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Tony And Emmy Award Winning Actor Ron Leibman Dies At 82

Actors Ron Leibman and Madeline Kahn are shown at the Tony Awards in New York, June 6, 1993.
Richard Drew
/
AP
Actors Ron Leibman and Madeline Kahn are shown at the Tony Awards in New York, June 6, 1993.

Ron Leibman, who won a Tony Award for his performance in the Broadway play Angels in America and an Emmy Award on the short-lived CBS show Kaz, died Friday afternoon at the age of 82.

Leibman's death was confirmed to NPR by his agent, Robert Atterman, CEO of Abrams Artists Agency. No other details were available.

The New York-born actor and stage veteran was also known for playing Dr. Leonard Green, the father of Jennifer Aniston's Rachel Green, on TV's Friends.

Leibman's Emmy came in 1979 when he played Martin "Kaz" Kazinsky, a convicted criminal who becomes a criminal attorney. In 2011, he joked about how he won the award and then the show was canceled after only 23 episodes.

That same year he played a union organizer in Norma Rae opposite Sally Field whose break-out performance garnered an Oscar.

His Tony Award came in 1993 for his portrayal of the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, a play about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

Leibman also starred in movies such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Where's Poppa?

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: December 6, 2019 at 11:00 PM CST
In an earlier version of this story, Ron Leibman's last name was incorrectly spelled as Liebman.
Richard Gonzales is NPR's National Desk Correspondent based in San Francisco. Along with covering the daily news of region, Gonzales' reporting has included medical marijuana, gay marriage, drive-by shootings, Jerry Brown, Willie Brown, the U.S. Ninth Circuit, the California State Supreme Court and any other legal, political, or social development occurring in Northern California relevant to the rest of the country.