Mike Nussbaum, the late-blooming Chicago actor who portrayed the getting older salesman George Aaronow within the unique Broadway manufacturing of Glengarry Glen Ross, simply one in all his many collaborations with David Mamet, has died. He was 99.
Nussbaum died Saturday — six days shy of his one hundredth birthday — at his house in Chicago, his daughter, Karen, advised the Chicago Solar-Occasions.
He acted on Windy Metropolis levels for greater than a half-century and acquired a lifetime achievement award from the League of Chicago Theaters in 2019.
On the massive display screen, Nussbaum performed the e book writer Bob Drimmer in Deadly Attraction (1987), a college principal in Subject of Desires (1989) and the alien jewellery retailer proprietor Mild Rosenburg in Males in Black (1997).
Nussbaum and Mamet first met within the late Sixties, and the long run Pulitzer Prize winner would forged him as Educate within the 1975 premiere of his three-man drama American Buffalo on the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. He additionally performed Albert Einstein in Mamet’s Relativity.
He shared a Drama Desk award in 1984 for his flip as Aaronow (Alan Arkin had the position within the 1992 film adaptation) in Glengarry Glen Ross and was one other salesman, Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon within the movie), in one other acclaimed run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre.
“It’s fantastic to work with Mike as a result of, like several artist, like several actor, he’s simply uncommon,” Mamet mentioned in a 2014 profile of Nussbaum in Chicago journal. “You’re always saying, ‘My God, the place did that come from?’ It’s not popping out of a bag of ‘performing moments.’ That’s all bullshit. It’s popping out of — who the hell is aware of the place? You both received it, otherwise you don’t, and Mike definitely does.”
The son of a fur wholesaler, Myron Nussbaum was born on Dec. 29, 1923, and raised within the Albany Park space of Chicago. He graduated from Von Steuben Excessive Faculty, then left the College of Wisconsin to enlist within the U.S. Military, the place he served underneath Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower as a teletype operator.
Again house, he labored in a household exterminating enterprise for almost 20 years earlier than deciding when he was in his 40s to pursue a full-time profession as an actor. He didn’t earn his Fairness card till the early ’70s.
Nussbaum first made it to Broadway because the director of the 1982 musical comedy Do Black Patent Leather-based Sneakers Actually Replicate Up?, however that lasted simply 5 performances. He was again 4 years later with a task in John Guare’s The Home of the Blue Leaves.
Nussbaum additionally performed a con artist and mafia boss, respectively, within the Mamet movies Home of Video games (1987) and Issues Change (1988).
His onscreen résumé included Harry and Tonto (1974), Shedding Isaiah (1995) and Steal Large Steal Little (1995), and TV turns in The Equalizer, 227, L.A. Regulation, Brooklyn Bridge, Frasier, The Commish, The X-Recordsdata and Early Version.
Within the Chicago journal profile, he famous that he did 50 push-ups a day and drank a double shot of rye earlier than mattress each night time.
Survivors embrace his second spouse, Julie, whom he married in 2004; his youngsters, Jack and Karen, and 7 grandchildren. His first spouse was Annette Brenner; they had been married from 1949 till her loss of life in 2003.
“I believe that being an actor in Chicago, over various years, is probably the most satisfying life I may think about,” Nussbaum advised the Solar-Occasions in 2019. “I discovered New York and L.A. to be … antithetic to artwork. The will for fame, the will for glory, for cash, is overwhelming in each cities. Though I had some success in each cities, I made a decision my life was extra balanced right here. I take pleasure in getting on the bus to go downtown and have somebody come up and say, ‘I cherished you in such-and-such.’”
