All Down Hill

Steven Hill, patron saint of the plea bargain, has died at the age of 94. He is best remembered as District Attorney Adam Schiff and from 1992 to 2000 every episode of Law & Order was a wry Jerry Orbach observation over a newly discovered dead body, a world-weary Steven Hill summation, and some other stuff in between, usually including Schiff imploring the assistant DA to ignore his principles and take whatever deal he can score from the defense. In the 1940s and ‘50s, Hill was a force of nature on the New York stage, joining Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Julie Harris in the inaugural class of the Actor’s Studio. Martin Landau said, “When I first became an actor, there were two young actors in New York: Marlon Brando and Steven Hill. A lot of people said that Steven would have been the one, not Marlon. He was legendary. Nuts, volatile, mad, and his work was exciting.” Hill gave that up for Orthodox Judaism, honoring the Sabbath by not working from sunset on Friday to sunset Saturday, which proved to be a problem on Broadway. He spent a year leading the Mission Impossible team as Dan Briggs until producers decided to test how serious he was about that whole religion thing, leading to him leaving the set in mid-filming. After a decade off, he returned as authority figures in films such as Yentl, Raw Deal and Billy Bathgate, where he frustratingly sends the annoying Loren Dean away from Dutch Shultz’s headquarters before he would have been killed.