Tag: soap opera

Born in Minneapolis, Levin studied acting after serving in the Navy. He went out to California to screen test (and also take classes alongside Jack Nicholson) before landing early work at Minneapolis’s influential Guthrie Theater when it opened in 1962. (His son told THR that he walked the boards with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.) He then left for New York City, making his Broadway debut in 1965 with The Royal Hunt of the Sun, written by Amadeus’s Peter Shaffer, working with Christopher Plummer and David Carradine. 

In 1970 he starred in the first Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real with Al Pacino, Susan Tyrrell, and Victor Buono. That same year he also appeared in Sam Shepard’s Operation Sidewinder (with music by The Holy Modal Rounders), and a production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan, co-starring Colleen Dewhurst and Priscilla Pointer. All three shows ran at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, directed by Jules Irving. (Of note: Irving and Pointer had three children, among them Amy Irving and legendary New York University film production professor David Irving.) 

Though Levin was a midwestern Jew, he landed a commercial gig as an Italian spokesman for Alitalia Airlines. He credited this commercial for getting him the audition for the Italian-American Jack Fenelli. (In a 1978 interview, he said that it was one of two offers he got after the spot aired, both Italian characters.)