Joanna Merlin, Law & Order: SVU Judge, Dead at 92
Joanna Merlin, original Fiddler On The Roof star and longtime Law & Order: SVU judge, has died. She was 92.
Her death was announced on the Instagram page of the New York University Tisch Graduate Acting Program, where Merlin had been on the faculty since 1998. A cause of death has not been given.
“Joanna was an actress, master Chekhov teacher and former casting director for Harold Prince, Stephen Sondheim, Bernardo Bertolucci and James Ivory,” the NYU program captioned. “Joanna will be deeply missed at Grad Acting, by the Chekhov community, and by the many people she touched through her artistry.”
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She cast the original Broadway productions of Sondheim’s Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along, as well as Evita, Candide and On the Twentieth Century. As an actor, her Broadway credits included Becket, opposite Laurence Olivier, and Fiddler on the Roof, in which she created the role of Tzeitel.
On the TV side of things, Merlin starred as Judge Lena Petrovsky on 43 episodes of Law & Order: SVU, beginning with the Season 2 episode “Legacy.” Her final appearance on the program was Season 12’s “Reparations.” In the ’90s, she also appeared in five episodes of Law & Order proper.
In 2011, she guest-starred on The Good Wife, and two years later, appeared in an episode of Homeland. Her other TV credits include a handful of TV-movies, including Black and Blue and Witness Protection, plus Northern Exposure, L.A. Law, Another World and All My Children.
