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Tony And Emmy Award Winning Actor Ron Leibman Dies At 82

Actors Ron Leibman and Madeline Kahn are shown at the Tony Awards in New York, June 6, 1993.
Richard Drew AP
Actors Ron Leibman and Madeline Kahn are shown at the Tony Awards in New York, June 6, 1993.

Ron Leibman, who won a Tony Award for his performance in the Broadway play Angels in America and an Emmy Award on the short-lived CBS show Kaz, died Friday afternoon at the age of 82.

Leibman's death was confirmed to NPR by his agent, Robert Atterman, CEO of Abrams Artists Agency. No other details were available.

The New York-born actor and stage veteran was also known for playing Dr. Leonard Green, the father of Jennifer Aniston's Rachel Green, on TV's Friends.

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Leibman's Emmy came in 1979 when he played Martin "Kaz" Kazinsky, a convicted criminal who becomes a criminal attorney. In 2011, he joked about how he won the award and then the show was canceled after only 23 episodes.

That same year he played a union organizer in Norma Rae opposite Sally Field whose break-out performance garnered an Oscar.

His Tony Award came in 1993 for his portrayal of the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, a play about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

Leibman also starred in movies such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Where's Poppa?

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