He grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan, although that may conjure a different image to the reader of 2020 than it did almost a century ago.

“There was a farm across the street,” Mr. Handman said in the documentary. “A real farm. That’s true. I had such a happy childhood that I never wanted to leave Inwood.”

Mr. Handman graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1938 and the City College of New York in 1943, later earning a master’s degree in speech pathology from Teachers College at Columbia University. After graduating from City College he enlisted in the Coast Guard, serving on an icebreaker that was assigned to knock out a German weather station in the Arctic. The mission was a success, and a number of Germans were taken prisoner.

“When the Germans came aboard the ship, I didn’t feel like saluting them,” Mr. Handman, who was Jewish, said in the documentary, but his commander ordered him to follow protocol and do so.

While at sea he would sometimes entertain his shipmates with skits, and the experience led him to think about acting once the war ended. He applied to the Neighborhood Playhouse, Sanford Meisner’s theater school, and studied there from 1946 to 1948.

He wanted to act, but Mr. Meisner saw him as a director and in 1949 suggested he lead a summer theater in the Adirondacks where some Neighborhood Playhouse students were in repertory. Mr. Handman was reluctant, but Barbara Ann Schlein, whom he would marry the next year, urged him to try it.

“I found myself, my calling, that summer,” Mr. Handman told Mr. Gerard in an interview for the biography.