Julian Barry, Who Made Lenny Bruce Into ‘Lenny,’ Dies at 92

Julian Barry, whose scripts for a Broadway play and a Hollywood film about Lenny Bruce, each titled “Lenny,” grew to become definitive portraits of the comic as a reality teller who drove himself mad in a righteous battle in opposition to American hypocrisy, was discovered useless on Tuesday morning at his residence in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 92.

His daughter Julia Barry stated he had died in a single day in his sleep. He had been receiving medical therapy for congestive coronary heart failure and, in latest weeks, for late-stage kidney illness.

Like Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon, Mr. Bruce died younger (he was 40) and have become a determine of regularly renewed pop-culture lore. His comedy profession and his felony prosecutions on drug and obscenity fees impressed museum exhibitions, one-man theatrical performances and biographies. From 2017 till this yr, a fictionalized model of Mr. Bruce was a recurring character on the Amazon Prime tv present “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

Mr. Barry’s play, which opened on Broadway in 1971, 5 years after Mr. Bruce’s loss of life, proved that Mr. Bruce might draw an viewers posthumously. The 1974 film model, which starred Dustin Hoffman within the title position, has endured as a basic of the Lenny Bruce mini-genre. It earned six Academy Award nominations, together with for greatest image, greatest actor and greatest tailored screenplay. (Mr. Barry misplaced to Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo for “The Godfather Part II.”)

In each scripts, Mr. Barry paid homage to Mr. Bruce by together with prolonged passages of his stand-up comedic materials. His Lenny Bruce is crude however winningly so — extra forgiving human frailty than mocking it, and skillful in utilizing earthy widespread sense to assault the prejudices of his day.

Clive Barnes of The New York Times referred to as the play a “dynamite shtick” of theater, and mirrored on the irony that Mr. Bruce had been arrested after utilizing language in nightclubs that by 1971 appeared unexceptional when declaimed from a Broadway stage. “The last laugh,” he concluded, “is with Mr. Bruce.”

The Broadway star of “Lenny,” Cliff Gorman, gained the 1972 Tony Award for lead actor in a play. As Mr. Gorman informed The Times in an interview after the play opened, his efficiency roused Mr. Bruce’s mom, Sally Marr, to go to his dressing room and deal with him as a “genius.”

Mr. Barry’s script in contrast Mr. Bruce to Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift. Some individuals rolled their eyes.

“The story Julian Barry has extracted from Bruce’s life tends to sanctify and, in the end, even to solemnize Bruce rather than to explore his obsessions,” one other Times theater critic, Mel Gussow, wrote in a 1972 overview, when Sandy Baron changed Mr. Gorman.

But Mr. Barry discovered a strong fan in Bob Fosse. After directing the film model of the Broadway musical “Cabaret” (1972), for which he gained the Academy Award for greatest director, Mr. Fosse determined that he wished “Lenny” to be his subsequent movie challenge. He employed Mr. Barry to jot down the script.

“In the play, I mythologized Lenny Bruce,” Mr. Barry informed Rolling Stone in 1974. In distinction, he stated, the film provided “a cold, objective approach.”

Mr. Barry was maybe referring to the movie’s depiction of Mr. Bruce’s decline — ranting onstage about his arrests, capturing heroin, speechifying pathetically in courtroom and eventually dying of a morphine overdose bare on his toilet flooring in Los Angeles.

Yet in “Lenny,” filmed in arty black and white, Mr. Bruce’s flaws are redeemed. He cheats on his spouse, however he reveals himself to be devoted to her when she wants him most. His idealism about racial slurs — that through the use of them individuals can sap them of their malign energy — goes unquestioned. His enemies within the authorized system don’t clarify their protection of conservative social mores.

Mr. Barry noticed Mr. Bruce as a tragic hero.

“The whole beauty of Lenny,” he informed Rolling Stone, “is his message: We’re all the same schmuck.”

Julian Barry Mendelsohn Jr. was born on Dec. 24, 1930, within the Bronx and grew up within the Riverdale neighborhood. His father struggled as a salesman in the course of the Depression however ultimately rose to develop into an government on the Hudson Pulp and Paper Company. His mom, Grace (Fein) Mendelsohn, donated money and time to Jewish causes and the theater.

Julian started performing as a young person whereas attending Horace Mann, a day faculty in Riverdale, the place, he wrote in his memoir, “My Night With Orson” (2011), he was a “townie” — not as privileged as wealthier fellow college students who lived in uptown Manhattan. Believing it could support a future profession in present enterprise — and following the recommendation of Philip Burton, a British director who taught at a summer season performing camp that Julian attended — he modified his identify to sound much less Jewish whereas nonetheless simply a young person.

He was briefly an undergraduate at Syracuse University and Emerson College in Massachusetts. After serving within the Army and combating in Korea in his early 20s, he established a profession as a Broadway stage supervisor. He then took at a danger on the age of 35, turning down regular work to give attention to writing.

Mr. Barry discovered success in tv writing scripts within the Sixties for fashionable reveals like “Mission: Impossible.” His first screenplay to be filmed was “Rhinoceros” (1974), an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder.

Mr. Barry’s 4 marriages led to divorce. In addition to his daughter Julia, from his third marriage, to the movie producer Laura Ziskin, he’s survived by his longtime accomplice, Samantha Harper Macy; two daughters, Sally and Jennifer Barry, from his second marriage, to Patricia Foley; a son, Michael, additionally from that marriage; 5 grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

In his autobiography, Mr. Barry described years of assembly stars and starlets. He and Frank Sinatra spent hours telling previous tales and imagining a film they could make collectively.

Summing up his life within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, he wrote, “I was still bumming a ride on my Academy nomination.”

Yet challenge after challenge of his didn’t get made, misplaced within the Hollywood purgatory often known as “development.”

To some extent, Mr. Barry wrote, it was his personal fault for changing into too hip for his personal good. He grew his hair lengthy, and he name-dropped within the offhand fashion of a “Hollywood Phony,” he wrote. Discussing a script of his with Robert Redford and the director Sydney Pollack in Mr. Redford’s lodge room, he all of a sudden lit up a joint. He was later informed that the 2 males didn’t like him.

“I had to live up to my reputation,” Mr. Barry recalled, “as the man who wrote about Lenny Bruce.”