Roger Stuart Berlind[ Miss Wheeler, Roger Berlind Will Be Wed, NYTimes.com; accessed June 20, 2015.] (June 27, 1930December 18, 2020) was a New York City theatrical producer who won 25 Tony Awards and a board member of Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. and Lehman Brothers. He was one of the founders of Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill in 1960, a company that would later through Sandy Weill become Shearson Loeb Rhoades, which was eventually sold to American Express in 1981 for approximately $930 million in stock.
Early life
Berlind was born to a
American Jews family
in New York City, to Mae (née Miller) and Peter Sydney Berlind, a hospital administrator.
[ Roger Berlind profile, filmreference.com; accessed June 20, 2015.] Raised in Woodmere, New York, he attended Woodmere Academy (since renamed as Lawrence Woodmere Academy).
[Seelye, Katharine Q. "Roger Berlind, 90, Dies; Broadway Impresario Who Amassed 25 Tonys", The New York Times, December 24, 2020. Accessed February 17, 2025. "The family moved to Woodmere, on Long Island, when Roger was 3. He attended Woodmere Academy and went on to Princeton, where he majored in English."] He attended Princeton University and received his bachelor's degree in English in 1954 after completing an 82-page long senior thesis titled "The Quest of the Ideal in the Plays of Yeats and Synge".
Berlind was a member of the Princeton Tower Club. The crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 66 on June 24, 1975, killed his wife, Helen Polk Clark, and three of his four children.
Theatrical career
His theatrical producing career began in 1976. Since then, he has produced or co-produced more than forty plays and musicals on
Broadway theatre and many
off-Broadway and regional theatre productions as well. Berlind has won 25
Tony Awards, more than any other individual.
His Broadway productions have won numerous
. Among them are
Amadeus,
Nine,
Long Day's Journey Into Night,
Ain't Misbehavin',
Guys and Dolls,
Hamlet,
Passion,
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,
Copenhagen,
Kiss Me, Kate,
Proof, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning
Anna in the Tropics, the 2004 revival of
Wonderful Town,
Curtains, and
Deuce.
In 2003, the 360-seat Roger S. Berlind Theatre opened in the McCarter Theatre Center at Princeton University. Princeton's Roger S. Berlind Professorship in the Humanities, previously held by Joyce Carol Oates, is currently held by Tracy K. Smith.[ Playbill.com]
See also
-
Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt
-
Theatre
-
New York City
External links
