Although the supporting actor Robert Loggia, who has died aged 85 after suffering from Alzheimer’s, played more than 200 roles in films, on TV and on stage in a career lasting more than six decades, he will be remembered, above all, for his portrayals of tough and gruff mafia bosses and assorted gangsters, mostly Italian or Hispanic. These included Frank Lopez, the ruthless Cuban refugee turned cocaine smuggler in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983); a member of an extended mafia family in John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor (1985); a vicious criminal in David Lynch’s neo-noir Lost Highway (1997) and the intimidating old-time mobster Feech La Manna in the TV series The Sopranos (2004).
Despite Loggia’s protestations that “an actor is an impersonator; he plays many different roles. If you played the same role all the time, God that’d be a boring career,” he could not escape typecasting. “It’s true I’ve been offered these gangster roles ever since the beginning of my career. No matter what you look like or what education you have, you’re always typecast. That’s just how it goes in Hollywood.”
However, bucking the trend were Loggia’s only Oscar-nominated part, a short screen-stealing performance as the cynical, foul-mouthed but tender-hearted private eye in the court-room thriller Jagged Edge (1985) and, completely against type, the benevolent far-sighted toy company owner in Big (1988) who performs Heart and Soul and Chopsticks in a dancing duet with Tom Hanks, a boy in a man’s body, on a foot-operated electronic keyboard.
He was born Salvatore Loggia on Staten Island, New York, the son of Sicilian immigrants, Beniamino Loggia, a shoemaker, and his wife Elena (nee Blandino). As a child, he became familiar with Little Italy, Manhattan, which helped him later as an actor to master the vernacular of the district. After graduating from New Dorp high school, New York, the well-built Loggia gained a football scholarship to Wagner college, a private liberal arts school where he did some acting. He then transferred to the University of Missouri, where he graduated in journalism in 1951. Following US army service, he began classes at the celebrated Stella Adler Studio of Acting.
In 1956, Loggia made two significant debuts: off-Broadway in Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm, in the part of the drug addict played by Frank Sinatra in the film of the same year, and on screen himself in Somebody Up There Likes Me. In the latter, he started as he was to continue, as a hoodlum pressurising boxer Paul Newman to take a dive.
This was followed by his corrupt union boss in The Garment Jungle (1957). Loggia then landed the title role as the real-life western gunman in Walt Disney’s TV miniseries The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca (1958). In contrast, he played the cynical army captain Solyony in the Actors Studio Broadway production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1964), directed by Lee Strasberg, reprising the role in the 1966 film version. But Loggia’s film career ground to a virtual halt after playing Joseph to Dorothy McGuire’s Virgin Mary in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), one of the many actors who would like to forget they were in the epic.
Nevertheless, he maintained a high profile by constant TV work in many hit series, even directing some episodes of Quincy, Magnum and Hart to Hart, as well as appearing in several TV movies – playing an Israeli general in the theatrically released Raid on Entebbe (1976) and Sadat to Ingrid Bergman’s Golda Meir in A Woman Called Golda (1982).
Meanwhile, his film career had shakily got back on track thanks to the director Blake Edwards, who cast him as a French Connection crook threatening the accident-prone Inspector Clouseau in three unnecessary Pink Panther sequels, Revenge of … (1978), Trail of … (1982) and Curse of … (1983). Edwards also gave Loggia parts in S.O.B. (1981) as a seen-it-all Hollywood lawyer, and in That’s Life (1986) as an alcoholic priest.
But it was his role in Scarface that gave his career a new lease of life. In De Palma’s violent update of Howard Hawks’s classic 1932 gangster movie, Loggia is repulsively riveting as the smarmy Miami drug-dealer and ex-mentor of Tony Montana (Al Pacino). He is dispatched by a sidekick of Tony’s after begging for his life at gunpoint. It set the pattern for many of his roles to come such as the mafia don in Prizzi’s Honor, and as a mobster who becomes a vampire in Innocent Blood (1992). On TV, Loggia was brilliantly abhorrent as the leader of the religious sect “Church of Synthiotics”, who exits singing “Hello, I must be going”, in the miniseries Wild Palms (1993), and as the elderly bakery-owning gangster in The Sopranos, who irritates Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) by repeatedly talking of “in my day”, until he, too, is eliminated.
In Lost Highway, Loggia demonstrates the apotheosis of road rage when he pulls over and beats a man half to death while delivering a monologue of bile for tailgating him. Apparently, 10 years earlier, Loggia showed up for an audition to play the role of the villainous Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. After waiting around for three hours, he was told that Dennis Hopper had already been cast. This prompted Loggia to launch an expletive-laden rant at Lynch. It remained in the director’s mind all that time when it came to casting Lost Highway.
Loggia is survived by Audrey O’Brien, a business executive, whom he married 1982, and by three children, Tracy, John and Kristina, all in show business, from his first marriage, to Marjorie Sloan, which ended in divorce.
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