Rise to Fame
He spent more than a decade in sidekick roles before The Larry Sanders Show gave him Hank Kingsley. Garry Shandling wanted comic relief. What Tambor delivered was a man so desperate to be liked he couldn't recognize condescension when it was aimed directly at him. Four Emmy nominations, zero wins. Arrested Development came next, then Transparent, where he played Maura Pfefferman and won back-to-back Emmys in 2015 and 2016. It took him roughly forty years to reach the top of the call sheet.
In the Spotlight
Transparent made him the first actor to win an Emmy for playing a transgender character, back-to-back in 2015 and 2016. Then his former assistant Van Barnes and cast member Trace Lysette both made harassment allegations in late 2017. Amazon investigated and fired him in February 2018. The show wrapped as a Tambor-less musical. He denied deliberate wrongdoing but acknowledged being 'volatile and ill-tempered.' Jessica Walter separately told the New York Times he'd verbally assaulted her on the Arrested Development set. His career since has been minimal.
Side Notes
He left a doctoral program at Wayne State in the late 1960s to join Richard Chamberlain's production of Richard II at Seattle Rep. He's reportedly the first actor to drop the C-word on American TV, improvising it during a Larry Sanders Show rehearsal in 1993 and watching Garry Shandling keep it in. He also succeeded Kelsey Grammer in La Cage aux Folles on Broadway in 2010. Someone with that career arc was never just a television sidekick, even when television was all anyone could see.