Lou Jacobi

The actor Lou Jacobi, who died on 23 October aged 95, was known for his comic roles but also won praise in dramatic roles over a long career in the theatre and cinema.

Jacobi was born Louis Harold Jacobovitch in 1913 in Toronto and began acting as a boy. He moved to London, appearing in Guys and Dolls and Pal Joey, before making his Broadway debut in 1955 in The Diary of Anne Frank, playing one of the occupants of the Amsterdam attic where the Franks were hiding. He played the same role in the 1959 film version and was in nine other Broadway plays, including Paddy Chayefsky's Tenth Man in 1959 and Neil Simon's Come Blow Your Horn in 1961.

As well as the Anne Frank adaptation Jacobi was in around two dozen other films, including the Dudley Moore comedy Arthur, Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (in which he played a middle-aged transvestite) and Barry Levinson's Avalon. His last film was IQ (1994), in which he played the logician Kurt Gödel, one of Albert Einstein's professorial friends at Princeton.

He also appeared in many television shows, including The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and That Girl, and was a regular on The Dean Martin Show on NBC for two seasons in the early 1970s. Later he made guest appearances in programmes such as Cagney & Lacey, St Elsewhere and LA Law. Also on his CV was the spoof album he made for Capitol, Al Tijuana and his Jewish Brass.

In 1957 Jacobi married Ruth Ludwin, who died in 2004.