Joanna Merlin, who created the role of the daughter Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway and served as a casting director for Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince and Bernardo Bertolucci, has died. She was 92.<\/p>\n
Merlin died Sunday in Los Angeles of complications from myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disorder, her daughters, documentary filmmaker Rachel Dretzin (Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey) and actress Julie Dretzin (The Handmaid\u2019s Tale), announced.<\/p>\n
Merlin also portrayed the dance teacher Miss Berg in Alan Parker\u2019s Fame (1980) and recurred as Judge Lena Petrovsky for more than a decade on NBC\u2019s Law and Order: SVU.
\nHer acting r\u00e9sum\u00e9 included the films Hester Street (1975), All That Jazz (1979), Baby It\u2019s You (1983), The Killing Fields (1984), Mystic Pizza (1988), Class Action (1991) and City of Angels (1998) and such TV shows as Naked City, The Defenders, East Side\/West Side, Homeland and The Good Wife.<\/p>\n
Merlin cast the original Broadway productions of Sondheim\u2019s Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods and Merrily We Roll Along as well as Lilian Hellman\u2019s Candide, Andrew Lloyd Webber\u2019s Evita and Prince\u2019s On the Twentieth Century.<\/p>\n
She also cast John Carpenter\u2019s Big Trouble in Little China (1986), James Ivory\u2019s Jefferson in Paris (1995) and the Bertolucci-directed Oscar best picture winner The Last Emperor (1987), for which she won the Artios Award from the Casting Society of America.<\/p>\n
The second child of Russian Jewish immigrants Toni Merlin (a sculptor) and Harry Ratner (a grocer), Joann Ratner was born in Chicago on July 15, 1931. She and her family relocated to L.A., where she graduated from Fairfax High School and attended UCLA.<\/p>\n
Her daughters noted that she and her sister, Harriet, were raised in a politically progressive home where their parents were involved in the early labor movement and supported evolving movements for racial equality and women\u2019s rights. It was an upbringing that impacted both sisters and was reflected in their own social activism, they said.<\/p>\n
As a young actress in Hollywood, Merlin \u2014 who took her mom\u2019s maiden name as her stage name \u2014 studied with Michael Chekhov, the celebrated actor and director from the Moscow Art Theatre who had fled political repression in the 1920s. She was a member of Chekhov\u2019s acting studio for five years and his last living student.
\nMerlin made her onscreen debut in Cecil B. DeMille\u2019s The Ten Commandments (1956), and her Broadway bow came five years later in Becket opposite Laurence Olivier. She began playing Tzeitel, the eldest daughter in Fiddler, on Broadway in 1964.<\/p>\n
In 2008, Merlin produced, co-wrote and starred in the one-woman film Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn, which she and director Ragnar Freidank adapted from a play by Ellen Cassedy.<\/p>\n
Merlin in the 1980s co-founded the Non-Traditional Casting Project, which became the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts and was honored at the 2011 Tony Awards. And in 1999, she launched the Michael Chekhov Association (MICHA) to preserve and share his legacy and practice. Since its start, it has trained more than 2,000 actors, directors and teachers around the world.<\/p>\n
A longtime faculty member of Grad Acting program at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Merlin is the author of Auditioning: An Actor-Friendly Guide, which contains a foreword by Prince and has been continuously in print since its first publication in 2001.<\/p>\n
Her husband of 42 years, attorney David Dretzin, died in 2006, and her sister, who famously pushed Charles M. Schulz to add a Black character \u2014 Franklin \u2014 to his Peanuts cartoon strip, died in 2020.<\/p>\n
In addition to her daughters, survivors include Julie\u2019s husband, writer-director-producer Sam Catlin (Preacher, Breaking Bad); Rachel\u2019s husband, producer Barak Goodman (American Experience); and grandchildren Noah, Jesse, Ruby, Ben and Eli.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joanna Merlin, who created the role of the daughter Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway and served as a casting director for Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince and Bernardo Bertolucci, has died. She was 92. Merlin died Sunday in Los Angeles of complications from myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disorder, her daughters, documentary filmmaker […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memorial"],"yoast_head":"\n