Portrayals in Media
A dramatic, controversial man in life, Cohn inspired many dramatic fictional portrayals after his death. Probably the most famous is his fictionalized role in Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, in which Cohn is portrayed as a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite who is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he lies dying of AIDS. In the initial Broadway production, the role was created by Ron Liebman; in the 2010 Off-Broadway revival by the Signature Theatre Company in Manhattan, the role was reprised by Frank Wood; in the HBO miniseries version of Kushner's play, Cohn was played by Al Pacino. Cohn is also a character in Kushner's one-act play, G. David Schine in Hell.
Cohn has also been portrayed by James Woods in the 1992 biopic Citizen Cohn, by Joe Pantoliano in Robert Kennedy and His Times, and by George Wyner in Tail Gunner Joe.
Cohn is portrayed by actor David Moreland in the X-Files episode "Travelers", in which an elderly former FBI agent speaks to Agent Fox Mulder about the early years of the McCarthy era and the beginning of the X-Files.
In the early 1990s Cohn was also one of two subjects of Ron Vawter's one man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, with Cohn's part written by Gary Indiana.
Kurt Vonnegut included a fictionalized character named Roy M. Cohn in his 1979 novel Jailbird. Vonnegut used Cohn with his verbal permission, promising in a January 1979 telephone call to "do him no harm and to present him as an appallingly effective attorney for either the prosecution or the defense of anyone," according to the prologue of the novel.
Roy Cohn is mentioned in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire".
The nasal voice of the unnamed but recurring character Blue-Haired Lawyer on The Simpsons, often retained by Mr. Burns or acting as the prosecutor, is based on that of Roy Cohn. A mock Paul Harvey radio broadcast in The Simpsons episode "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" reports "that little boy that nobody liked grew up to be... Roy Cohn. And now you know the rest of the story." In "Thirty Minutes over Tokyo", another episode of The Simpsons, money management guru Chuck Garabedian explains that he got his suit cheap "because Roy Cohn died in it."
Roy Cohn appears as a character in the novel Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon (Pantheon Books, 2007).
Cohn is briefly mentioned in Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as one of protagonist Stanley Konigsberg's classmates at the Horace Mann School. In the world of the novel, titular character Joe Kavalier performed at Cohn's bar mitzvah as the magician 'The Amazing Cavalieri'.
In the 2012 comic novel Nick & Jake, by Tad Richards and Jonathan Richards, Cohn and his partner G. David Schine come to Paris, where Cohn tries to make a citizen's arrest of protagonist Nick Carraway (the narrator of The Great Gatsby, a quarter century later.
During the creation of the 'Names Project' AIDS-memorial quilt, a square was anonymously added which carried the legend: 'Roy Cohn: Bully, Coward, Victim'.
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Famous quotes containing the words portrayals and/or media:
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