Character actor known for villainous roles
Henry Silva, an actor who rose to prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s playing smooth-faced, rough-edged heavies in Hollywood dramas — notably the dope pedlar called “Mother” in A Hatful of Rain and a North Korean agent in The Manchurian Candidate, died Sept. 14 in Los Angeles. He was 95.
His son Scott Silva confirmed the death but did not provide an immediate cause.
In a career spanning five decades, Silva became one of the busiest character actors in Hollywood, with more than 130 credits in films and on television. He was of Puerto Rican heritage but, as he once quipped, was endowed with a face that allowed “great diversification.”
“I could play almost everything but a Swede — and I'm working on that,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1963.
Silva was unconventionally handsome, capable of conveying eerie menace or rugged masculinity with his poker face, close- set eyes, blade-like cheek bones and sinuous physicality. He received his breakthrough role on Broadway in 1955 as the well-tailored but malevolent narcotics pusher in A Hatful of Rain, a part he reprised onscreen in 1957.
In The Manchurian Candidate (1962), based on Richard Condon's novel about Cold War paranoia, Silva portrayed a communist agent. He poses as a manservant to an American vet
I COULD PLAY ALMOST EVERYTHING BUT A SWEDE — AND I'M WORKING ON THAT.
eran of the Korean War (Laurence Harvey) who has been brainwashed by communists into assassinating a U.S. presidential candidate.
Silva's other notable early films included Viva Zapata! (1952) as a Mexican peasant who confronts Marlon Brando's revolutionary title character; the Gregory Peck western The Bravados (1958) as an American Indian who belongs to a gang of murderous outlaws; and Green Mansions (1959) as a Venezuelan tribal chief's bad-seed son.
Henry Silva, the son of Puerto Rican parents, was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 23, 1926, and grew up in Spanish Harlem. He was about six months old when his father left the family. His mother was illiterate.
He quit school and left home in his mid-teens, working as a dishwasher and longshoreman, among other jobs, to save money for acting school.
Silva's marriages to Mary Ramus, actress Cindy Conroy (a former Miss Canada) and actress Ruth Earl, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce. Survivors include his sons, Michael Silva and Scott Silva, both of Los Angeles.