Lawrence Block on Larry Block

Film and TV | Lawrence Block on the actor Larry Block

LAWRENCE JOEL “LARRY” BLOCK  (October 30, 1942 – October 7, 2012)

This Lawrence Block was an actor who lived in New York and appeared frequently in films, on television, and on the stage. He almost always used the name “Larry Block.” You can find out more about his acting career on his Wikipedia page.

My own middle initial, which appears few places besides my tax returns and passport, is R. Friends do call me Larry, but I've never used it on a piece of writing. It's always plain old Lawrence Block.

So there.

I first became aware of LJB in the early 70s, when I had an apartment on the Upper West Side. We both had listed phones, and each of us occasionally got a call meant for the other. “No, you want Larry Block the hack writer,” he told at least one caller, who reported as much to me with something approaching glee. I decided to tell the next clown with a wrong number that he wanted Larry Block the ham actor, but I never got the chance.

I saw him once on stage, in some off-off-Broadway effort on West 42nd Street, and I saw him on the screen, in a non-porn role in a porn film, The Devil in Miss Jones. (A good friend of mine, the late Patrick Farrelly, also had a non-porn role in the film. I can't find either of them listed in the credits, so they may have used other names, or been in another film altogether. Never mind.)

And I once met him face to face, although he never knew it.

I was walking with a writer friend, Thomas Cook. We'd been at a group dinner in midtown, and I was walking Tom home to his apartment in Hell's Kitchen, and would then walk myself home to my place in the Village. Tom had previously mentioned that he had a friend with the same name as I, actor Larry Block, and as we walked west on 46th Street he said, “Oh, there he is now.”

I forget what LJB was doing. Lugging garbage cans to the curb, I think, or lugging them back. Never mind.

“I'll introduce you,” Tom said. And, as we drew up to where my namesake was lugging something or other, he said brightly, “Larry Block, meet Larry Block.” Larry Block the actor assumed Tom had just said his name twice, and had not bothered saying the name of his companion, and I don't think he cared a whole lot anyway. Whereupon Tom and I continued our walk, and Tom clearly thought he'd successfully introduced the two of us, and I didn't care enough to let him know what had happened.

Then a couple of years later Larry Block died.

But his work lives on, at least to the extent that it keeps turning up in lists of my work. I don't believe for a moment that this blog post will straighten things out. But, you know. We do what we can.

© Copyright Lawrence Block excerpted from https://lawrenceblock.com/film-and-tv/ on 2023 April 19