Frank Puglia

MINI BIO:

Sharp-featured, hawk-like, Italian-born actor with dark hair, a stern player who looked hard-put to raise a smile in most of his roles as bad guys of sundry nationalities. Equally serious as chiefs of police and the occasional priest, he only rarely turned to comedy, and even played a Japanese diplomat in Blood on the Sun. He had come to America at 13, already experienced in his native Sicily as a member of a travelling light opera group. A year later, he had joined an Italian theatre company in New York's Bowery area and begun a lifetime of acting. D.W. Griffith brought him to Hollywood to play the "good" brother in Orphans of the Storm, but he didn't really settle until the early 1930s, working steadily in exotic roles and only easing up when he passed 65. Just before his death, Puglia described himself as a "lucky nobody." Most buffs, though, wouldn't agree.