Actor Vincent Schiavelli dies

[Yuliya]

No one posted it and I kept meaning but forgot.

Vincent Schiavelli, 57, died of lung cancer at his home in Polizzi Generosa, Italy. He played Leon Pulver, the press agent, in Steele on the Air and Dr. Kaufmann in Tomorrow Never Dies. His non-PB movies include Ghost and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, though I must admit I don't remember him in the latter (maybe because I don't remember the latter very well.)

The article in German can be found here

[sparklingblue]

Oh no. How sad.

[Ace]

I saw this last week, so sad. Too young to die and such a marvelous talented character actor who appeared in tons of films and TV shows and nearly always stole every scene he was in.

Ace

[Ace]

Full obit from the Times Herald:

December 29 2005

ALISON KERR

Vincent Schiavelli, actor; born November 10, 1948; died December 26, 2005

WITH his droopy eyes, hooked nose, freakish height (he was six foot five and a half) and mad scientist-style hair, Vincent Schiavelli, the Italian-American actor who died on Boxing Day at the age of 57, made an impression in many films – even when he made only the most fleeting of appearances. Like all great character actors, he added colour and his offbeat, melancholy looks were a sort of shorthand for the type of personality he was portraying. Such was his popularity that in 1997 he was named one of America's best character actors by Vanity Fair.

Among the tens of movies he popped up in are six films by the renowned director Milos Forman. These included the classic 1970s drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), in which he played one of the mental patients whose lives are shaken up by the arrival of Jack Nicholson on the ward, and the smash hit Amadeus (1984), in which he played Salieri's valet.

Schiavelli's gallery of nut-cases and creeps also includes the demented subway spook in the blockbuster romantic fantasy Ghost (1990), the grey-faced organ grinder who fires machine guns and kidnaps infants for his boss, the Penguin, in Batman Returns (1992), and Dr Kaufman, who tries to bump off Teri Hatcher's character, in the 1997 James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies.
For many movie fans, he will always be Mr Vargas, the biology teacher, in Cameron Crowe's cult teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). And who could forget the scene in the Ron Howard comedy Night Shift (also 1982) when Schiavelli's deadpan delivery man reacts to Henry Winkler's complaint about there being mustard in his sandwich by wiping the offending condiment off on Winkler's door?

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Schiavelli studied acting at New York University's School of the Arts. He began his career in the theatre in the late 1960s, and made his film debut in Forman's Taking Off (1971), in which he played a hippie who, in one memorable scene, gives a group of parents of teenage runaways a demonstration on how to smoke a joint.

The following year, he embarked on a long parallel career on TV with a role as a minor character, Peter Panama, in the comedy The Corner Bar. This was the first regular gay character to appear on American television.

Schiavelli went on to appear in most of the main American TV shows of the next three and a half decades, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cagney and Lacey and Charlie's Angels.

In the long-running sitcom Taxi, he worked with comedian Andy Kaufman, in whose life story, Forman's Man On The Moon, he would feature in 1999. He also appeared in Moonlighting, the hugely successful, mid-1980s, mystery/ romantic comedy in which his first wife, Allyce Beasley (who played the exuberant Miss DiPesto) was a regular.

In addition to his acting career, Schiavelli, whose grandfather had worked as chef for an Italian baron before he settled in the States, was an accomplished food writer who won a journalism award for his newspaper and magazine contributions.

He also wrote several cookbooks, including Many Beautiful Things, a compilation of recipes and anecdotes about his visits to Polizzi Generosa, the Sicilian hill-top town that was his grandparents' birthplace and which, a few years ago, became his final home.


A wonderful piece on Schiavelli and character actors in the NY Times:

NY Times: Faces Only a Mother, and the Movies, Could Love


By PETER EDIDIN
Published: January 1, 2006

NO one ever mistook Vincent Schiavelli for anyone else. Mr. Schiavelli, who died last week at 57, had one of the most memorable faces in movies, and his mournful, comic, threatening, endearing visage graced dozens of them.

He may be best known as the high school science teacher in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" who took his students to the local morgue.

The film historian Robert Sklar, speaking in a telephone interview, said that when he heard an obituary for Mr. Schiavelli on the radio last week, "I kept seeing the morgue scene from 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High' in my mind. You could hear the voice and see the face."

Mr. Schiavelli's career is a reminder that film, however adept it has become at bending or inventing reality, is still ruled by the close-up - what the film theorist Bela Balazs called the "language of the face."

This goes back to the very beginning. In 1896, the 15-second film "The Kiss," made with two New York stage actors, was a national sensation. The first history of the movie business, published in 1926, asserted that the development of cinema since "The Kiss" consisted of little beyond the invention of new ways to get to the "close-up, fade-out clinch."

The kissing lovers, the weeping widow or the scowling gunslinger - it is the face and the expression it wears that signals to audiences that something has happened. They are the keys to the meaning of a film moment, and to entering it emotionally.

Mostly, of course, movies offer beautiful faces and construct fantasies around them. But other, more idiosyncratic images of humanity have always been present as well, and with them a more expansive vision of what it is to be human. Mr. Schiavelli was just one of those images.

Elisha Cook Jr. was another. When he played a killer, as he did in "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Big Sleep," his blank, infantile features, dead eyes and strangled voice made him memorably creepy.

Wallace Shawn is still another. Short, balding, plump and usually perplexed, Mr. Shawn embodies the stubborn sanity of the oft-disappointed Everyman. In "My Dinner With Andre," while the elegant André Gregory speculates grandly about the meaning of life, Mr. Shawn holds tightly to the hope of waking up each day to his girlfriend and a decent cup of coffee.

Actors can make their odd physiognomies work for them in part because audiences feel compelled to interpret unusual faces, said Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and the author of "Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty."

"Cognitively," she said in a phone interview, "we learn to process faces by creating a face bank. Odd faces actually push our cognitive boundaries."

"Because we can't fit them into a mold," she added, "we have freer range to imagine who they are, so they can embody more complexity. Their features draw us in because we want to make sense of them."

In fact, the power of a distinctive face often renders actors who possess them paradoxically anonymous. Filmgoers are frequently unable to remember their names, even if they can describe their roles.

There is an old argument in film circles, which contends that film as high art died with the advent of sound. The voice, they say, supplanted the primary language of the face - what Balazs called the "spiritual dimension of facial expression alone."

Indeed, two of the most famous lines of movie dialogue ever written make this point.

"We didn't need dialogue," says Norma Desmond, the silent film diva in "Sunset Boulevard." "We had faces."

But the movies still have faces, wonderful ones. And they still speak.