( google.de [accessed September 7, 2019]).
  3. ↑ For Cambria's Nehemiah Persoff, art isn't just an act . In: sanluisobispo . ( sanluisobispo.com [accessed April 7, 2018]).
  4. ↑ Newspaper article about Persoff's 100th birthday
personal data
SURNAME Persoff, Nehemiah
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Persov, Nehemiah
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film and theater actor and painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 2, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Jerusalem , Palestine