Jerry Orbach, who died Tuesday of prostate cancer at age 69, was one of the leading men of the New York stage. He starred in some of Broadway’s most fabled productions between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s, when he appeared as the tyrannical director Julian Marsh in David Merrick’s monumental production of “42nd Street.”

As the capstone to a prolific career, Orbach spent the past 12 seasons playing detective Lennie Briscoe on TV’s “Law and Order” and its various spinoffs. The role made Orbach financially secure and brought him before his widest audience.

The city Landmarks Conservancy in 2000 affirmed his iconic status by declaring Orbach a “Living Landmark.”

“It means they can’t tear me down,” Orbach told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Orbach in 1955 took over, as a replacement, the role of the Street singer in a revival of the “Threepenny Opera.” A precocious 21-year-old, he was then cast in the leading male role, Mack the Knife, playing opposite Lotte Lenya.

In 1960, Orbach became an original cast member of “The Fantasticks”; he starred as the puppet master in David Merrick’s 1961 production of “Carnival!” and in 1969 he won a Tony award for playing C.C. Baxter in “Promises, Promises,” Neil Simon’s long-running stage adaptation of “The Apartment.” In 1975, Orbach played the original Bill Flynn in “Chicago,” with Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon.

Possessed of a distinctive baritone voice, Orbach was the first to sing two of the best-loved show tunes of the 1960s, the Burt Bachrach/Hal David song “What Do You Get When You Fall in Love?” from “Promises, Promises,” and “Try to Remember” from “The Fantasticks,” a song he came to regard as his personal theme.

Orbach was born at the Bronx. His father managed a series of lunch counters and the family moved around frequently when Orbach was young, ending up in Waukeegan, Ill. Both his parents had abortive show business careers, his mother as a radio singer, his father as a vaudeville comedian.

In 1952, Orbach won a singing contest for Northern Illinois high schools, and that summer he moved to Chicago and joined the Chevy Chase Summer Theater, where he appeared in a production of “Charley’s Aunt” and helped build sets. The theater also hosted a touring production of “Come On Up, Ring Twice,” written by and starring Mae West.

“The director handed me the keys to his ’47 Cadillac and told me to pick up Mae West,” Orbach told Newsday in 2003. “When the run was over, she tossed me a $100 bill. I was making $25 a week, so it was the most money I’d ever had.”

Orbach attended the University of Illinois, then transferred to Northwestern, where he studied acting while appearing in regional theaters during the summer. In 1955, Orbach dropped out of Northwestern and moved to New York, and almost immediately he landed an understudy’s position in “The Threepenny Opera,” the Off-Broadway revival of the Brecht and Weill musical at the Theater de Lys. He began taking leading roles as a vacation replacement and stayed with the production for three and a half years while studying acting with Lee Strasberg and others.

In 1960, Orbach took the part of the narrator, El Gallo, in “The Fantasticks,” which became the longest-running show in New York theater history. The critic Walter Kerr wrote in the Herald-Tribune that Orbach’s task was “to set a suitably fey tone without letting archness run away with him” and concluded that, “having an interesting face, a controlled voice and clear intelligence, Mr. Orbach is no doubt on his way.”

The following year, Orbach left “The Fantasticks” for “Carnival!” He starred as a shy puppeteer who uses his hand puppets to win the heart of an ingenue. The production won the 1961 New York Drama Critics Circle award for best musical.

Orbach had already had a film role, as a street gang leader in “Cop Hater” (1958), by Ed McBain. In 1963, after “Carnival!” closed, Orbach decided to try his luck in Hollywood. “I really wanted to be a serious film actor like Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift,” Orbach told People in 2000. “They’d say, ‘Your nose is too big, your eyes are too droopy. You’re no Tyrone Power.’ But because I could sing, I kept getting jobs in musicals.” The five months he spent looking for work in Hollywood he would later recall as “the low point in my life.”

Orbach next starred in a Chicago revival of “Carnival!”, an Off-Broadway revival of “The Cradle Will Rock,” and a series of touring musicals. In 1967,Orbach once again garnered critical huzzahs, starring in “Scuba Duba,” a tense comedy/drama in which he played a neurotic Jewish intellectual whose oversexed wife runs off with a black scuba diver. He left “Scuba Duba” to play the lead in “Promises, Promises,” the Tony-winning role that made his career. “Mr. Orbach has the kind of wrists that look as though they are about to lose their hands, and the kind of neck that seems to be on a nodding acquintanceship with his head,” wrote Clive Barnes. “He makes gangle a verb, because that is just what he does. He also sings most effectively, dances most occasionally, and acts with an engaging and perfectly controlled sense of desperation.”

“Promises, Promises” ran for 1,281 performances; Orbach left the production in late 1970.

He again tried Hollywood, this time as the lead in “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971), a critical and financial failure. Orbach knew something about his role as Kid Sally Palumbo, a small-time gangster. Some said it was based on the life of Joseph “Crazy Joey” Gallo, a mobster who was Orbach’s personal friend and who was reputed to have been the triggerman in the killing of Albert Anastasia, head of the notorious Murder, Inc. Gallo also at one point kept a pet lion to intimidate loan-sharking victims.

Gallo spent a decade in prison for extortion, during which he had become conversant with existentialist philosophy and literature. After being released in 1971, he lived in Greenwich Village and hung out with a glamorous theater crowd, including Orbach and his wife at the time, Marta. Marta, a former actress whom Orbach had met when the two were cast in “Threepenny Opera,” was also an occasional contributor to the Village Voice. She had agreed to collaborate with Gallo on a screenplay and possibly a book based on the gangster’s life.

In 1972, after sharing Champagne at the Copacabana with the Orbachs, Gallo took a limousine to Umberto’s Clam House, in Little Italy. There he was killed in a spectacular mob rubout while eating a bowl of shrimp, scungilli, and clams.

Orbach returned to Broadway and starred in the moderately successful comedy “6 Rms Riv Vu” and “Chicago,” another hit that ran for nearly 1,000 performances. His final major stage role was in “42nd Street,” which opened in 1980 and ran for nearly a decade, although Orbach left after two years.

Orbach had his first real success in movies in 1981 with “Prince of the City,” after which he was frequently in vited to play police roles. He became a familiar face to many as Jennifer Gray’s father in “Dirty Dancing” (1987) and had character roles in several other films.

Beginning in the 1980s, Orbach worked regularly in television, taking numerous guest roles in sit-coms and dramatic series, and also starring in miniseries. Orbach was nominated for an Emmy for a guest appearance on “Golden Girls” in 1990.

A recurring role in “Murder, She Wrote” led to the short-lived CBS series “The Law and Harry McGraw.”

In 1992, Orbach joined “Law and Order,” then entering its third season. He seemed to inhabit the role of hardboiled detective Lennie Briscoe so thoroughly that New York police frequently hailed him while he was shooting the series around the city. He liked the praise but was eager to separate himself from the role.

“Lennie’s tougher than I am, and he carries a gun,” Orbach told Newsday. “I’m not a recovering alcoholic, and both of my children are alive. Lennie’s into fast food; I’m very aware of nutrition.”

Jerome Bernard Orbach

Born October 20, 1935, at the Bronx; died Tuesday at Manhattan of prostate cancer; survived by his wife, Elaine Cancilla, and his sons, Anthony Nicholas and Christopher Ben.