If you've seen the Seinfeld epsisode where they paint Uncle Leo's eyebrows back on, you'll be in tears over this photo
Len Lesser, a character actor for more than half a century whose hawklike profile and Noo Yawk accent finally gained him popular recognition when he played Jerry Seinfeld’s annoying Uncle Leo on “Seinfeld,” died on Wednesday in Burbank Calif. He was 88.
The cause was pneumonia, said his son, David, adding that his father had been treated for cancer for two years.
Mr. Lesser had hundreds of credits in the movies and television, many of them in roles that took advantage of his distinctive face, dominated by a long bent nose, and his streetwise-sounding voice, which could take on aspects of a gangster or a Catskills tummler.
He played gunmen, prisoners and other heavies. He played a waiter at Sardi’s in the comedy “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” (1960), which starred Doris Day and David Niven; he played a prison guard in “Papillon” (1973), which starred Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman; he played a soldier in “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970), alongside Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas and Don Rickles.
On television, even an abbreviated list of shows he appeared on describes most of the medium’s commercial history. In the 1950s he was in “Gunsmoke,” “Have Gun — Will Travel,” “Dragnet,” “Playhouse 90” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”; in the 1960s, “The Untouchables,” “Ben Casey,” “Honey West,” “That Girl” and “Get Smart”; in the 1970s, “All in the Family,” “The Mod Squad,” “Kojak” and “The Rockford Files”; in the 1980s, “Remington Steele” and “Falcon Crest.” In the 1990s, in addition to 15 episodes of “Seinfeld,” he was seen in “Thirtysomething,” “Boy Meets World” and “Mad About You.”
“Jerry! Hello!” Mr. Lesser, as Uncle Leo, would cry whenever he’d encounter his nephew in a social situation on “Seinfeld.” His greeting was usually accompanied by an elaborate palms-up gesture of welcome, and followed by a meandering digression of increasingly unbearable inconsequentiality, often involving his son, Jeffrey, who worked for the New York City Parks Department.
The popularity of the show (it ran from 1990 to 1998) — and the character — carried over into his next regular gig, on the Ray Romano comedy “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Indeed, he played his part there as a kind of Leo reprise. His character, Garvin, was a demonstrative buddy of Ray’s father (Peter Boyle), and his signature greeting for Ray, complete with a cheerleading shake of the arms and fists, was an exuberant “Hey, Ray’s here!”
Leonard Lesser was born in the Bronx in 1922. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, was a grocer. Young Leonard entered City College in New York at 15 and graduated at 19. He enlisted in the Army the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and served during World War II in the China-Burma-India theater.
He began studying acting on his return, starting on the stage, and continued to perform in plays throughout his career, including an appearance in 2010 in Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing” with the Los Angeles company A Noise Within.
Mr. Lesser’s marriage to the actress Jan Burrell ended in divorce. In addition to his son, who lives in Albany, Ore., he is survived by a daughter, Michele, of Burbank, and three grandchildren.
In interviews late in his career, Mr. Lesser spoke about how “Seinfeld” had changed his life, making him a celebrity of the sort he’d never imagined. People would recognize him on the street not by name but as the man who bored Jerry with his tales of Jeffrey’s park triumphs or who once retrieved a watch Jerry had discarded and then tried to sell it back to him.
“Uncle Leo became a whole new thing for me,” Mr. Lesser told the Canadian newspaper The National Post in 2010. “After sweating out every job, my God. Now it’s everywhere I go. I was at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, watching people put notes in the wall, it’s an esoteric day, very silent, very nice. All of a sudden: ‘Uncle Leo, where’s the watch?’ ”
