Hollywood’s Golden Agers: From gangsters to ghosts, Nehemiah Persoff’s played the lot

FEW Golden Age stars have had careers as varied as Nehemiah Persoff.

Never heard of him? Just one glance at him in any of his many movies, and you’ll realise who he is.

He was in On The Waterfront in 1954, as a cab driver – a classic movie. From Star Trek’s Next Generation TV series to The Last Temptation Of Christ, Little House On The Prairie to Hawaii Five-O or The High Chaparral, he’s been in everything.

Persoff was born in Jerusalem in 1919, and turns 100 next year, making him one of the oldest surviving stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

His acting career spanned 52 years, from 1947 till 1999, and it all began when his family moved to the United States when he was 10.

Nehemiah got a degree at a technical college and later served in the US Army during the Second World War.

Next he worked as an electrician for the subways but spent every spare minute learning to act.

Gangster boss Little Bonaparte in Some Like It Hot was one of his first notable roles, in which he parodied Benito Mussolini in the Marilyn Monroe classic.

As his career grew, he still found time to marry Thia, with whom he’s had four kids, and proved himself to be a very fine watercolour artist, too.

In those early days, he made a great mobster and gangland type.

He was Johnny Torrio, Al Capone’s mentor in a 1959 movie, and Jake Greasy Thumb Guzik in The Untouchables.

Like many a gangster, he had grown up in a poor but happy family, and would remember friends and family always singing and dancing.

A circus would regularly come to Jerusalem, where they set up in a big field, and as a kid he would stand and admire all the action and fun for hours on end.

Once, an Arab man who watched it through a peephole from outside let Persoff have a look – he saw a funny little chap with a cane. Charlie Chaplin.

Little did he know, he would say many years later, that he would eventually get to know the great man himself, as a fellow actor.

The family’s arrival in America was less than auspicious, as The Great Depression hit.

However, this after all was the land where anybody could become rich and famous, regardless of background, if they worked hard enough and wanted it hard enough.

Persoff would one day have it all, and more.

One notable appearance was in the wonderful Twilight Zone series, in which he played Carl Lanser.

He was the former captain of a German navy boat, who finds himself on board the SS Glasgow, seemingly puzzled as to how he has got there.

It turns out, during a typically weird and spooky episode, that he is doomed to sail on the ghostly ship for eternity, his punishment for having been on a U-boat that dared to attack ships full of innocent civilians.

Persoff played a similarly strange, haunting character in a great episode of Rawhide. Incident Of The Wanderer saw him play Michob, a man who appears in the camp dry as a bone, having walked out of a heavy rainstorm, making all around him fearful and suspicious.

Clint Eastwood, of course, was the main star, but Persoff stole the show – again!

The Girl Who Knew Too Much, from 1969, was an interesting foray into cinema rather than US TV. A vehicle for Batman star Adam West to shake off his image as the goodie by playing a tough, ruthless nightclub owner, Persoff played the police lieutenant.

It flopped at the box office, but was shown on TV and for some reason gained a mass audience, and would be shown on countless repeats.

We can only assume that Nehemiah Persoff loves bizarre roles, or perhaps studio bosses just see him as ideal for them – another job that is fondly remembered for its downright weirdness was his appearance in Charlie’s Angels.

He played the mute and seriously disturbed Anton Metzger, who turns out to be a ghost (again!) haunting the set of a show where his lost love used to perform.

For a man who is soon going to celebrate his 100th birthday, Persoff has shown himself very adept at playing dead people!

Yentl, of course, would become one of his best-known roles, and it is a most unusual movie, too. A romantic musical drama, written, directed and produced by Streisand and others, Persoff plays the father who teaches his daughter the Talmud.

As she is Ashkenazi, this is forbidden, but she dresses as a boy, and it is certainly not your average film.

It made Barbra the first female to win a Golden Globe for Best Director, and it says much about Nehemiah Persoff that it was him she turned to for the perfect actor to bounce off.

He followed it up by portraying a rabbi in Magnum PI, and another rabbi in The Last Temptation Of Christ.

The wonderfully-titled Great Twain Robbery was the Murder, She Wrote job he took on next, playing Constantin Stavros, around the same time as he did Star Trek, MacGyver and Law & Order.

He has been nothing if not versatile! Little wonder that the amazing Nehemiah Persoff enjoyed such a lengthy career – and life.