NEW YORK — F. Murray Abraham’s wife of 60 years, Kate Hannan Abraham, died three years ago after a long illness. “I didn’t want to change anything in our apartment,” Abraham, 86, said of his two-bedroom duplex in Manhattan.
“But our daughter kept saying, ‘You’ve got to do the house over.’ I suppose she thought it should be brought back to life. And she was right. But it was a while before I could get to that point.”
Abraham, who stars with Kristin Chenoweth in the musical adaptation of “The Queen of Versailles,” which just opened on Broadway, won an Academy Award in 1985 for his performance in the drama “Amadeus.” He also appeared in the movies “Scarface,” “Mighty Aphrodite” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” as well as the television series “Homeland,” for which he received an Emmy nomination. But most significantly, at least for his apartment, Abraham was a second season cast member of “The White Lotus.”
During the show’s extended shoot in Sicily, Abraham became close to actor Michael Imperioli, who played his son, and to Imperioli’s wife, Victoria, an interior designer. Echoing his daughter, Victoria Imperioli urged Abraham to redo the apartment, the family home since 1987.
“I said to him, ‘Let’s return your home to the time when everything was happy and everyone was in good health,’” Victoria Imperioli recalled. “It took me almost a year to convince him.”
Finally, Abraham assented. He had to go to Latvia for a few months to shoot a movie, and he told her to renovate his apartment while he was gone.
Living Room
When he returned to New York, Abraham had to stay in a hotel for a while as the renovation went on. He finally moved back home in September, and while he was pleased with the results — refinished floors, new paint on the walls, marble countertops, art deco decor — the place still isn’t finished. There are shelves and pictures to hang and pieces of furniture to pick out somewhere in between his eight performances per week.
All in good time. “Victoria said, ‘Now it’s up to you,’” Abraham said.
Abraham’s Oscar lives part-time in the maisonette, but the statuette is far more likely to be spotted on display at the bistro around the corner. Thanks to the restaurant’s seared foie gras, a dish for which the actor has a serious weakness, and the genial owner, he became a regular years ago and wanted to give as good as he got. “I think you should share an Oscar,” he said.
Abraham’s wife did all sorts of handiwork, including cross-stitching and needlepoint. There are many examples of her work at the couple’s weekend home upstate and in the apartment. “She used to cue me on many of my scripts — she would have them memorized before I did — and she would do needlepoint while we went over my lines,” Abraham said.
Exercise Room and Den
Abraham’s acting jobs have taken him all over the world, and the exercise room and den contain many of his treasures.
“When I started making movies abroad I started bringing pieces back home and this is one of them,” Abraham said of a prayer rug from Morocco.
Abraham and his wife moved from Los Angeles to New York in 1965 and got an apartment on 52nd Street and 8th Avenue just as the holiday season was wrapping up. “I like crowds, but my wife didn’t, so I walked to Times Square to look around and I picked up this,” he said, pointing to a well-flattened horn that had been used for New Year’s Eve.
Bedroom
“Victoria wanted to make the bedroom into a cave for me — a man cave,” Abraham said. To that end, Imperioli covered the walls in golden velvet. “No one does that anymore, but Victoria did it for me,” he added. “It’s really neat.”
When his wife was alive, Abraham kept the myriad nude paintings in his collection, all by painter Don Perlis, in the small office he owns on the ground floor of the building. “Don loves women, and I love women, too, and these are very good paintings by the way,” he said. Now some have migrated home.
His wife preferred Perlis’ other pieces in the apartment — the portraits of her husband at work, including a rendering of him as lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn in the Broadway production of “Angels in America.”
Stairwell
The success of “Amadeus” raised Abraham’s profile and his salary, enabling him to move his family — which included two children — from Brooklyn to Manhattan. “This apartment was my wife’s choice,” Abraham said. “I wanted to live in a penthouse, but she didn’t like that kind of light, and she was right.”
He added: “I have trees and an old church to look at. And I have a sense of privacy that I never expected to have in a place so low to the ground.”
An ivory darning egg that once belonged to the grandmother of Abraham’s wife is affixed to the banister in the stairwell. It’s a tribute to family and fancy work.
Sitting Room
Abraham is a great admirer of Marlon Brando and went to his estate sale, where he met the actor’s son Christian. Abraham sat with him during the proceedings and left with quite the haul, including several side tables, a bookcase, a few small figurines and two lamps, one seriously dinged.
“I wonder if Brando hauled off and knocked it,” Abraham said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.