On a November night in 1957, Alan Mandell stood in the dining hall of San Quentin State Prison and delivered Lucky's unbroken, nonsensical monologue from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot to an audience of roughly 1,400 inmates who had never before seen a play. Mandell, who later became one of the last actors alive to have been personally directed by Beckett and who also played the enigmatic Rabbi Marshak in the Coen brothers' A Serious Man, died October 13, 2026, at his home in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, The Hollywood Reporter reported. He was 98.

Born Albert Mandell on December 27, 1927, in Toronto, he was one of eight children of Bella and Louis Mandell, who ran a restaurant and raised the family in the rooms above it. He left school as a teenager, later recalling that he had been a dropout, or in his own words a 'throw-out,' and that his father worried about what would become of him. By the early 1950s he was running Theater '49, a small company in Toronto.

In 1954 he traveled to San Francisco to visit his sister. He wandered into the converted garage that housed the fledgling Actor's Workshop, found no one in the office, answered a ringing telephone, and began tidying the cluttered desk. A co-founder discovered him there and asked if he could stay on to handle reservations; he did, eventually becoming the company's only full-time employee and, working alongside Jules Irving, helping steer it into one of the first full-fledged regional theaters in the country, according to American Theatre magazine. A one-week visit stretched into a stay of more than a decade.

That company brought Waiting for Godot to San Quentin in November 1957, and Mandell's performance as Lucky left an impression the prison had not expected. His delivery of the character's torrential, broken monologue moved a group of inmates to start their own theater troupe. With one of them, Rick Cluchey, Mandell helped found the San Quentin Drama Workshop, which ran from 1958 to 1965 as the first extended prison theater program in the country organized by prisoners themselves.

Cluchey, long since paroled, introduced Mandell to Beckett in Europe in 1980, where the playwright was overseeing a production of Endgame. Beckett cast him as Nagg by telegram: "Approved Mandell as Nagg. Signed Samuel Beckett." During a rehearsal of the Nagg and Nell scenes, Beckett played the part opposite him, and afterward told him, "Oh, you're going to be very good," according to LAist. Mandell went on to perform Lucky and Nagg under Beckett's own direction in Europe until the playwright's death in 1989. He described Beckett's method decades later: "I always thought of him more as a conductor than a director... It was about rhythm. It was about language. The pauses were like musical beats."

Mandell went on to manage the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center in New York through the early 1970s, then moved to Los Angeles, where he became a consulting director and actor with the Los Angeles Actors' Theatre and later the Los Angeles Theatre Center. He kept performing Beckett on Los Angeles stages into his late eighties. In 2012, at 84, he won the LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award for lead actor in a play for his performance as Estragon opposite Barry McGovern in Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Forum, TheaterMania reported. Of returning to the role at that age, he joked, "It was easier when I was 80."

His final Beckett performance came in 2016, when, at 88, he directed and starred as Hamm opposite McGovern in Endgame at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. Daniel Segura, his assistant of ten years, remembered what it was like to hear him work through Beckett's language: "Hearing him do Beckett, I was always blown away by his musicality."

Beyond the stage, Mandell built a long career in film and television that stretched from The Six Million Dollar Man, Cannon, Baretta and Eight Is Enough in the 1970s to Grey's Anatomy and the Coen brothers' A Serious Man in the 2000s, in which he played Rabbi Marshak, the synagogue elder young Danny Gopnik waits months to see. He also appeared in John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus and, in 2019, in the Netflix film Velvet Buzzsaw.

Mandell met Elizabeth Heller through his San Quentin work; she drove him to rehearsals and, eventually, to dinner at the prison. They married in 1967 and remained married until her death in 1997, at 65. He is survived by his son, Peter, and daughter-in-law, Sarah; his daughter, Olivia, and her husband, Dean; his grandchildren, Elizabeth, Ethan and Spencer; and his brother, Jerry.

The San Quentin Drama Workshop that grew out of his one 1957 performance outlived the decade he spent nurturing it, and theater historians still cite it as the first prison drama program of its kind organized by the prisoners who started it. Four Ovation Awards, a late and strange turn as a Coen brothers rabbi, and nearly six decades of Beckett performances on two continents make up the public record, but all of it traces back to a cluttered desk in a converted San Francisco garage and a telegram that read, simply, that Samuel Beckett had approved him.