Please Rewind Talent Wall

Alvin Epstein

Alvin Epstein built a career around the kind of roles that ask an actor to do more with less: a gesture, a pause, a carefully controlled shift in rhythm. Born in the Bronx on May 14, 1925, he attended Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art and Queens College before serving with the United States Army in Germany during World War II. His later studies in dance with Martha Graham in New York and mime in Paris helped establish the physical foundation of his work. His early New York performances included mime appearances with Marcel Marceau. Epstein made his Broadway debut in 1956 as the Fool in Orson Welles’ production of King Lear. That same year, he played Lucky in the Broadway premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, beginning a long association with Beckett’s demanding theatrical world. In 1958, Epstein appeared as Clov in the United States premiere of Endgame. He would return to the play from different angles over the following decades. In a 1984 Off-Broadway production at the Samuel Beckett Theater, he played Hamm and also directed. In 2005, at Manhattan’s Irish Repertory Theatre, he took the role of Nagg, Hamm’s aged father; he performed the part again at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008. Few career paths offer such a clear view of an actor revisiting the same text through three distinct characters. Also associated with television acting and directing, Epstein was an American performer whose career was shaped by precision, physical awareness and repeated engagement with some of modern theatre’s most exacting material. He died in 2018.