Mordecai Lawner
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Mordecai Lawner (June 9, 1928 - November 27, 2014, New York City) was an American actor, playwright, and theater educator with a career spanning more than half a century on stage and screen. A City College of New York graduate and U.S. Army veteran stationed in West Germany during the Korean War era, Lawner built his professional life around both performance and teaching. He was a longtime faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, the High School of Performing Arts, and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City. His wife was actress Eugenia Thornton, with whom he often performed, and he continued to appear in regional theater productions well into his eighties, including a run of Tuesdays with Morrie in Saratoga Springs.
On Broadway, Lawner appeared in productions including a George C. Scott-directed revival of Death of a Salesman (1995). In film, he is perhaps best remembered for playing the father of Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in Annie Hall (1977). Additional screen credits include Raw Deal (1986) and A Fish in the Bathtub (1999).
In Ghostbusters II (1989), Lawner played the Man with a Ticket, a brief but memorable character who appears in the very opening of the film (Chapter 01: Start). His scene shows a man arguing with a meter maid who has just given him a parking ticket near Dana Barrett's apartment building. He tells her to keep the ticket because he is not paying it, throws it to the ground in protest, points at her, then turns away. The scene is one of the establishing New York street vignettes in the opening montage that precedes Dana's arrival at the building. He died of heart failure at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on November 27, 2014, at the age of 86.