Herb Edelman as an announcer for Armed Forces Radio, he enrolled in Brooklyn College as a theater student, but eventually dropped out. He later worked as a hotel manager and as a taxicab driver. One of his fares was director Mike Nichols, who in 1963 cast Edelman in his breakthrough Broadway role, as the bewildered telephone repairman in Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park". Edelman reprised his role in the 1967 film version (starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda). He appeared in the movie versions of Simon's "The Odd Couple" (1968) and "California Suite" (1978). He also appeared in an installment of
Jane Fonda Kael, in her "New Yorker" review of the film, noted of Fonda: "[She] has been a charming, witty nudie cutie in recent years and now gets a chance at an archetypal character. Fonda goes all the way with it, as screen actresses rarely do once they become stars. She doesn’t try to save some ladylike part of herself, the way even a good actress like Audrey Hepburn does, peeping at us from behind “vulgar” roles to assure us she’s not really like that. Fonda stands a good chance of personifying American tensions and dominating our movies in the seventies as