Actor and comedian Leslie Jordan, who died at 67 in a car accident, won an Emmy for his role in the hit American television comedy series Will and Grace (2001-06), as acerbic socialite Beverley Leslie, the odd couple’s titular neighbor.
His career, however, reached even greater heights during the Covid-19 pandemic, when his daily Instagram videos drew nearly 6 million followers. With his diminutive build (he was 4-foot-11), southern accent, and campy yet comfortable homosexuality, Jordan was a mainstream version of Truman Capote, only smaller, southerner, and funnier. He talked easily about his favorite subject – himself – like a family member illuminating the loneliness of confinement.
By the time he started Will and Grace, Jordan had been talking about him 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 television acting debut on 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.
His first billed movie role came in the comedy Ski Patrol (1990), in which he played the patrol’s Danny DeVito-in-Taxi style controller. He’s become a busy guest star in comedies and dramas, with a recurring role on Reasonable Doubts and a regular role on the political sitcom Hearts Afire. He stepped away 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 shows and variety shows.
In 1996, he starred in Del Shores’ play Sordid Lives in Los Angeles. It was, according to Variety, proof that “nothing succeeds like excess.” Jordan played Earl “Brother Boy” Ingram, an institutionalized transvestite because he believes he is Tammy Wynetteboth in the play and in the 2000 film version. The latter, who also starred Olivia Newton JohnBeau Bridges and Bonnie Bedelia, became a TV series in 2008 and sparked a sequel in 2017, A Very Sordid Marriage.
Jordan told stories from many angles of a gay man’s struggles and successes in an often hostile or incomprehensible world. He wrote a play, Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel, and starred in it as the storyteller, a gay man who died of a drug overdose in Atlanta; it became a 2001 movie.
In 2004, he filmed Like a Dog on Linoleum, a one-man show in which he was accompanied by a gospel choir. His 2008 memoir My Trip Down the Pink Carpet became another one-man show, released as a film in 2010.
He has often credited his acting success to the capacity for amusement he developed as a survival mechanism as a child.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he was the eldest of three children and grew up in Chattanooga, where his father, Allen Jordan, a strict disciplinarian, was an Air Force Reserve officer. His mother, Peggy Ann (née Griffin), was loving, but confused by her son.
One summer, he was sent to an all-boys camp to toughen up; every other participant received trophies for their accomplishments, and just when his father had finally given up, Leslie was named top all-around camper because he could make everyone laugh.
When Leslie was 11, her father died in a plane crash. After Brainerd High School, he studied acting at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and considered a career as a jockey, but becoming lighter and stronger would have been a challenge. He decided to pursue his acting career.
In 1982, he chose Los Angeles over New York (“so I could fail with a tan”), arriving with money sewn into his jacket by his mother. He started acting classes and soon got into commercials. In eight months, he had eight national television commercials, including playing the elevator operator at Hamburger Hell in a Taco Bell commercial.
The residual money has had its effect. Jordan developed alcohol and drug problems and was arrested six times for driving under the influence. “If you want to get sober, try 27 days in the Los Angeles County Men’s Jail,” he said, although it would be years before he was sober. During one of his cell stints, he was moved from his cell and his bunk taken over by actor Robert Downey Jr.
In 2014 he traveled to Britain, to participate in Celebrity Big Brother and to play a character called Buck A Roo in two episodes of the sitcom Benidorm (2015). He was in the TV series Sky Living the Dream (2017-19), set in a trailer park in Florida, and fulfilled every actor’s dream as Benjamin Franklin in The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time (2018 ).
Jordan turned his Instagram greeting, How Y’All Doing?, into the title of a memoir published in 2021, when he was back in Los Angeles with another sitcom, Call Me Kat. He died on his way to the taping of the show, when he lost control of his car.
He is survived by his sister Jana.
Leslie Jordan, actor and writer, born April 29, 1955; died on October 24, 2022
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