The American actor Tony Lo Bianco, who has died of most cancers aged 87, specialised in hoods and heavies, usually performed with an unusual twinkle within the eye that prompt he was in on some grim personal joke. “I suppose I’ll should do a nun subsequent,” he mentioned after a run of such roles.
There was by no means any doubt that he meant enterprise. “Should you encountered Tony in a abandoned alley at midnight, you’d be inclined at hand him your pockets earlier than he requested for it,” wrote a US newspaper in 1978.
Together with his conspiratorial method, imposing stare and tractor-tyre eyebrows, Lo Bianco fitted naturally into the 70s pattern for gritty crime thrillers. Because the mobster Sal Boca in The French Connection (1971), he’s pursued by the New York cop “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) for his position in shopping for an enormous cargo of heroin. The Seven-Ups (1973) reunited Lo Bianco together with his pal and French Connection co-star Roy Scheider, and gave him an even bigger chew of the cherry, this time as a shady police informer in a camel-hair coat and sharp hat.
His first main position had already proved he was extra eccentric than any rent-a-thug. In The Honeymoon Killers (1970), which was impressed by actual occasions, he performed the silver-tongued Spanish con-artist Ray Fernandez, who embarks on a homicide spree with a lonely lady whom he tries to swindle. Martin Scorsese was sacked because the movie’s director for dragging his ft, however the finish consequence (with the composer and librettist Leonard Kastle stepping in after Scorsese’s exit) has a scorching, unwholesome B-movie tang, due in no small half to Lo Bianco’s oleaginous presence and his rapport with Shirley Stoler as his partner-in-crime.
Most of his best display screen work was carried out within the 70s. He was a police detective investigating seemingly random murders within the supernatural horror God Instructed Me To, and an injured, suicidal former rodeo rider elevating his younger sons in Glory Days, AKA Goldenrod (each 1976).
Bloodbrothers (1978), through which Lo Bianco was all gruffness and gristle as an Italian-American development employee pressuring his recalcitrant son (Richard Gere) to observe in his footsteps, was particularly pricey to him. “It’s very near my coronary heart,” he mentioned. “I do know the characters like I do know my household.”
In the identical yr, he was a surprisingly genial crime boss reverse Sylvester Stallone within the union drama F.I.S.T. “Certain, I might have performed [him] as another Italian thug,” he mirrored. “However does the world actually need one other overbearing, obnoxious, apparent slob to dismiss or look down on as some form of buffoon?”
Lo Bianco attributed his facility as an actor partly to his upbringing. “Coming from an Italian household in an enormous metropolis, my feelings had been all the time near the floor, able to reside life absolutely, to present, to snicker and cry with out holding again, with out pressure.”
He was born in New York Metropolis to Carmelo, a taxi driver, and Sally (nee Blando). One in every of his academics at William E Grady highschool prompt he give performing a go, although his early passions had been largely sporting ones. As a youngster, he tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and was additionally a Golden Gloves welterweight boxer. “I suppose you’d say I used to be a borderline delinquent. It was the 50s, Elvis time, leather-based jackets, a time for being robust.”
Years later, he would step again into the ring to play the boxer Rocky Marciano within the tv biopic Marciano (1979). He returned to the identical story, once more for TV, in Rocky Marciano (1999), this time because the gangster-turned-promoter Frankie Carbo reverse Jon Favreau because the prizefighter.
Lo Bianco studied performing on the Dramatic Workshop in Manhattan within the late 50s, and based the Weekend Theater there with the intention to achieve expertise. “I constructed the units, the stage, and put within the lighting. I bought it going.” He did the identical in 1963 with the Triangle Theater, the place he additionally served as inventive director. It was right here that he first met Scheider.
He collected quite a few credit on tv, together with a recurring position between 1971 and 1973 as a health care provider within the long-running cleaning soap opera Love of Life, and on stage: in 1975, he gained an Obie (an award for an off-Broadway efficiency) for his portrayal of a fading baseball star in Yanks-3 Detroit-0, Prime of the Seventh. He additionally gained a Tony for taking part in the tormented longshoreman Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge in 1983.
Showing within the Italian caper Imply Frank and Loopy Tony (1973) instantly after his success in The French Connection, Lo Bianco gave the impression to be spoofing his personal picture when it was nonetheless in its infancy: he performed a none-too-bright criminal who idolises a legendary gangster (Lee Van Cleef). However the actor re-asserted his authority on tv within the anthology sequence Police Story (1973-76). He was one among solely a handful of solid members who appeared in multiple episode. Much more unusually, he was on the correct aspect of the regulation this time.
In Franco Zeffirelli’s mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977), he was Quintillius, who advises Pontius Pilate, performed by Rod Steiger. A yr later, additionally on tv, he starred in The Final Tenant as a person coping with the rising wants of his senile, irascible father, performed by the performing guru Lee Strasberg. Within the 80s he gained plaudits for a TV adaptation of Paul Shyre’s play Hizzoner!, through which he starred because the New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia. This spawned a number of spin-offs, together with La Guardia and The Little Flower, written by Lo Bianco and carried out by him the world over initially of this century.
Notable later roles embody a mafia boss within the lighthearted, 30s-set Clint Eastwood/Burt Reynolds automobile Metropolis Warmth (1984), a corrupt property developer in John Sayles’s ensemble drama Metropolis of Hope (1991), the ivory-haired mobster Johnny Roselli in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), and yet one more intimidating gangster in The Juror (1996), with Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin.
Like Robert De Niro, for whom he was generally mistaken, it appeared there was nowhere left to go however comedy after taking part in so many crooks. Having parodied himself on the very begin of his movie profession, Lo Bianco did so once more in Mafia! (1998), also called Jane Austen’s Mafia!, a send-up from among the group behind the Airplane! and Bare Gun spoof sequence.
Although he directed to acclaim on stage, he made just one movie, the slasher film Too Scared to Scream (1984). His last image was Someplace in Queens (2022), starring and directed by Ray Romano, through which Lo Bianco performed the primary character’s standoffish father.
He’s survived by his third spouse, Alyse (nee Muldoon), a author, whom he married in 2015, two daughters, Yummy and Nina, from his first marriage, to the actor Dora Landey (Anna, a 3rd daughter from that marriage, died in 2006), a brother, John, and 6 grandchildren. Each his earlier marriages – the second was to Elizabeth Natwick – resulted in divorce.
