A stage actor who brought New York volume to the screen and knew, at his best, when to turn it down. As the union man in Norma Rae he is the best thing after Sally Field; elsewhere the parts were smaller than the voice.
Fi1m perspective
Reuben Warshowsky arrives in a Southern mill town with a box of leaflets and a New York accent, and nobody will stand next to him. Ron Leibman plays him in Norma Rae (1979) as a man who has worked out that he is a joke to these people and has decided to be a useful one. He talks fast, he talks too much, and he never once pretends to belong. That is the Leibman method in a sentence: come in loud, own it, and let the other actors decide what to do with the noise.
He came up through improvisation with the Compass Players in the late 1950s and made his Broadway debut in 1963, which explains a good deal about the scale. His film debut was Where's Poppa? (1970), opposite George Segal, and through the 1970s he was the intense, faintly alarming character actor in other people's pictures. Then Martin Ritt gave him Reuben, and for once the part was as big as he was. He also created, co-wrote and led the television series Kaz (1978–79), which the critics liked and the audience did not find. That pattern, praised and under-watched, would repeat.
What works is the energy when it has somewhere to go. In Norma Rae the organiser's patter is set against the machinery of the mill, and Leibman keeps it just this side of caricature. We liked Reuben more than the film needed us to; the floor belongs to Field, and yet each time he walked back into town with his leaflets we were pleased to see him, which is not nothing for a character the script mostly uses to explain what a union is. What does not work is the same energy in a small frame. Television and modest supporting parts tended to flatten him. He turns up in Garden State (2004) as Dr. Cohen and our review did not mention him at all, which says more about the size of the part than about the actor.
The later reputation was made on stage, as Roy Cohn in Angels in America (1993), a part built for the kind of attack he had always had, and on television as Rachel's overbearing father in Friends (1996), where the same attack was played for laughs. Overbearing men who think they are in charge became the trade. From 2005 he taught at The New School for Drama.
If you want to see what he could do, Norma Rae is the place to start and, for most viewers, the place to finish. Watch him in the town, where nobody will be seen with him and he keeps talking anyway, and then watch how little he needs to do once Norma Rae starts listening. The loud parts came easily to him. The quiet ones were the work.
Biography
Ron Leibman (1937–2019) was an American actor. Born in New York City, he appeared in films such as Norma Rae (1979), Auto Focus (2002) and Garden State (2004), in which he played Dr. Cohen.
He won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play in 1993 for portraying Roy Cohn in Angels in America. On television, Leibman won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1979 for his lead role in the series Kaz (1978–1979) and appeared as Dr. Leonard Green in Friends (1996–2004). He later voiced Ron Cadillac in Archer (2013–2016).
