Steven Hill, trailblazing TV star, dies at 94.
Steven Hill, who originated imposing lead roles on two notable television series, “Mission: Impossible” in the 1960s and “Law & Order” in the 1990s, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 94.
Born Solomon Krakowsky on Feb. 24, 1922, in Seattle, the son of a Russian Jewish furniture-store owner, Hill graduated from the University of Washington and at first moved to Chicago to work in radio.
He was 44 and a veteran stage and television actor in 1966 when he was cast as Daniel Briggs, the leader of an elite covert-operations unit, in the new series Mission: Impossible. But he left after the first season, paving the way for Peter Graves’s six-season run as the show’s lead.
Almost a quarter-century after that experience, Hill took on the role of the district attorney Adam Schiff on a new cops-and-lawyers series based in New York, Law & Order. He played the role, said to be modeled on the long-serving Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, from 1990 to 2000.
In a 1996 interview with The Washington Post, Dick Wolf, the creator of “Law & Order,” called Hill “the Talmudic influence on the entire zeitgeist of the series.” “Steven has more moral authority than anyone else on episodic TV,” Wolf said.
At: http://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/celebrity/steven-hill-trailblazing-tv-star-dies-at-94/ar-BBvXN3Z?ocid=ansmsnent11&OCID=ansmsnnews11