Jerome Coopersmith Dies: ‘Hawaii Five-O’ Writer, Broadway Playwright Was 97
deadline.comJerome Coopersmith, who wrote more than 30 installments of the classic 1960s-70s police drama Hawaii Five-O and received a Tony Award nomination for his book for the 1965 Harold Prince-directed Sherlock Holmes musical Baker Street, died Friday in Rochester, NY.
He was 97. His family announced his death. After earning a Purple Heart at the Battle of the Bulge in 1945, Coopersmith also wrote, among other stage works, the first act of the 1966 three-part Mike Nichols-directed musical The Apple Tree, starring Barbara Harris and Alan Alda.
The musical was revived for Broadway in 2006 by the Roundabout Theatre Company in a production that starred Kristin Chenoweth, Brian D’Arcy James and Marc Kudisch.
But Coopersmith was most prolific as a television writer. From his early days in the late 1940s and early 1950s contributing to such series as The Gabby Hayes Show, Johnny Jupitor and the religion-themed Lamp Unto My Feet, Coopersmith wrote more than 100 episodes until his final credits in the late 1980s with Spenser: For Hire and A Man Called Hawk.
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