Michael Levin, an actor best known for playing the role of Jack Fenelli over the entire 13-year run of Ryan’s Hope, died on January 6 at a hospital in Westchester, New York. His son Jason Levin informed The Hollywood Reporter, who published a story late last night. He was 90 years old.

The iconic ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope aired from 1975 to 1989, and Levin made 1,074 appearances—including the first and last—according to IMDb. The show differentiated itself early on by focusing on blue-collar families, like the Irish-American Ryans who owned a tavern across from a hospital in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Levin’s character, the Italian-American journalist Jack Fenelli, eventually married the bar owner’s daughter, Mary Ryan, played by Kate Mulgrew. (But before the marriage, they “kept company”—quite the scandal for an old-school Catholic family in the mid-1970s.)

Mulgrew’s character was killed off in an accident in 1979 (dying in Jack’s arms!), but Mary did return “as a ghost,” as happens from time to time on soaps.

In 1999, “Jack and Mary” were listed as one of the 25 Greatest Love Stories in a special issue of Daytime TV magazine. Levin was also nominated for three consecutive Daytime Emmys. This clip hints at their fiery relationship. 

Born in Minneapolis, Levin studied acting after serving in the Navy. He went out to California to screen test (and also take classes alongside Jack Nicholson) before landing early work at Minneapolis’s influential Guthrie Theater when it opened in 1962. (His son told THR that he walked the boards with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.) He then left for New York City, making his Broadway debut in 1965 with The Royal Hunt of the Sun, written by Amadeus’s Peter Shaffer, working with Christopher Plummer and David Carradine. 

In 1970 he starred in the first Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real with Al Pacino, Susan Tyrrell, and Victor Buono. That same year he also appeared in Sam Shepard’s Operation Sidewinder (with music by The Holy Modal Rounders), and a production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan, co-starring Colleen Dewhurst and Priscilla Pointer. All three shows ran at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, directed by Jules Irving. (Of note: Irving and Pointer had three children, among them Amy Irving and legendary New York University film production professor David Irving.) 

Though Levin was a midwestern Jew, he landed a commercial gig as an Italian spokesman for Alitalia Airlines. He credited this commercial for getting him the audition for the Italian-American Jack Fenelli. (In a 1978 interview, he said that it was one of two offers he got after the spot aired, both Italian characters.) 

“I am very happy acting, and I am very happy when I am working. But that is only when I am working. I also find that about ninety percent of what is available for an actor isn’t all that good. I don’t like doing commercials, and I don’t like doing bad plays,” he said in 1978.

After his lengthy turn on Ryan’s Hope, Levin jumped to CBS and their long-running soap As The World Turns as a replacement for the role of John Eldridge, one of Lisa Miller’s eight husbands. He then went back to ABC for a small recurring role as a doctor on All My Children. He did other television with through the mid-1990s, including, as is the birthright of all New York actors, two appearances on Law & Order.