TONY LO BIANCO
(19 October 1936 - 11 June 2024)
First a theatre actor who then gravitated to the cinema, Tony Lo Bianco, who has died from prostate cancer at the age of 87, was usually cast as a villain. It may have been his looks that led to his being stereotyped, although his acting was that of a master player, for he could always breathe life into any stock character. After Broadway he became part of the American season of crime films that appeared from the 1970s and thus it became the day of the badman. For Lo Bianco it meant films like The Honeymoon Killers, The Seven-Ups, The French Connection, and then City Heat, Boiling Point and Mafia! He also played criminals in many popular TV series.
Anthony Lo Bianco was born to a first-generation Italian-American family in Brooklyn, New York, grandson of Sicilian immigrants. His father was a cab driver, his mother a housewife. While attending a vocational school in Brooklyn, and developing an interest in plays, his teacher encouraged him to join the Dramatic Workshop. In 1963 he founded the Triangle Theatre and was its artistic director for six years working with lighting designer Jules Fisher, playwright Jason Miller and actor Roy Scheider. He got work as an understudy and then had supporting roles in Broadway productions, eventually starring in Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun. In 1965 Lo Bianco made his film debut in Doris Wishman’s sexploitationer The Sex Perils of Paulette, but it was another five years before real success came with The Honeymoon Killers. Leonard Kastle wrote and directed and Lo Bianco starred as a conman who seduces an overweight nurse into killing single women. Based on a true story, the film had been started by Martin Scorsese and Donald Volkman, but both were fired. It was a hit and became a cult movie beloved by the likes of François Truffaut. Lo Bianco then appeared in William Friedkin’s The French Connection with his friend Roy Scheider. Sidney Lumet’s Serpico with Al Pacino, about the life of a New York cop, gave Lo Bianco a small, uncredited role. Next came the noirish The Seven-Ups with Roy Scheider, then Goldenrod (aka Glory Days), in which he played an ex-rodeo champ, the sci-fi thriller God Told Me To and the Italian crime movie Merciless Man, with Maud Adams.
More crime for Lo Bianco came in F.I.S.T. (1978) directed by Norman Jewison, with Sylvester Stallone as a warehouse worker fighting the labour unions in Cleveland, with Rod Steiger and Peter Boyle. For a change of theme, Lo Bianco played one of two brothers in Robert Mulligan’s Bloodbrothers, labourers in an Italian immigrant family, who has problems with his son (Richard Gere). Walter Newman’s screenplay was nominated for an Oscar. Richard Benjamin’s City Heat was a crime comedy written by Blake Edwards and starring Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood. John Sayles’ City of Hope found him as a corrupt property developer whose son turns to crime to pay his debts. Crime and money were also the themes of Boiling Point, with Wesley Snipes and Dennis Hopper. Even in Oliver Stone’s all-star Nixon, Bianco had the part of a gangster known to Nixon in Cuba.
He was in the legal thriller The Juror and the Godfather spoof Mafia! (aka Jane Austen’s Mafia!) which apparently also satirised Forrest Gump, The English Patient and Il Postino. Lo Bianco was also in a mixture of genres such as action, gay comedy, science fiction horror, JFK’s assassination and even more crime movies. His last film was Somewhere in Queens in 2022. He only directed one film himself, the slasher movie Too Scared to Scream (aka The Doorman) in 1984 with Mike Connors and Anne Archer, and he directed on TV. He was in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth as Quintillius, and played Rocky Marciano in a TV biopic of the boxer (Marciano), being a former Golden Gloves boxer himself.
Among the awards he received was an Emmy for Hizzoner!, a play about the New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, an Obie for Yanks-3, Detroit-0 Top of the Seventh and an Outer Critics Circle Award for A View from the Bridge for which he also received a Tony nomination. In addition, he was honoured with many Italian State and Community awards. He was first married to Dora Landey (1964-1984) and they had three daughters, Miriamne, Nina and Anna. He then wed Elizabeth Fitzpatrick (2002-2008) and later Alyse Muldoon from 2015 until his death.
MICHAEL DARVELL