Leonard Frey played men who apologised, like Motel in Fiddler on the Roof, and men who made others wish they would, like Harold in The Boys in the Band. Two screen roles made the reputation; stage and television took the rest.
Fi1m perspective
Motel the tailor cannot get a sentence out to Tevye without apologising for it first, and Leonard Frey plays the apology as if it were the man's whole posture. In Fiddler on the Roof (1971) he has a small part in a long film, and our review thought him better than the part. We found ourselves siding with Motel more than Norman Jewison's film asked us to, because Frey makes the apologising look like something the man learned young, not a joke the script is telling at his expense.
The opposite pole is Harold in The Boys in the Band (1970), the acerbic centre of an ensemble, a part Frey had played off-Broadway in 1968 before the film. We have not reviewed it, so we will not judge it at length. What can be said is that it fixed his reputation for sharp, mannered comic work, and that the play has been criticised for its stereotypes while the performances, his included, were mostly spared.
He was a stage actor first, trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner, and he had already been in the original Broadway Fiddler on the Roof (1964), as Mendel and then as a replacement Motel, before Jewison filmed it. After 1971 the pattern set: revivals and new plays, among them The National Health (1974) on Broadway, supporting film parts, and a good deal of television guest work through the 1970s and 1980s. He died in New York in 1988, at 49.
What he did well was play inside a group. He was cast, over and over, as the flamboyant one, the prig, the fey figure at the edge of an ensemble comedy or musical, and by most accounts he was at his best with others on stage to play against. What he did not get was a film career that built on the two roles. The screen work after 1971 stayed supporting and sporadic, and the attention went elsewhere.
He knew the risk. "I'm grateful to The Boys in the Band but I started to get paranoid that I'd reach old age with people still thinking of me only as Harold - if they thought of me at all," he said of taking Motel. He did not reach old age, and people think of him as both, which is a better outcome than the sentence feared. Start with Motel; the film is 181 minutes and he is one of the reasons to stay.
Biography
Leonard Frey (1938–1988) was an American actor. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he studied art at Cooper Union before switching to acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner. He made his stage debut in an Off-Broadway production of Little Mary Sunshine.
Frey originated the role of Harold in the Off-Broadway production of The Boys in the Band and reprised it in the 1970 film. He played Motel the tailor in the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in The National Health (1975). Other film credits include The Magic Christian (1969) and Where the Buffalo Roam (1980).
