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Leslie Jordan obituary

The actor and comedian Leslie Jordan, who has died aged 67 in a car accident, won an Emmy for his role in the hit US television comedy series Will and Grace (2001-06), as the acerbic socialite Beverley Leslie, the titular odd couple’s neighbour.

His career reached even greater heights, however, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when his daily videos on Instagram attracted nearly 6 million followers. With his diminutive frame (he was 4ft 11in), southern accent, and campy but comfortable gayness, Jordan was a mass-market version of Truman Capote, only smaller, more southern and funnier. He talked easily about his favourite subject – himself – like a family member brightening the loneliness of lockdown.

By the time he started Will and Grace, Jordan had been telling people about himself for years, directly as well as through the characters he played – his one-act musical Hysterical Blindness and Other Southern Tragedies That Have Plagued My Life Thus Far ran off-Broadway for seven months in 1993.

He made his acting debut on television in the Lee Majors action series The Fall Guy in 1986, and in 1989 a guest role in Candice Bergen’s Murphy Brown caught people’s attention. 

Leslie Jordan, second right, in a 2003 episode of Will and Grace. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images© Provided by The Guardian

His first billed film role came in the comedy Ski Patrol (1990), in which he played the patrol’s Danny DeVito-in-Taxi-style controller. He became a busy guest star in comedies and dramas, with a recurring role in Reasonable Doubts and a regular part in the political sitcom Hearts Afire. He branched off from comedy in episodes of American Horror Story and Boston Legal, and in 12 Miles of Bad Road reunited with the producers of Hearts Afire. He was also popular on talk and variety shows.

In 1996 he starred in Del Shores’s play Sordid Lives in Los Angeles. It was, according to Variety, proof that “nothing succeeds like excess”. Jordan played Earl “Brother Boy” Ingram, a cross-dresser institutionalised because he believes he is Tammy Wynette, in both the play and the 2000 film version. The latter, which also starred Olivia Newton-John, Beau Bridges and Bonnie Bedelia, became a TV series in 2008 and sparked a 2017 sequel, A Very Sordid Wedding.

Jordan spun stories recounting from many angles the struggles and successes of a gay man in an often hostile or uncomprehending world. He wrote a play, Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel, and starred in it as the Storyteller, a gay man who has died of a drug overdose in Atlanta; it became a 2001 film.

Reference:The Guardian:  Michael Carlson