Richard Conte
Richard Nicholas Peter Conte ( born March 24, 1910 in Jersey City, New Jersey, † April 15, 1975 in Los Angeles, California ) was an American film and theater actor and film director.
Life
Conte was the son of an Italian-American barber and spent in very humble circumstances of his childhood and youth. He therefore proposed as an adolescent with odd jobs, including truck driver, Wall Street clerk and singing waiter at a seaside resort in Connecticut.
Just by the job as a singing waiter, he became engaged in 1935 for the first time in a theater in New York City. Here he was discovered by Elia Kazan and John Garfield, who promoted the 25 -year-old from now on. Kazan helped Conte to a scholarship at the Neighborhood Playhouse, which completed this successfully. 1939 Conte was in Moon Over Mulberry Street made its debut on Broadway and was in the same year his film debut in the drama film Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence.
Conte was retired and had not therefore, like other actors to participate in the Second World War. In 1942, he received a long-term contract at 20th Century Fox and changed his first name from Nicholas to Richard. Just in time between 1943 and 1945 flourished his career; he usually embodied soldiers.
After the war he became predominantly roles in film noir dramas, such as in Joseph L. Mankiewicz 's blood enmity (1949 ) on the side of Edward G. Robinson, before he in the 50s, now independent, star of numerous B movies was. In 1965 he took over the role of Barabbas in The Greatest Story Ever Told, directed by George Stevens.
1968 Conte graduated its first and only work as a director. It was Operation Cross Eagles, a film which was made in cooperation with the U.S. Yugoslavia. He also played the lead role.
Contes last big role - his career developed in parallel with the crime films since the 1960s down - he should get 1972. In The Godfather, 1972, he played with Don Barzini to counterparties by Don Corleone ( Marlon Brando ). Also, Conte worked as an alternative for the role Brando talking.
Richard Conte private was married twice. He was married from 1943 to 1962 to actress Ruth Storey. The two have a son, Mark Conte, who has worked as an editor in the film industry today. After divorcing Storey married Conte 1973, a woman from the middle class, Shirlee Garner.
Richard Conte died two years later, at the age of 65, of a heart attack.