From the N.Y. Times:
Jerry Orbach - who won fame on the New York stage as one of the last bona fide leading men of the Broadway musical and global celebrity on television as a New York detective on NBC's "Law & Order" - died on Tuesday night. He was 69.
The cause was prostate cancer, according to his agent, Robert Malcom.
In performances that spanned half a century, the Bronx-born Mr. Orbach came to embody two beloved New York archetypes: the musical matinee idol, to which he gave a refreshingly modern spin with his rugged and idiosyncratic persona, and the shrewd, irascible cop, a role he honed to a razor's edge as Detective Lennie Briscoe on "Law & Order."
After playing that role for 12 seasons, Mr. Orbach left the show at the end of last season with plans to star in "Trial by Jury," a spinoff that is scheduled to have its debut on NBC in the spring. His illness, which he first disclosed earlier this month, figured in the switch; Dick Wolf, the creator of the "Law & Order" programs, said the new program, on which Mr. Orbach was to appear only occasionally, was less taxing.
Whether singing "Try To Remember" as the dashing narrator of "The Fantasticks" in 1960 or trading barbs with fellow detectives and reluctant witnesses on television in recent years, Mr. Orbach exuded a wry, ragged masculinity that was all his own. As a star of musicals, he created a new kind of hero who was leagues away from suave, swaggering Adonises like John Raitt, Howard Keel and Alfred Drake (though like them, he sang in a resonant baritone). And he flourished at a time when the Broadway musical hero was fast becoming an endangered species.
In shows like "Promises, Promises," Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach's 1968 adaptation of the movie "The Apartment," and "42nd Street" in 1981, Mr. Orbach registered as a musical answer to the shaggier leading men who had begun to emerge on American movie screens, actors like Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson. His rough-edged individuality may account for his endurance on the Broadway stage in an era when other promising musical actors - including Larry Kert, Robert Goulet and Robert Morse - proved unable to follow through on their breakthrough successes.
Mr. Orbach may indeed have been the last of a breed: no male star since has matched the breadth and continuity of his career in musicals. Though he originated the part of the corrupt, silver-tongued lawyer Billy Flynn in Bob Fosse's 1975 production of the musical "Chicago," Mr. Orbach was at his best as a tough cookie with a melting center.
Writing in The New York Times of "Promises, Promises," the critic Clive Barnes said of Mr. Orbach's portrayal of the haplessly ambitious, morally bewildered hero: "He makes gangle into a verb because that is just what he does. He gangles. He also sings most effectively, dances most occasionally, and acts with an engaging and perfectly controlled sense of desperation."
Yet he was equally persuasive in 1981 as the dictatorial director in David Merrick's Broadway version of the movie "42nd Street," in which he managed to instill new vitality into the hoariest of show-biz clichés. When, at the conclusion of the show's opening night performance, Merrick shocked the audience and cast by announcing that its director, Gower Champion, had died, it was Mr. Orbach who had the taste and authority to request that the curtain come down.
Mr.. Orbach's other important roles on stage included Mack the Knife in the landmark off-Broadway production of "The Threepenny Opera" in the late 1950's and El Gallo, the benevolently interactive narrator in "The Fantasticks," which was staged at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in 1960 and went on to become the longest-running musical in New York. Walter Kerr, writing about that performance in The New York Herald Tribune, said, "Mr. Orbach is no doubt on his way."
He also appeared as the misanthropic puppeteer in "Carnival" in 1961 and was nominated for a Tony award for playing Sky Masterson in the 1965 revival of "Guys and Dolls." He won the Tony for best actor in a musical for "Promises, Promises."