About Alan

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Alan Mandell is an accomplished theater and film actor, theater manager, stage director, and producer. He is considered a foremost interpreter and scholar of Samuel Beckett’s works. He was born “Albert” on December 27, 1927 to his parents Bella Grossman and Louis Mandell, a Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Het officially changed his name to “Alan” in 1968. After serving as the Artistic Director of Theater ’49 in Toronto in the early 1950s, he subsequently spent most of his working life in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.

Mandell became involved with the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop in 1954 while visiting his sister, and he helped the group’s co-founders Jules Irving and Herbert Blau transform the Actor’s Workshop into one of the first full-fledged regional theater companies in the United States. On November 19, 1957, the Workshop put on a historically significant performance of its production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in San Quentin Prison, which was later discussed in Martin Esslin’s influential Theatre of the Absurd (1961). Mandell, as Lucky, struck a chord with the prisoners, and he ended up co-founding the San Quentin Drama Workshop with inmate Rick Cluchey, who would go on to become an actor and playwright. During this period, Mandell also met his future wife, Elizabeth Heller. They got married in 1967 and had 2 children, and 3 grandchildren. Elizabeth died on June 16, 1997, at age 65.

When Irving and Blau were selected to run the Repertory Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York, they asked Mandell to join them in Manhattan as the company’s manager. Blau left the Repertory after only a year, but Irving and Mandell remained through 1973. In the mid-1970s, Mandell moved west and joined the Los Angeles Actors' Theatre, which would transform into the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1985. He served as a consulting director and actor, and he developed and oversaw the Poetry/Literary Series at the Center.

In addition to his time with these four major companies, Mandell worked on a wide range of seminal theatrical and film productions throughout his career, including the 1973 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire and J.C. Mitchell’s 2001 film, Hedwig and the Angry Inch.. Both he and Rick Cluchey collaborated directly with Beckett throughout the 1980s and continue to appear in productions of Beckett's plays.