After a lackluster attempt at film acting, including the low-budget gangster flick "Mad Dog Coll" (1961), Mr. Orbach launched into a series of revivals, earning a Tony nomination as Sky Masterson in a 1965 production of "Guys and Dolls" with the New York City Center Light Opera Co.
Critical raves continued for his roles in Bruce Jay Friedman's "Scuba Duba" (1967), as a social liberal whose bigotry arises when his wife runs away with a black man, and the Neil Simon-Burt Bacharach musical "Promises, Promises" (1968).
Tony Award winners James Earl Jones, left, Julie Harris, Angela Lansbury and Jerry Orbach share spotlight in 1969.
(AP)
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The Simon-Bacharach show was an adaptation of Billy Wilder's film "The Apartment," about an insurance company clerk who advances his career by making his pad a trysting place for his bosses. Mr. Orbach played the clerk, Chuck Baxter, whom Jack Lemmon had portrayed in the 1960 film. He received a Tony Award for best actor in a musical.
Around that time, he played one of his more notable television roles, in "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" (1971), based on Jimmy Breslin's book about gangsters.
Impressed with Mr. Orbach's performance, Gallo called up the actor, who was stunned by the mobster's command of literature, including Sartre and Camus. Mr. Orbach took Gallo to chic Broadway parties, and Gallo reciprocated with invitations to nightclubs. Mr. Orbach and his wife were with Gallo at the Copacabana nightclub on April 7, 1972, and left the party just hours before Gallo was gunned down while eating scungilli at Umberto's Clam House in Manhattan.
"That's just kind of a sad subject," he told an interviewer years later. "One of those things that's been sensationalized so much over the years that I prefer to let it rest. . . . Some interviewer up in Toronto I was doing a TV thing said, 'What was it like for you when Joey Gallo got killed?' 'I don't know, what's it like for you when a friend of yours gets killed? You want to tell me about it?' "
In 1975, Mr. Orbach landed the part of Billy Flynn, a smooth-talking lawyer, in "Chicago," the hit Bob Fosse-Fred Ebb-John Kander musical about celebrity criminals. He received a Tony nomination for best actor in a musical.
His final Broadway appearance was as the tyrannical director Julian Marsh in "42nd Street" (1980), the David Merrick-produced megahit about the making of a musical during the Depression. When Gower Champion, the show's director and choreographer, died just before opening night, Merrick withheld the news until the last curtain call to get the most reaction possible in the next day's reviews. Mr. Orbach was furious at such tastelessness and shouted to bring down the curtain.
Mr. Orbach made film appearances in Sidney Lumet's police drama "Prince of the City" (1981), in "Dirty Dancing" (1987) as Jennifer Grey's father and in Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989). His television offers also mounted, from the short-lived "The Law and Harry McGraw" to "Law & Order."
In his private life, he was a noted golfer and skilled billiards player.
His marriage to actress Marta Curro ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife, actress Elaine Cancilla, whom he married in 1979; and two sons from his first marriage.
