Alan Mandel, Actor and Translator of Samuel Beckett's Plays, Dies at 98.

In 1957, he helped stage 'Waiting for Godot' at San Quentin State Prison, playing Lucky, and later helped Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter with the recent Broadway revival.

Alan Mandel, a distinguished stage veteran known for his interpretations of Samuel Beckett's nihilistic plays, died in the landmark 1957 production of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin State Prison. He was 98 years old.

Mandel died Tuesday at his Westwood home, his son Peter Mandel and daughter-in-law Sarah Mandel told The Hollywood Reporter.

In movies, the Toronto native played an elderly rabbi whose advice consisted only of lyrics from Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" in the Coen brothers' Serious Man (2009), and he appeared for John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) and Shorts (2000).

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In November 1957, Mandel was a member of the San Francisco Actor's Workshop led by Jules Irving and Herbert Blau when he portrayed the slave Lucky in a performance of Waiting for Godot for 1,400 inmates at San Quentin. (This production serves as a preface to Martin Slane's influential 1961 book Theater of the Absurd.)

Since then, Mandel co-founded the San Quentin Drama Workshop with inmate Rick Clachi, who would become an actor and playwright, and the pair directed many other plays at the prison.

Later, Beckett himself directed Mandel in Waiting for Godot and Endgame (as Nagg) in Europe, and their relationship continued into the 1980s.

"The text for [Beckett] was like a musical score," he told Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty in 2015, "and the important thing for us was to find the rhythm of the line."

Mandel appeared in Beckett's plays dozens of times in his career, and in Los Angeles in 2012 he received an Ovation for his turn as Estragon opposite Ireland's Barry McGovern as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Society. For Beckett's last performance, he portrayed Hamm alongside McGovern in Endgame at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City in 2016.

And when Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter were preparing to play Estragon and Vladimir, respectively, in their revival of Waiting for Godot at Broadway's Hudson Theater last year, they sought out Mandel for his expertise.

One of eight children, Albert Mandel was born on December 27, 1927 in Toronto. His parents Bella and Louis owned a restaurant and the family lived above it. After performing in Oliver Twist as a youth, he set his sights on the theater stage.

"I was a dropout or 'kicked out'. It was one of those things." "My father wanted to know what was going to happen to me," she told The Times in 1992. I was 17 or 18 years old. I told him that I was going to enter the theater. He looked at me and said, "A good Jewish boy goes to the theater." It was a very good reminder. I didn't know what to say."

In the early 1950s, Mandel served as artistic director of Theater 49, a branch of Toronto's Civic Theatre, then visited his sister in San Francisco in 1954. He discovered San Francisco's Actor's Workshop, then a teaching studio operating in a converted garage, and became its business manager.

The workshop would become a pillar of the regional theater movement, known for its experimentalism and known as the home of Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and Harold Pinter in the United States.

When Irving and Blau were hired to run the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center in 1965, Mandel accompanied them to New York as company manager. During his tenure on Broadway, he appeared in The Country Wife and directed the 1973 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire starring James Farentino and Rosemary Harris.

In 1976, Mandel came to Los Angeles to work on the NBC adaptation of Irving's Dark Victory, starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Anthony Hopkins and directed by Robert Butler.

He also joined the Actors Theater of Los Angeles, which became the Los Angeles Theater Center in 1985, as director and consulting actor, developing and overseeing the poetry/literary collection there.

Mandel won his first Ovation Award in 2009 for his role as the abominable poet Spooner in Pinter's No Man's Land at the Odyssey Theater, then portrayed the role as furniture merchant Gregory Solomon in 2015's Arthur Miller's The Price at the Taper, where THR found fault with his performance in its review: "He's so good. He literally steals the show and makes it It takes an unexpected direction."

McNulty was a big fan, writing that "listening to Mandel's meticulous diction is like reading a handwritten letter by someone with the most extraordinary pen."

In 2010, Mandel revisited the San Quentin experience of Waiting for Godot in the documentary The Impossible Self.

In addition to her son and daughter-in-law, survivors include her daughter, Olivia, and her husband, Dean; her grandchildren, Elizabeth, Ethan and Spencer; and her brother Jerry, her husband of 30 years, art patron Elizabeth Heller, died in 1997 at the age of 65.