A stand up comic he called his hard-boiled character on the long running TV drama Lenny Bruce with a badge.Richard Belzer who became one of American televisions most enduring police detectives as John Munch on & Order: Special Victims and several other shows died on Sunday at his home in Beaulieu sur Mer France. He was 78.
The death was confirmed by Bill Scheft, a friend of Mr. Belzer’s. Mr. Scheft, who has been working on a documentary about Mr. Belzer’s life and career, said the actor had been dealing with circulatory and respiratory problems for years.As Detective Munch, Mr. Belzer was brainy but hard-boiled, cynical but sensitive. He wore sunglasses at night and listened to the horror stories of rape victims in stony silence. He was the kind of cop who made casual references to Friedrich Nietzsche and the novelist Elmore Leonard. He spoke in quips; when accused of being a dirty old man he responded Who are you calling old?”
In a 2010 interview with AARP The Magazine, Mr. Belzer who was a stand up comic when he was not playing Munch described his television alter ego as Lenny Bruce with a badge. With Munch Mr. Belzer found phenomenal success. In when the character was written out of SVU as the Law & Order” spinoff is often called Mr. Belzer wrote in The Huffington Post that he had appeared as Munch in more than 500 hours of programming on 10 different shows.
The character’s run began in 1993, on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and included guest appearances on “Sesame Street” and “30 Rock.At his retirement, Mr. Belzer was often described as the actor with the longest run playing the same character on television, as well as the actor who had played the same character on the largest number of different shows.A life of mistreatment, misbehavior and missed opportunities prepared Mr. Belzer for his star turn as a streetwise detective.
Richard Jay Belzer was born on Aug. 4, 1944, in Bridgeport, Conn. He grew up in a housing project in the city. His father, Charles, co-owned a wholesale tobacco and candy distributor, and his mother, Frances (Gurfein) Belzer, was a homemaker.Our mother didn’t know how to love her sons appropriately,” Leonard, Mr. Belzer’s brother and a fellow comedian, told People magazine in 1993. “She always had some rationale for hitting us. Richard added: “My kitchen was the toughest room I ever worked. I had to make my mom laugh or I’d get my ass kicked.”
She died of cancer, and Charles died by suicide before Mr. Belzer turned 25. Leonard jumped from the roof of his Upper West Side apartment building and died in 2014.Mr. Belzer routinely fought authority. “I was thrown out of every school I ever went to,” he told AARP. He served in the army for a little under a year, then received a discharge on psychiatric grounds after repeatedly injuring himself.He went on to work as a truck driver, jewelry salesman, dress salesman, dock worker, census taker and reporter for The Bridgeport Post. In that job, he dreamed of becoming a serious writer — but instead spent his free time dealing drugs.
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