Mandy Patinkin doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but he does play a grim reaper on TV.
It’s on Showtime’s innovative, very black comedy called “Dead Like Me,” which runs 10 p.m. Sundays. For the record, grim reapers don’t kill the people themselves. They are just there to escort the soul to its final resting place. Patinkin plays Rube, who is a supervisor, a grim reaper foreman, so to speak.
His newest employee is a young girl named George (Ellen Muth), who was killed in the pilot episode outside the building where she worked. By an errant toilet. From the Mir space shuttle. (Please refer back to the start of the previous paragraph, the part that said “very black comedy.”)
Patinkin admits it’s a stretch, but suggests that the show has a very Jewish theme. “Hopefully, its underlying message is to live your life and enjoy every moment to the fullest. That’s what the Mourner’s Kaddish is about, to believe in life after tragedies happen.”
Mandy (actually it’s Mendal, for his grandfather), 51, grew up in what he calls a “Conservative Jewish household in Chicago.” What does that mean? “Conservative Jews in Chicago are considered Reform Jews in New York and Orthodox by Jews in L.A.”
He was very active in his temple, between a boys’ junior congregation and Hebrew school five days a week, roughly from the time he was 7 until 14. “Then I threw it all away until I got married.”
To be fair, it was a difficult time in his life. He wasn’t doing well in school. “School wasn’t the best place for me to learn. I needed to learn different ways. So my learning began when I left school,” he says.
“The way the school operated, the structure and the systems weren’t designed for a more creative kid, which is what I was. I needed a place that talked things through in a way that I could connect with. I didn’t connect with math or numbers or rote memorizing,” he says.
Hoping he’d develop other interests, his mother sent him to the Young Men’s Jewish Council Youth Center, where he joined a drama group. The first play was “Carousel,” with Patinkin in the role of Billy Bigelow. Bigelow commits a robbery to help his support his family, and when faced with prison commits suicide. He’s allowed to return to earth for one day 15 years after he dies.
The teacher asked the young actors what the show was about. “Everybody raised their hands and said it’s about a guy who dies and goes to heaven and gets to come back. The teacher said, ‘Yes, it’s about that. But I think it’s also about if you love somebody, tell them.’
“That was a basic thing I probably had said to me by my rabbi in his sermons and I probably heard it at the dinner table. But when I heard it in the environment of the theater it spoke to me for the first time. And that’s where my learning began. I learned from plays and songs and the geniuses who wrote them, people far smarter than the people who wrote the history books. These people all had the remarkable ability to synthesize the human condition.”
After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Kansas for two years — for his parents’ sake. Knowing how few people are successful in the entertainment industry, they wanted him to study business.
“I didn’t want to do it. I think if I got a business degree it would be guaranteeing I’d fail. I don’t want to be too hard, but it also bored the [hell] out of me.”
Instead he went to New York, studied at Juilliard and made his way as an actor. He was doing Shakespeare for Joseph Papp when his agent urged him to audition for a new play about the wife of a South American dictator. “I didn’t want to do it,” he remembers. “My agent and I had a fight, and he won.” Patinkin went to the audition and got the part. “I didn’t even know
what the part was.”
It was, of course, Che in “Evita,” a part that won him a Tony for best featured actor. His first big break in films came a few years later when he co-starred with Barbra Streisand in “Yentl.” Other successes followed, including “Sunday in the Park With George” and his role as Dr. Jeffrey Geiger in “Chicago Hope,” which won him an Emmy.
He also had a flourishing recording and concert career, although he’s at least temporarily put touring on hold because of his commitment to the series. He has recorded the music of Sondheim, Bernstein and Belz. The last was one of the songs from “Mamaloshen” an album of traditional, classical and contemporary songs (“Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Maria”) sung in Yiddish.
Ironically, when he began to promote the album, it was the Jewish producers who were reluctant to put him on the air. Even on shows where he’d regularly appeared before, he was turned down by people who hesitated to have Yiddish sung there.
To add to the irony, it was Regis Philbin who turned things around. “I called up Regis, who is a friend of mine, and he said, ‘Come tomorrow morning.’ From that minute on, everyone had me on.”
Patinkin does a lot of charity work, though he doesn’t call it tikkun olam. “I’ll repair the world after I repair myself,” he jokes.
He’s worked for gun control, organ donation groups and Doctors Without Borders. He is also very active in Americans for Peace Now, a group that wants Israel to more actively pursue peace, withdraw its settlements and build the security fence closer to the Green Line.
He is not concerned that his Yiddish album or his work with APN will hurt my career. “It’s only helped my career,” he says. “Haven’t you heard? The whole world is Jewish,” he says.