RICHARD CONTE

Richard Conte (born Nicholas Richard Conte) was an actor from the 1930s to the 1970s. He had a long, slow road to success! He was born in 1910, and for many years, he was stuck in low paying jobs. One of those was as a singing waiter, and that got him some acting jobs, and Elia Kazan and John Garfield discovered him and helped him get into The Neighborhood Playhouse. He made his Broadway debut at the age of 29, and had some other stage roles and appeared in a movie, "Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence", which was also Glenn Ford's first movie. He stayed on Broadway for a few years, but as World War II continued, he became much in demand in Hollywood, due to the lack of major stars who were away at war, and he usually played an Italian American (which he was). He had some better roles in the late 1940s, including Call Northside 777, but by the 1950s, he became a B-movie actor, no doubt because he was now in his forties, mostly in film noirs, again as Italians, often as gangsters. In the late 1960s, he relocated to Europe, where he also directed. He had one last great role, as Don Barzini in The Godfather in 1972. He returned to Europe and made a few more movies before passing away in 1975 at the age of 65.