Michael Lerner

Michael Lerner was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Romanian Jewish immigrant parents. He earned a bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College and a master's from UC Berkeley before spending two years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) on a Fulbright scholarship, performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Lerner built a prolific career playing heavyweights, politicians, and mobsters on stage and screen. In 1991, Joel and Ethan Coen cast him in Barton Fink as Jack Lipnick, the blustering, psychotic Hollywood studio boss modeled on Louis B. Mayer. Lerner's tour-de-force performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He became a staple of cinema and television, portraying Mayor Ebert in Roland Emmerich's Godzilla (1998), the demanding publishing executive Fulton Greenway in Elf (2003), and mob boss Arnold Rothstein in Eight Men Out (1988).