Michael Lerner, who has died aged 81, was a versatile character actor whose specialty was imbuing heavies with nuanced depth. The critic Philip French recognised the “layer of charm, the thin skin of bonhomie” he brought to his roles, the most famous of which were the gangster Arnold Rothstein, fixing baseball’s World Series in John Sayles’s Eight Men Out (1988), or the studio boss Jack Lipnick in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991), in which his displays of alternating intimacy and threat get him what he wants, and which earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
Lerner had auditioned for a gangster part in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing, but though the brothers described Lipnick as a “Michael Lerner type”, for Barton Fink “they didn’t have me come in until the last minute”. Wearing a pair of glasses he had found in a junk shop that made him look like the MGM boss Louis B Mayer, “I fucking blew them away,” he said: “I auditioned in character, talking a mile a minute.”
