Mike Nussbaum, the late-blooming Chicago actor who portrayed the aging salesman George Aaronow in the original Broadway production of Glengarry Glen Ross, just one of his many collaborations with David Mamet, has died. He was 99.
Nussbaum died Saturday — six days shy of his 100th birthday — at his home in Chicago, his daughter, Karen, told the Chicago Sun-Times.
He acted on Windy City stages for more than a half-century and received a lifetime achievement award from the League of Chicago Theaters in 2019.
On the big screen, Nussbaum played the book publisher Bob Drimmer in Fatal Attraction (1987), a school principal in Field of Dreams (1989) and the alien jewelry store owner Gentle Rosenburg in Men in Black (1997).
Nussbaum and Mamet first met in the late 1960s, and the future Pulitzer Prize winner would cast him as Teach in the 1975 premiere of his three-man drama American Buffalo at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. He also played Albert Einstein in Mamet’s Relativity.
He shared a Drama Desk award in 1984 for his turn as Aaronow (Alan Arkin had the role in the 1992 movie adaptation) in Glengarry Glen Ross and was another salesman, Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon in the film), in another acclaimed run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre.
“It’s wonderful to work with Mike because, like any artist, like any actor, he’s just unusual,” Mamet said in a 2014 profile of Nussbaum in Chicago magazine. “You’re constantly saying, ‘My God, where did that come from?’ It’s not coming out of a bag of ‘acting moments.’ That’s all bullshit. It’s coming out of — who the hell knows where? You either got it, or you don’t, and Mike certainly does.”
The son of a fur wholesaler, Myron Nussbaum was born on Dec. 29, 1923, and raised in the Albany Park area of Chicago. He graduated from Von Steuben High School, then left the University of Wisconsin to enlist in the U.S. Army, where he served under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower as a teletype operator.
Back home, he worked in a family exterminating business for nearly two decades before deciding when he was in his 40s to pursue a full-time career as an actor. He did not earn his Equity card until the early ’70s.
Nussbaum first made it to Broadway as the director of the 1982 musical comedy Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, but that lasted just five performances. He was back four years later with a role in John Guare’s The House of the Blue Leaves.
Nussbaum also played a con artist and mafia boss, respectively, in the Mamet films House of Games (1987) and Things Change (1988).
His onscreen résumé included Harry and Tonto (1974), Losing Isaiah (1995) and Steal Big Steal Little (1995), and TV turns in The Equalizer, 227, L.A. Law, Brooklyn Bridge, Frasier, The Commish, The X-Files and Early Edition.
In the Chicago magazine profile, he noted that he did 50 push-ups a day and drank a double shot of rye before bed every night.
Survivors include his second wife, Julie, whom he married in 2004; his children, Jack and Karen, and seven grandchildren. His first wife was Annette Brenner; they were married from 1949 until her death in 2003.
“I think that being an actor in Chicago, over a number of years, is the most satisfying life I could imagine,” Nussbaum told the Sun-Times in 2019. “I found New York and L.A. to be … antithetic to art. The desire for fame, the desire for glory, for money, is overwhelming in both cities. Although I had some success in both cities, I decided my life was more balanced here. I enjoy getting on the bus to go downtown and have someone come up and say, ‘I loved you in such-and-such.’”
