Correction Appended

Louis Nizer, the shrewd and voluble trial lawyer who made a long career of representing famous people in famous cases and whose autobiography, "My Life in Court," was a best seller, died yesterday at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 92 and lived in midtown Manhattan.

The cause was kidney failure, said Perry Galler, the managing partner in the New York-based law firm Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon, of which Mr. Nizer was the senior partner.

Mr. Nizer founded the firm with Louis Phillips, and colleagues said yesterday that he remained active, going in to his office almost every day, until 10 days before he died.

Mr. Nizer's wavy hair and near-classic profile adorned countless courthouses, board rooms and corridors of power as he talked his way to fame and fortune. In the course of his work as a trial lawyer, he made himself an authority on contract, copyright, libel, divorce, plagiarism and antitrust law, and on other kinds of law involving the entertainment world.

His roster of celebrity clients included Johnny Carson, Charlie Chaplin, Salvador Dali, Eddie Fisher, Alan Jay Lerner, Mae West, the basketball star Julius Erving and Spyros P. Skouros, once board chairman of 20th Century Fox films.

The tension of the courtroom and the fervor of the advocate pervaded his books, including "My Life in Court" (1962, Buccaneer Books) which made him nationally famous. It rose to the top of The Times's best-seller list and logged 72 weeks as a sales leader. One critic praised it as "entertaining and philosophically instructive, an unusual combination."

The book included stories of court cases that Mr. Nizer had won, including the famous libel action that the writer Quentin Reynolds, with Mr. Nizer as his lawyer, brought successfully against the columnist Westbrook Pegler. The account of that case served as the basis of the 1963 Broadway play "A Case of Libel."

Another of his books was "Implosion Conspiracy" (1972), a study of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage case. Its publication prompted the Rosenbergs' two sons to sue him. Accusations of defamation of character and invasion of privacy were eventually dismissed in 1977 by the United States Court of Appeals in Manhattan. A remaining copyright issue was later settled out of court.

Although Mr. Nizer's courtroom career spanned more than six decades, he once wrote: "The excitement has never diminished. Indeed it has grown. The challenge is ever new. The contest is ever intense. Surprise is ever present."

The challenge took many forms. Sometimes it lay in gaining the exoneration of an individual like John Henry Faulk, the CBS radio and television personality. In 1962, Mr. Nizer won for Mr. Faulk a $3.5 million libel judgment -- later reduced to $550,000 on appeal -- after an ultra-conservative publication had linked Mr. Faulk with a Communist conspiracy. That legal victory was widely credited with breaking the back of blacklisting in broadcasting.

Sometimes the challenge lay in working behind the scenes, advising clients like the Motion Picture Association of America, which Mr. Nizer served as general counsel.

He was born in London on Feb. 6, 1902, and brought to the United States as a child. Early in his life, as the son of the owner of a Brooklyn dry-cleaning establishment, he made his voice and name heard in his noisy new hometown. As a youth, he won a Government citation for his patriotic speeches during Liberty Loan drives in World War I. Fresh out of Columbia College, he twice won the Curtis Oratorical Prize at Columbia Law School, from which he graduated in 1924.

As a fledgling lawyer in 1925, he talked his way into the newspapers when he championed the interests of a group of Brooklyn merchants. It was in 1926 that he and Mr. Phillips set up a law partnership, which grew into the prestigious firm of Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon.

A combination of qualities brought Mr. Nizer his vast success. He was exuberantly competitive: "I enjoy the clash of ideas," he once said. On trans-Atlantic voyages in the 1930's, for lack of other realms to conquer, he passed the time winning shipboard table tennis tournaments.

He strongly identified with his clients' interests. He once wrote what he called "A Lawyer's Prayer," which began: "I would pray, O Lord, never to diminish my passion for a client's cause, for from it springs the flame which leaps across the jury box and sets fire to the conviction of the jurors."

He was a master at preparing and presenting legal arguments. He cut an earnest and authoritative figure, presenting arguments that were not memorized outright, but planned meticulously, during long hours at his office.

Much of what he spoke or wrote was garnished with sweeping declarations that would resound pleasingly in a high-ceilinged courtroom, even if they were actually composed, say, for a modest book review.

"Nowhere is the cupidity and nobility of man better demonstrated than in the judicial arena" was the sort of thing he was apt to say.

Mr. Nizer was also a master at bons mots about people. Presenting Sara Delano Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt's mother, at a banquet, he said: "A beautiful young lady is an act of nature. A beautiful old lady is a work of art. I introduce you to a work of art."

He told many tales of the courtroom. Speaking of his work on divorce cases, he once said: "I remember one occasion when I was cross-examining a lady, who was accused of infidelity, and after close questioning, she broke down and screamed: 'What you say isn't true. I have been faithful to my husband dozens of times."

Mr. Nizer's manifold gifts brought him a staggering variety of clients over the years, ranging from Igor Cassini to Gov. James A. Rhodes of Ohio to Occidental Oil to the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association to 85 percent of the producers and distributors of copyrighted film programs used on television.

Much of his legal work involved the film industry. He was a longtime executive secretary and lawyer for the New York Film Board of Trade, and at one time or another, he was retained by most member companies of the Motion Picture Association of America.

His last decade and a half of work ranged from a high-profile libel case, involving a resort in California, which was settled in the early 1980's, to a price-controls-violation case by the United States Government against a unit of Occidental Petroleum Corporation. Partners of his said yesterday that he won, last year, the his aspect of that case.

Mr. Nizer also continued to act as a mentor to other lawyers in his firm, and he was a regular contributor to journals on trial strategy and other aspects of litigation. Last month's issue of the journal Federal Litigation Guide Reporter has a lead article by Mr. Nizer titled "Finding and Selecting the Right Judge."

Not all of his books were well received. Mr. Nizer's 1966 book "The Jury Returns," about cases in which he had been involved, and his 1978 work, "Reflections Without Mirrors," were unloved by critics.

And his 1992 book, "Catspaw," (Carroll & Graf) was about legal work he did on behalf of a man who was repeatedly tried for a double murder that, Mr. Nizer wrote, he did not commit. A reviewer said he "orates with such abandon that impatient readers may lose sight of his subject."

In his spare time, Mr. Nizer was an enthusiastic golfer and painter for years and was active in a wide variety of community affairs. He was a friend and supporter of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and a leader of March of Dimes, United Jewish Appeal, and Federation of Jewish Philanthropies campaigns. The honors he received included a 1957 Yeshiva University award "for honoring the spiritual and cultural heritage of Judaism in America."

His other writings included the books "New Courts of Industry: Self-Regulation Under the Motion Picture Code" (1935, Ozer); "Thinking on Your Feet" (1940), about public speaking; "What to Do With Germany" (1944), and "Between You and Me" (1948), about jury trials and other subjects.

Mr. Nizer married Mildred Mantel Wollins in 1939; she died last year. He is survived by two stepchildren, Tony and Terry Wollins, both of Boca Raton, Fla., and several step-grandchildren and step-great-grandchilden.

Funeral services are to be held at noon on Sunday at Frank E. Campbell the Funeral Chapel, 1076 Madison Avenue, at 81st Street.

The obituary also omitted one publisher of Mr. Nizer's 1992 book, "Catspaw." While the book was republished by Carroll & Graf which still has it in print, the original publisher was Donald I. Fine.