In a career that spanned five decades, he became one of Hollywood's busiest character actors, with more than 130 film and television credits.
Henry Silva, an actor who rose to fame in the 1950s and early 1960s playing smooth-faced, rough-faced heavies in Hollywood dramas, most notably the drug dealer named “Mother” in “A Hatful of Rain” and a North Korean agent in “The Manchurian Candidate,” died on September 14 in Los Angeles. He was 95 years old.
His son Scott Silva confirmed the death but did not provide an immediate cause.
In a career that spanned five decades, Silva became one of Hollywood's busiest character actors, with more than 130 film and television credits. He was of Hispanic and Sicilian ancestry but, as he once quipped, was endowed with a face that allowed for "great diversification."
"I could play almost anything but a Swede, and I'm working on it," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1963.
Silva was extraordinarily handsome, capable of conveying creepy menace or rugged masculinity with his poker face, set eyes, bladed cheekbones, and sinuous physique. He received his breakout role on Broadway in 1955 as the well-adjusted but malevolent narcotics dealer in "A Hatful of Rain," a role he reprised on screen in 1957.
In "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962), based on Richard Condon's novel about Cold War paranoia, Silva played a communist agent. He poses as a servant of an American Korean War veteran (Laurence Harvey) who has been brainwashed by communists into assassinating a United States presidential candidate.
“The Manchurian Candidate,” also starring Frank Sinatra, flopped at the box office on its initial release, but is now considered a tense classic. Critic Peter Travers wrote in People magazine of the film's 1988 re-release that Silva achieves "a villainy high in the low that hasn't been equaled since."
Other notable early films by Silva include "Viva Zapata!" (1952) as a Mexican peasant who takes on Marlon Brando's revolutionary title character; Gregory Peck's western “The Bravados” (1958) as an American Indian who belongs to a gang of murderous outlaws; and "Green Mansions" (1959) as the evil-minded son of a Venezuelan tribal chief.
In a change of pace, Silva played one of the stepbrothers in the Jerry Lewis comedy "Cinderfella" and was part of Sinatra's gang of casino robbers "Rat Pack" in "Ocean's 11" (both 1960).
Silva said that he admired Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield and that he longed to play their kind of tough, street-smart male leads. He got the chance to play it in "Johnny Cool" (1963). His portrayal of a Sicilian-born gangster who hides his murderous instincts under a sleek, dapper appearance did not initially win over audiences or critics.
But "Johnny Cool" has drawn a devoted following over the years. Among his devotees was director Jim Jarmusch, who cast Silva as a cartoon-obsessed mob kingpin in "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" (1999). "Henry's face is almost like a mask," Jarmusch told the Chicago Tribune, "but things that blink can be very interesting."
Opportunities for him as a leading man were limited in Hollywood, and Silva took an extended hiatus to work in Europe, where he appeared in films like "The Return of Mr. Moto" (1965) as the Japanese detective hero and won top awards.
He told the Chicago Sun-Times that mobsters and other criminals often praised his work. "They say, 'My God, where did you learn to play with us?' I say, 'I lived with 'us.' I grew up with 'us' in New York. I used to know the guys who used to run all the areas, the prostitution rings. He used to shine his shoes. They were saying, 'Child, come here. I want you to shine my shoes, I'll break your head”.
Henry Silva, the son of Puerto Rican parents, was born in Brooklyn on September 23, 1926, and grew up in Spanish Harlem. He was about six months old when his father abandoned the family. His mother was illiterate. Silva was a shy student, often scared in elementary school because he barely understood English until he was 8 years old.
He found a much-needed release in movies, particularly the “Andy Hardy” film series starring Mickey Rooney about an all-American teenager. “It was about families, something I never had,” Silva told the Los Angeles Times. He dropped out of school and left home in his mid-teens, working as a dishwasher and stevedore, among other jobs, to save money for acting school.
"I spent six years knocking on doors and hearing 'No' before I got a job as an extra on a TV show for $5," he recalled to the Tribune. He enrolled in the Actors Studio workshop, where he evolved Michael V. Gazzo's harrowing “A Hatful of Rain”. One of the first serious drug addiction dramas, it centered on a young married war veteran (Ben Gazzara) struggling to kick his narcotics habit.
Silva's marriages to Mary Ramus, actress Cindy Conroy (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 from Los Angeles.
On television, Silva had a memorable turn in the 1960s crime drama "The Untouchables" as a ruthless mob enforcer. He also became a mainstay in action movies of the 1980s and 1990s, including "Above the Law" with Steven Seagal and "Dick Tracy" (as Influence, the casino owner), and played a boxing spectator. in director Steven Soderbergh's breakout 2001 film. a reboot of “Ocean’s Eleven.”
“I see a lot of actors who play heavies, but they always play the same heavies,” he told the Tribune in 2000 when asked about his stamina as a screen baddie. “I have a roll of seven-minute clips from my movies, and none of the guys are the same. I don't always go to the same place, because that would be boring. I read the page and it tells me who the character is. I don't interfere in the page, I let it affect me, but I'm not playing it safe either.
