With his future at stake, actor Steven Hill clung to Shabbos

Photos:  AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo, Family archives

How much more can be written about Steven Hill, the famous Torah-observant TV and film actor who tenaciously clung to his principles after becoming frum in the early 1960s? The story is well-known: There were the early years of glitter and glitz and the later years of fame and kavod before his passing in 2016 at age 94. But a recently discovered cache of letters reveals something else: the darkness, brokenness, and loneliness of a man who’d been at the top of the world, who had sacrificed his career and his family for a Torah life — as he clutched onto Shabbos for sheer survival.

My friend Sam Friedland discovered the letters as he was going through the papers of his mother, Mrs. Rhoda Friedland, after her passing a little more than a year ago. There was an extensive correspondence, for instance, between his parents and the two most recent Lubavitcher Rebbes. But one particular cache of letters took Sam for a long trip down memory lane: It was a correspondence from 1965, between Steven Hill and his own father, Mr. Everett Friedland.

Suddenly, Sam was back in the spring of 1963, just short of his eighth birthday, playing in his front yard. Across the street, he noticed a stranger, which was a rarity for the small-town Monsey of Sam’s youth. Ever a friendly and inquisitive kid, Sam crossed the dirt path dividing his small house from that across the way and asked the stranger his name, to which he replied, “Steven.” His curiosity piqued, Sam continued with his questions:

“What do you do?”

“I’m an actor,” the stranger replied. Little Sam was sufficiently impressed with that response to grab the stranger by the hand, exclaiming, “You’ve got to come and meet my dad!” As it happened, Everett Friedland was sitting on his front porch as Sam ran up with Steven in tow and excitedly told his father that the man from across the street was an actor.

Though the actor whom Sammy excitedly escorted to meet his father was not quite a household name yet, he was one of America’s most respected character actors. And much rarer, especially for those days, he was a fairly recent baal teshuvah.