\n\tMandell appeared in Beckett plays dozens of times in his career, and in L.A. he received an Ovation Award in 2012 for his turn as Estragon opposite Irishman Barry McGovern as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Forum. For his final Beckett performance, he portrayed Hamm alongside McGovern again in Endgame at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City in 2016.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd when Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter were preparing to play Estragon and Vladimir, respectively, in their revival of Waiting for Godot<\/a> at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway<\/a> last year, they sought out Mandell for his expertise, meeting with him at his home.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cHe was a brilliant manager and producer, which made him sought after for the way he could put on a production, run a theater company, run a business,\u201d Daniel Segura, Mandell\u2019s main assistant for the past 10 years, told THR. \u201cAs an actor, he just had a lyricism to him that was poetic. Hearing him do Beckett, I was always blown away by his musicality. He could deliver it to an audience that all of a sudden got it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWatch and listen to Mandell recite \u201cfragments\u201d that Beckett wrote late in his career and called \u201cStirrings Still\u201d here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tAlan Mandell with Marion Ross on a 2010 episode of Grey\u2019s Anatomy.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRon Tom\/ABC\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n \n\tOne of eight kids, Albert Mandell was born in Toronto on Dec. 27, 1927. His parents, Bella and Louis, owned a restaurant, and the family lived above it. After performing in Oliver Twist as a youngster, he set his sights on a stage career.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI was a dropout or \u2018throw-out.\u2019 It was one of those things,\u201d he told<\/a> the Times in 1992. \u201cMy father wanted to know what was going to happen to me. I was 17 or 18. I told him I was going to go into the theater. He looked at me and said, \u2018A nice Jewish boy goes to the theater.\u2019 It was a great remark. I didn\u2019t know what to say.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMandell served as the artistic director of Theater \u201949, an offshoot of the Toronto Civic Theatre, through the early 1950s, then visited his sister in San Francisco in \u201954. He discovered the San Francisco Actor\u2019s Workshop, then a teaching studio working out of a converted garage, and became its business manager.<\/p>\n \n\tThe workshop would become a pillar of the regional theater movement, renowned for its experimentalism and as a home for Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and Harold Pinter premieres in the U.S.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen Irving and Blau were hired to run the Repertory Theatre at Lincoln Center in 1965, Mandell accompanied them to New York as the company\u2019s manager. During his time there, he appeared on Broadway in The Country Wife and managed the 1973 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire that starred James Farentino and Rosemary Harris.<\/p>\n \n\tIn 1976, Mandell came to L.A. to work on an NBC adaptation of Dark Victory that was produced by Irving, starred Elizabeth Montgomery and Anthony Hopkins and was directed by Robert Butler<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tHe also joined the Los Angeles Actors\u2019 Theatre, which would become the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1985, as a consulting director and actor, and he developed and oversaw the poetry\/literary series there.<\/p>\n \n\tMandell landed his first Ovation Award for his work in Joanna Glass\u2019 Trying at the Colony Theatre in Burbank in 2007, then won another two years later for playing the down-and-out poet Spooner in Pinter\u2019s No Man\u2019s Land at the Odyssey Theatre\/<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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