OBITUARY: RIP Ron Leibman –
Dec. 6, 2019 – Mr. Leibman, red-faced and cackling, is a demon of Shakespearean grandeur, an alternately hilarious and terrifying mixture of chutzpah and megalomania, misguided brilliance and relentless cunning,” Frank Rich wrote in his New York Times review. “He turns the mere act of punching telephone buttons into a grotesque manipulation of the levers of power, and he barks out the most outrageous pronouncements (‘I brought out something tender in him,’ he says of Joe McCarthy) with a shamelessness worthy of history’s most indelible monsters.”
Leibman made his big-screen debut in Where’s Poppa? (1970), Carl Reiner’s dark comedy about an aging mother (Ruth Gordon) driving her attorney son Gordon (George Segal) batty as he tries to honor his father’s dying wish not to put mom in a home.
