The students’ work was so well received that Mr. Houseman and Ms. Harley, the drama division’s administrative director, formed the Acting Company, a professional troupe, in 1972, with the new graduates at its core. By 1973 the company was on Broadway with five plays in repertory, Mr. Schramm appearing in all of them.

He was often, as Mel Gussow put it in The New York Times in 1978, “the company’s resident old character man.” That year, at age 30, he was playing King Lear. Previously for the company, he had played an aging wanderer in Maxim Gorky’s “The Lower Depths,” the philosophical old doctor Chebutykin in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” and the father of one of the young lovers in Molière’s “Scapin.” After five years with the Acting Company, Mr. Schramm became a regular on regional stages as well as in New York theaters. A turning point in his career came in 1988, when he played the male lead in the Garson Kanin comedy “Born Yesterday” opposite Rebecca de Mornay at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. The production drew rave reviews.

“His portrayal is a true heir to Jackie Gleason: loud, blustery, swift, an ungrammatical ball of suet, as unaware of his arrogance as of his limitations,” Sylvie Drake wrote in a review in The Los Angeles Times. “In spite of it all, Schramm succeeds in making Brock remarkably appealing — a sort of disconnected large pussycat, with the roar and the timing of the lion that he’s not.”

The television industry took note.

“Because of those reviews, I landed in every casting office in town,” Mr. Schramm told that newspaper in 1989. “I was the flavor of the month.”

He had done little television before that — his main credit had been playing Robert S. McNamara in the 1983 mini-series “Kennedy” — but suddenly he was turning up in episodes of “Miami Vice,” “Wiseguy” and other shows.