A prolific screen actor who appeared in 75 movies and television shows, Mr. Rachins launched his career doing theater in New York, appearing as one of the original cast members in the risque musical revue “Oh! Calcutta!” Created by British theater critic Kenneth Tynan, the show debuted off-Broadway in 1969 and became a headline-grabbing sensation, propelled by controversial sketches and dance sequences in which the cast performed naked.
The cause was a heart ailment, his family said in a statement.
Alan Rachins, an Emmy-nominated actor known for playing two very funny but very different television characters — a boorish, miserly law-firm partner on “L.A. Law” and a histrionic ex-radical on “Dharma & Greg” — died Saturday at a hospital in Los Angeles. The Cambridge native was 82.
“I can’t tell you how many times I heard the joke, ‘I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on,’” Mr. Rachins told the New Jersey Star-Ledger in 2003, looking back on a production that made him feel “extremely vulnerable” onstage.
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Mr. Rachins’s career appeared to come full circle when he appeared in Paul Verhoeven’s camp classic “Showgirls” (1995), playing the crass, insult-slinging producer of a topless Las Vegas stage show. “Can you spell MGM backwards? I bet you can’t,” he tells one aspiring dancer, before likening the hair of another performer to the fuzz on a tennis ball.
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In between those roles, Mr. Rachins rose to national prominence on the NBC legal drama “L.A. Law,” playing the abrasive, money-obsessed lawyer Douglas Brackman Jr. His character was an often humiliated source of comic relief: mistakenly arrested by an undercover vice cop while trying to order a hand roll at a sushi bar; kidnapped by two of his tenants while moonlighting as a slumlord; forced to get skin grafts on his posterior after lighting a cigar atop a turpentine-filled toilet.
Created by lawyer and screenwriter Terry Louise Fisher and Mr. Rachins’s brother-in-law, writer-producer Steven Bochco, “L.A. Law” premiered on NBC in 1986 and ran for eight seasons, mixing dark comedy with weighty explorations of the American legal system and its practitioners. It won the Emmy award for outstanding drama series four times.
Mr. Rachins, who received an Emmy nomination in 1988 for outstanding supporting actor in a drama, was part of an ensemble cast that included Harry Hamlin, Corbin Bernsen, Jill Eikenberry, Susan Dey, Jimmy Smits, and Michael Tucker.
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The series spotlighted his talent for playing comic oddballs (at one point, his character enlists a sex therapist because he can’t help passing gas — and then passing out — in the bedroom), although he also managed to create touching moments in scenes involving his character’s wife, Sheila, played by his real-life wife, actress Joanna Frank.
“In the pilot episode, there was nothing of the more flamboyant or bizarre side of Douglas; he was going to be the hard-line office manager, the penny pincher,” Mr. Rachins told the New York Times in 1990. “It was kind of limited, and I didn’t know where it was going. But quickly it developed a lot more color and flamboyance.”
As Mr. Rachins saw it, the character was “constantly trying to live up to the image of his father,” one of the law firm’s founding partners. Mr. Rachins, who had a strained relationship with his own father, told Australia’s Sun-Herald newspaper that the character’s “emotional anguish” was “a great source of joy for me as an actor.”
But he said he was far more comfortable with his role on the ABC sitcom “Dharma & Greg,” about the unlikely marriage between a free-spirited yoga teacher (Jenna Elfman) and a strait-laced lawyer (Thomas Gibson). The show, which premiered in 1997 and ran for five seasons, featured Mr. Rachins in the role of Larry Finkelstein, Elfman’s balding hippie father, who wears his remaining hair in a ponytail and, a quarter-century after Watergate, can’t stop ranting about President Richard M. Nixon.
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Mr. Rachins cited his own countercultural bona fides in interviews, noting that he had “marched against Vietnam” and, of course, performed in “Oh! Calcutta!” His “Dharma” character liked to walk around in the buff, although Mr. Rachins was not as exposed as he once was in New York, singing and dancing without clothes.
An only child, Alan Lewis Rachins was born in Cambridge on Oct. 3, 1942, and grew up in Brookline. His father ran a food company that manufactured ice-cream toppings and cake decorations; his mother managed the home and died when Mr. Rachins was 11.
“I had dinners alone,” he recalled in a 2006 interview with Our Town Brookline, a monthly magazine. “My father’s second job was playing gin rummy.”
Growing up, Mr. Rachins performed in plays at a Maine summer camp and decided to become an actor after seeing James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” “He saw a young man expressing all this anger at his father, and he thought, ‘I can’t do it in life, but I could do it in the movies,’” his wife said in an interview with the Times.
He attended Brookline High but initially did not perform in school plays.
“One night I got a phone call and somebody asked me to play the part of Prince Charming in a production of ‘Snow White.’” he told The Boston Globe. “The play didn’t go over well — my friends were on the floor laughing — but that was one thing that gave me an enormous boost to sustain the idea that I could be an actor.”
Mr. Rachins was supposed to take over the family business, and studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school for two years before dropping out against his father’s wishes. He moved to New York, where he studied acting under teachers William Ball, Warren Robertson, and Kim Stanley, and made his Broadway debut in 1967, with a small role in the play “After the Rain.”
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After his father died in 1970, Mr. Rachins returned to Massachusetts, where he briefly tried running the family business. He sold his share of the company to an uncle and, looking for alternatives to acting, studied screenwriting and directing at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. He also enrolled in a film production program at Empire State College, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1974.
Mr. Rachins went on to write episodes of “Hill Street Blues,” “Hart to Hart,” and “The Fall Guy.”
Bochco cast him in “L.A. Law” after seeing him in director Henry Jaglom’s independent film “Always” (1985), in which Mr. Rachins and Frank, whom he married in 1978, played a married couple in Los Angeles.
In addition to his wife, he leaves a son, Robert.