Nehemiah Persoff
| Nehemiah Persoff | |
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| File:Nehemiah Persoff 1960.JPG
Persoff in 1960
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| Born | August 2, 1919 Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine |
| Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. San Luis Obispo, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1948–1999 |
| Spouse(s) | Thia Persov (m. 1951; her death 2021) |
| Children | 4 |
| Signature | |
| 220px | |
Nehemiah Persoff (August 2, 1919 – April 5, 2022) was an American actor and painter. He appeared in more than 200 television series, films, and plays in a career spanning over 50 years, beginning after World War II.
Contents
Early life
Born in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, on August 2, 1919,[1][2] Nehemiah Persoff emigrated with his family to the United States in 1929 and graduated from the Hebrew Technical Institute in 1937.[3] Persoff was drafted by the United States Army in early 1942 and served during World War II until 1945. He was assigned to an acting company to entertain troops around the world.[4] After the war, he worked as a subway electrician, maintaining signals while he began to pursue his acting career in New York theatre. In 1947, he was accepted into the Actors Studio, and was one of the 26 members of the beginners' class taught by Elia Kazan, along with James Whitmore and Julie Harris. He began his acting career in 1948.[5][6]
Acting career
Among his early film roles was the driver during the I coulda been a contender scene in On the Waterfront (1954), Leo the accountant in The Harder They Fall with Humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger (1956), and the gangster boss Little Bonaparte, a parody of Little Caesar in Billy Wilder's film classic Some Like It Hot (1959),[7] and he appeared again with Steiger in Al Capone (1959). He also appeared in supporting roles in films such as The Comancheros (1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). In the film Yentl (1983), Persoff portrayed the father of Barbra Streisand's character. He appeared in the comedy film Twins (1988) and in the American Tail animated-film series as Papa Mousekewitz. His last movie was 4 Faces (1999), the last film to be directed by Ted Post.
His many television credits include Five Fingers ("The Moment of Truth"), The Big Valley ("Legend of a General", Parts I & II, episode), Alfred Hitchcock Presents ("Heart of Gold" episode), The Twilight Zone ("Judgment Night"), The Untouchables (six episodes, including three episodes as Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, regarded by many as his signature role[8]), Naked City, Route 66 (two episodes), Seaway ("Last Voyage" episode, 1965), The Legend of Jesse James, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Gunsmoke, Columbo ("Now You See Him..."), Gilligan's Island (as the title character in the episode "The Little Dictator", the favorite episode of the show's creator Sherwood Schwartz[9]), The Wild Wild West, The High Chaparral ("Fiesta" episode, 1970), Hawaii Five-O (seven episodes), Cannon, Ellery Queen ("The Adventure of the Pharaoh's Curse" episode), Mission: Impossible (three episodes), Adam-12 ("Vendetta" episode), The Mod Squad, Barney Miller (three episodes), and Star Trek: The Next Generation, ("The Most Toys" 1990). He appeared as the Eastern Alliance Leader in the Battlestar Galactica episode, "Experiment in Terra" (1979).
Personal life and death
Persoff retired from acting in 1999 and pursued painting, specialising in watercolours. Before his death, he lived in Cambria, California.[10] His wife, Thia Persov, whom he married in 1951, died in 2021 due to cancer.[11][12] They had four children.
He died on April 5, 2022, at the age of 102 of heart failure.[13][11]
Selected filmography
Film and television
References
- ↑ International Television & Video Almanac (2007), pg. 366
- ↑ This former Hollywood movie star living in Cambria just celebrated his 100th birthday
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- ↑ Jeffrey Meyers: The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. University of Illinois Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-252-03544-9, p. 193.
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External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nehemiah Persoff. |
- Nehemiah Persoff at the Internet Movie Database
- Nehemiah Persoff at the Internet Broadway DatabaseLua error in Module:EditAtWikidata at line 29: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).Lua error in Module:WikidataCheck at line 28: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
- Nehemiah Persoff Paintings
- Nehemiah Persoff discography at Discogs
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- 1919 births
- 2022 deaths
- American people of Palestinian-Jewish descent
- American male film actors
- American male television actors
- American male voice actors
- American male painters
- United States Army personnel of World War II
- 20th-century American painters
- 21st-century American painters
- 21st-century male artists
- Artists from New York City
- Military personnel from New York City
- Mandatory Palestine emigrants to the United States
- Electricians
- Jews in Mandatory Palestine
- Jewish American male actors
- Jewish painters
- Male actors from Jerusalem
- United States Army soldiers
- Western (genre) television actors
- American centenarians
- Men centenarians
- 21st-century American Jews
