Laura Adler, an Emmy-nominated casting director and former administrator of Casting Society, died Thursday in Los Angeles following a brief illness. She was 65.
A Casting Society rep confirmed the news to Deadline.
Adler was set to receive the Casting Society’s Rosalie Joseph Humanitarian Award at the 41st Artios Awards on February 26 in Los Angeles. The award is given for outstanding contributions to humanitarian causes that have in turn supported the casting community, a distinction that the group said reflected Adler’s life’s work.
She earned a 2003 Emmy nomination for casting the NBC drama American Dreams and also was casting director for such series as Better Off Ted, Dream On and The Goode Family, among others.
Born on July 1, 1960, in New York City, Adler got her start in the early 1980s as a technician on The Pee-wee Herman Show, a West Hollywood stage show in which Paul Reubens showcased his nerdy, bowtied character years before Pee-wee’s Playhouse debuted. She also was a production assistant on the 1981 ABC telefilm A Long Way Home, starring Timothy Hutton, Brenda Vaccaro and Rosanna Arquette.
Later that decade, she pivoted to film and TV casting, working as an associate to such acclaimed casting directors as Mark Saks, Barbara Claman and Ted Hann. Her credits in that capacity range from the early-’90s features Defending Your Life and Prelude to a Kiss to the mid-’90s HBO comedy Dream On and late-2000s TBS sitcom My Boys. She also was a casting associate on American Dreams in 2002-03 before being upped to casting director.
In 2005, Adler became an original member of the steering committee that fought to secure pension and health benefits for casting professionals — an achievement that reshaped the industry. In 2014, she was hired as Casting Society’s Administrator, a position in which she would spend the next decade serving and supporting the global casting community with dedication and compassion. She retired from the role in 2024.
Her father was Jerry Adler, a veteran actor known for playing Hesh Rabkin on The Sopranos, Fire Chief Sidney Feinberg on Rescue Me and Howard Lyman on The Good Wife. He died in August at 96.
Laura Adler is survived by her sisters Alisa Adler, a talent agent at Paradigm; Emily Adler, a writer; and Amy Adler; and her nephew Joe Adler.