Bridgeport-Born Richard Belzer, Detective Munch On Law & Order, Dies

Creativity often comes from pain. Richard Belzer channeled his childhood misery in Bridgeport into making fans laugh and cry on a variety of platforms: stage, screen, television and his own talk show where he interviewed many of his idols. Belzer died on Sunday at his home in France. He was 78.

His long-portrayed role of dark-glassed and dark-humored Detective John Munch featured a stony brilliance.

As Detective Munch, Mr. Belzer was brainy but hard-boiled, cynical but sensitive. He wore sunglasses at night and listened to the horror stories of rape victims in stony silence. He was the kind of cop who made casual references to Friedrich Nietzsche and the novelist Elmore Leonard. He spoke in quips; when accused of being a dirty old man, he responded: “Who are you calling old?”

In the 1960s Belzer worked in the newsroom of the Bridgeport Post, predecessor to the Connecticut Post, where he fancied a career of serious writing. Instead, he was heavy into serious drugs, something that dogged him for decades.

“Our mother didn’t know how to love her sons appropriately,” Belzer told People magazine in 1993. “She always had some rationale for hitting us. My kitchen was the toughest room I ever worked. I had to make my mom laugh or I’d get my ass kicked.”

Eventually, the blend of pain and humor was recognized.

It was that East Coast cool with a pinch of dark humor that led Homicide’s creator, director Barry Levinson, to cast Belzer as the stinging detective. “I heard him on the Howard Stern show, and he wasn’t just telling jokes. He was smart, and he had an attitude,” says Levinson. “I wondered if I could take that and put it into the Munch character. A lot of comics who go into acting kind of do it winking at the camera. But Richard’s in there doing it as an actor.”

I met Belzer in 1986 when I was an administrative aide to Mayor Tom Bucci. He stopped into City Hall for a visit. I was pressed into writing a proclamation declaring Richard Belzer Day. With trepidation, I showed Belzer the proclamation and a line declaring “Whereas, Richard Belzer has a wit so sharp he can shave with it …”

Said a deadpan Belzer: “That’s the best you could come up with? It’s not even original.”

Richard Belzer was certainly a Bridgeport original.