Mike Nussbaum, an actor known as the dean of Chicago theater who found success during his early association with Chicago-born playwright David Mamet, died Dec. 23 at his Chicago home. He is 99.
His death was announced by his daughter, Karen Nussbaum, a labor organizer.
In the past decade, Mr. Nussbaum as the oldest working actor in the country, a distinction that slightly irritated him. (To the amazement of reporters, he vigorously performed his daily regimen of 50 push-ups, a practice he maintained until he was 98.) He often said that he preferred to be known only for his acting skills, not for the age at which he is acting.
Mr. Nussbaum came to Chicago’s community theaters, particularly the Hull House, an incubator of talent in the 1960s, while also running a successful liquidation business. When he was 40, he was dealing with a wasp’s nest when he fell off a roof, breaking a kneecap and breaking a wrist. While he was stewing on the couch recovering, he decided it was the right moment to pursue acting full time.
A pivot point in his acting career came in 1975, when Mr. Mamet, then a fledgling playwright, cast him as Teach in an early production of “American Buffalo,” his celebrated play about a trio of unfortunate, double-crossing. hustlers. The couple met at Hull House, where Mr. Mamet as a gofer when he was a teenager.
“It was, for those of us who saw it, kind of an overwhelming, definitive experience,” Robert Falls, the former artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, said. told Chicago magazine in 2014. “Over the years, I’ve seen actors like Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall play that part, and nobody played it the way Mike Nussbaum did. There’s a Chicago quality to his voice, in terms of attitude, a sense of pathos and danger that he brought to it that’s never really been matched.”
When Mr. Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” another tale of desperate hustlers, opened on Broadway in 1983, Mr. Nussbaum and fellow Chicagoan Joe Mantegna are cast as two of the play’s hard-working, venal real estate agents. Mr. Mantegna earned a Tony Award for his role as the smooth Ricky Roma; Mr. Nussbaum won a Drama Desk Award for his role as George Aaronow, a battered salesman with a nagging conscience; and the play would win Mr. Mamet the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
“There is a particular heroism in Mike Nussbaum, whose fearful eyes deliver a lifetime of blasted dreams,” wrote Frank Rich in his review for The New York Times, “and in Joe Mantegna, as the youngest, dapperest go-getter in the company.”
The couple performed years ago in “A Life in the Theater” by Mr. Mamet, a slight but poignant two-person play about a young actor and an older one pushing and guiding each other, ego to ego. Mel Gussow of The Times praised their performances as effortless. “As the cynical old poseur, Mr. Nussbaum is a Jack Gilford with a touch of John Barrymore,” he wrote.
Mr. Mantegna, speaking by phone, said Mr. Nussbaum was “the role model for what everyone considered a Chicago actor.”
“He’s not doing it for the end game,” Mr. Mantegna said. “In New York, there’s an end game: I might make it to Broadway, get a shot on TV. It’s an industry. LA is an industry. In Chicago it was never an industry; we did it for the love of doing it.”
Mr. Mantegna recalled Broadway producers urging Mr. Mamet to cast “Glengarry Glen Ross” with stars, and Mr. Mamet pushed back. “He said, ‘I’ll do it with my kind.’ Then there we were, this group of unknowns, doing what would eventually win the Pulitzer Prize.”
Then Mr. went away. Nussbaum in all this.
BJ Jones, artistic director of the well-known Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Ill., which Mr. Nussbaum helped found in the 1970s, called Mr. Nussbaum during its run on Broadway to ask him to star in a work by the English playwright Simon Gray.
Mr. Nussbaum called his wife at the time, Annette, for advice. “Do it,” he said. “I’m tired of New York.”
“Mike left Broadway to do a play that we probably paid him a few hundred bucks for,” continued Mr. Jones. “And when he did, they were scalping tickets in the lobby to see him. He was a Broadway star, but he went home.”
As Mr. Mantegna said, “We were riding the carousel, and there was the brass ring and he could have had it, but he decided he liked the carousel.”
A small man with a thick mustache, Mr. Nussbaum seemed to be able to play anyone: He was a ferocious Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” and a cheeky witch in “Macbeth,” two of his many roles for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He also continued to work in film and television. He was a pompous school principal in “Field of Dreams,” the 1989 baseball fantasy starring Kevin Costner, and a friendly jewelry store owner in “Men in Black,” the 1997 science fiction comedy with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.
“Mike is the consummate ensemble player,” Mr. Jones said. “And he had a natural warmth that brought out all his characters.”
Myron G. Nussbaum was born on December 29, 1923, in New York City and grew up in Chicago. His father, Philip, was a fur wholesaler; his mother, Bertha (Cohen) Nussbaum, was a homemaker. Mike was a thin, lonely child, beaten and despised by his father, “a man I didn’t admire,” he told Chicago magazine.
He was 9 and at summer camp when he discovered acting, though he froze during his first performance and had to be carried on stage. He attended the University of Wisconsin before dropping out and enlisting in the Army during World War II. There his lack of a middle name caused him annoyance at roll call. Those without one had to shout “NMI,” and it was such a hassle that he chose the letter G, at random.
He worked as a Teletype operator in France, first in Versailles and then Reims, and was on duty on May 7, 1945, the day of the German surrender. He sent the announcement declaring the end of the war in Europe, signing it not with his initials, as was customary, but with his full surname. He kept a framed copy as a memento.
He returned to Chicago in 1946 and married Annette Brenner, who later worked in public relations for the American Civil Liberties Union and elsewhere. He got into the exterminating business because he wanted a home, a family and a stable life, which he knew he couldn’t get as a professional artist. “I like the American dream,” he said.
His first wife died in 2003. In addition to his daughter Karen, Mr. Nussbaum is survived by his son Jack, a writer and activist; his second wife, Julie (Brudlos) Nussbaum; seven grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Susan, a playwright, novelist and disability activist, died last year.
“I was lucky: Chicago gave me opportunities that I didn’t think I could get in New York,” Mr. Nussbaum told The New York Times in 2014. “There’s no real fame here, unlike in New York. And you don’t get a raise when you win a Jeff” — otherwise known as The Joseph Jefferson Award, an honor given to theater arts in Chicago — “unlike when you win a Tony. But I got a solid work, great work, and all I want to do is act.”
