Daniel Rosenberg; Actor, Lawyer

Daniel C. Rosenberg, a television actor and prominent lawyer who won multimillion-dollar and precedent-setting verdicts for “Cagney and Lacey” co-producer Mace Neufeld and others, has died. He was 44.

Rosenberg died Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of complications from surgery, his family said.

The son of film producer Frank P. Rosenberg, whose motion pictures included “One-Eyed Jacks” starring Marlon Brando, Rosenberg always loved the entertainment business. But he majored in philosophy at UC Berkeley and then went on to the university’s Boalt Hall School of Law, where he earned the prestigious post of editor of the law review.

In his final year, however, he later confessed, he regularly skipped lectures on estates and trusts to take an acting clas “I have to act,” Rosenberg, whose stage name was Daniel Schaefer, told The Times in 1985 when he was cast as a divorce lawyer--the only time he lost a case--on television’s “Divorce Court.”

“This is not a hobby for me,” he said. “I don’t do this for relaxation or therapy. I just do it because I have to. . . . If someone made me make a choice, I’d have to give up being a lawyer.”

He also appeared as a criminal lawyer in “Criminal Court,” another syndicated program using actual court records as inspiration for fictional cases, and on the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.” He was also in the low-budget feature film “Revival House.”

But the occasional actor, who saw “great similarities between litigation and acting,” was no slouch as a lawyer. In 1989, he won a landmark case on behalf of television producer John Mantley, who produced “Gunsmoke” and “How the West Was Won.” The decision enabled other producers, directors and actors to challenge studios when they felt they had been unfairly cut out of a project.

The million-dollar-plus verdict for Mantley against Warner Bros. over an aborted science fiction film was upheld in appellate court in 1991. Rosenberg explained that Mantley won fraud damages not for money due under a contract but “on the value of the literary rights that he was induced to transfer to Warner in the belief that Warner would use Mantley’s services.”

The jury verdict Rosenberg won for Neufeld in 1990 forced co-producer Barney Rosenzwig and Orion Pictures Corp. to share profits with Neufeld from the 1982-88 run of “Cagney & Lacey.”

Known for his ability to express himself before a jury, Rosenberg joined the Santa Monica entertainment law firm of Stein & Kahan in 1981 and made partner in less than four years.

“I try to be as unconservative in my work in the courtroom as I am on the stage,” he said. “I try to use my acting ability all the time.”

As for his lucrative legal pay, while struggling alter-ego Daniel Schaefer waited for acting roles, Rosenberg said: “It’s a lot less anxiety-inducing than waiting on tables.”

Rosenberg is survived by his parents, Frank P. and Maryanne Rosenberg, and two brothers, film editor John Rosenberg and psychiatrist Dr. James E. Rosenberg.

The family said services will be private.