Henry Silva, known for many tough-guy roles, dies at 95
Henry Silva, a prolific character actor best known for playing villains and tough guys in “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Ocean’s Eleven” and other films, has died at age 95.
Silva’s son Scott Silva told Variety that his father died Wednesday of natural causes at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. Silva was a New York City native who dropped out of school as a teenager, in the 1940s. He was accepted the following decade into the Actors Studio, where fellow students included Shelley Winters and Ben Gazzara. He went on to have a long and busy career in film and television, with hundreds of credits before retiring from acting in 2001.
He had a breakthrough role on stage and screen in the 1950s as a drug dealer in “A Hatful of Rain” and supporting parts in two of Frank Sinatra’s best known movies, both from the early 1960s: “Ocean’s Eleven,” the Las Vegas heist film that was a showcase for Sinatra, Dean Martin and other “Rat Pack” members; and “The Manchurian Candidate,” the Cold War thriller about brainwashing and the attempted assassination of a presidential nominee that starred Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh.
Silva was also seen on such television series as “Wagon Train” and “The F.B.I.,” and in such films as Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy,” Jerry Lewis’ “Cinderfella” and “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,” in which he played a mobster in the 1999 release directed by one of his admirers, Jim Jarmusch.
Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Between Riverside and Crazy.”
The Oscar-, Emmy-, and Grammy Awardwinner will join actors Stephen Mckinley Henderson, Elizabeth Canavan, Liza Colónzayas, Victor Almanzar, Michael Rispoli and Rosal Colón – who all premiered the work off-broadway in 2015.
The play centers on a cantankerous ex-cop who owns a piece of real estate on New York City’s Upper West Side and makes it a refuge for the hard-luck orphans who have become his surrogate family. Common will play the excop’s newly paroled son, Junior.
“Between Riverside and Crazy” will begin previews Nov. 30 and will officially open on Dec. 19 at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater.