This experienced stage actor possesses an expressive, pock-marked face and a well-modulated speaking voice. Prior to Abraham's bravura, Oscar-winning performance as Salieri in Milos Forman's acclaimed film "Amadeus" (1984), he had appeared on TV and in film mostly in bit-parts and small roles and was probably most often recognized by the public as a talking leaf from Fruit of the Loom TV commercials. His most memorable pre-"Amadeus" screen role was as the drug lord hung from a helicopter as Al Pacino looks on in Brian De Palma's remake of "Scarface" (1983). After "Amadeus", the actor appeared as a monk in "The Name of the Rose" (1986), had an unbilled role as D.A. Abe Weiss in the prodigious misfire "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (1990), and was Wolf Sr., a hunter of the homeless, in the urban fantasy film "Surviving the Game" (1994). Abraham later played gangsters like Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, in "Mobsters" (1991), and Al Capone in "Dillinger and Capone" (1995). He was also seen as the leader of the Greek Chorus in Woody Allen's "Mighty Aphrodite" (1995). His stage work of the same era included the vaunted Mike Nichols' production of "Waiting for Godot" (1988) opposite Robin Williams and Steve Martin.

For all of his talent, Abraham seemed to be typecast in Machiavellian roles or as the spokesman of "culture". Salieri, the all-too-human composer in the age of Mozart, ostensibly set the pattern for the actor's TV appearances, which have echoed that role's high-toned, sometimes operatic cadence. He has hosted numerous televised Metropolitan Opera presentations, narrated several science specials and played Pope Julius II in the 1991 TNT miniseries "A Season of Giants". A professor of theater at Brooklyn College, Abraham has also portrayed academics in a fine TV adaptation of Vaclav Havel's play "Largo Desolato" (PBS, 1990) and in a version of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (NBC, 1993). In 1994, he joined the cast of "Angels in America", Tony Kushner's adulated Broadway play, appointed with the difficult task of replacing Ron Leibman, playing one of history's most famous witch hunters, Roy Cohn, undergoing a sort of manic decay. The role was a plum for Abraham: Cohn opened the instant classic with a tour-de-force monologue. Abraham reportedly played the character with insidious intelligence rather than his predecessor's whirling vitriol.

Abraham returned to the big screen portraying Russian dictator Josef Stalin in the Australian black comedy "Children of the Revolution" (1996; released in the USA in 1997) and was alongside Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam in the thriller "Mimic" (1997).

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