Salvatore "Robert" Loggia ( , ; January 3, 1930 – December 4, 2015) was an American actor. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Jagged Edge (1985) and won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor for Big (1988).
In a career spanning over sixty years, Loggia performed in many films, including The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), three Pink Panther films, An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Scarface (1983), Prizzi's Honor (1985), Oliver & Company (1988), Innocent Blood (1992), Independence Day (1996), Lost Highway (1997), Return to Me (2000), and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (2012). He also appeared on television series including the Walt Disney limited series, The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca (starring role-1958), Mancuso, FBI (in which he starred-1989–1990), Malcolm in the Middle (2001), The Sopranos (2004), Men of a Certain Age (2011), and was also the star of the 1966–67 NBC martial arts / action series, T.H.E. Cat.
Early life and education
Loggia was born in Staten Island, New York, on January 3, 1930, to Biagio Loggia, a shoemaker born in Palma di Montechiaro, Province of Agrigento, Sicily, and Elena Blandino, a homemaker born in Vittoria, Province of Ragusa, Sicily. He grew up in the Little Italy neighborhood, where the family spoke Italian at home. He graduated from New Dorp High School before taking courses at Wagner College where he joined the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity. In 1951, he earned a degree in journalism from University of Missouri. He later studied acting with Alvina Krause at Northwestern University.
After serving in the United States Army as a reporter for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service in the Caribbean, he married Marjorie Sloan in 1954 and began a long career at the Actors Studio, studying under Stella Adler.
Career
At age 25, he made his debut on Broadway in The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955.
Although Loggia made his first film, Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), in an uncredited appearance, it was not until he was cast as a New Mexico lawman Elfego Baca, two years later, that he made a breakthrough in Hollywood. Loggia was a radio and TV anchor on the Southern Command Network in the Panama Canal Zone, and he came to prominence playing a real-life sheriff in The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca, a series of Walt Disney TV shows.
He later starred as the proverbial cat-burglar-turned-good circus artist Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat in a short-lived detective series called T.H.E. Cat, first broadcast in 1966. At first, T.H.E. Cat appeared to be a success, Loggia said: "We're drawing about a 30 per cent share of the audience, which NBC considers fine for a new show with a new star." After NBC cancelled the series when viewing figures failed to deliver, Loggia went into a mid-life crisis—a "Dante-esque descent into the inferno", as he called it later. For six years his career foundered, and his marriage fell apart. Restless and unnerved, constantly riddled with self-doubt, a chance meeting with Audrey O'Brien was his saving grace. She helped him out of the crisis, and they later married. Despite playing Frank Carver on the CBS soap opera The Secret Storm in 1972, he took a new course when he decided to begin a career in directing.
He also carried on acting and amassed many television credits in a variety of roles, including appearances on Overland Trail, Target: The Corruptors!, The Untouchables, The Eleventh Hour, Breaking Point, Combat!, Custer, Columbo, Ellery Queen, The High Chaparral, Gunsmoke, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Big Valley, The Wild Wild West, Rawhide, Little House on the Prairie, The Rockford Files, Starsky & Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Magnum, P.I., Quincy, M.E., Kojak, Hawaii Five-0, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Falcon Crest, Frasier, The Sopranos, Monk, and Oliver Stone's miniseries Wild Palms.
The director Blake Edwards often cast Loggia in his films in minor or supporting roles. These included Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) and other Pink Panther sequels, and S.O.B. (1981), which was a satire about Hollywood.
In 1983, Loggia played Frank Lopez, a drug dealer who was one of the main supporting characters and antagonists in the film Scarface, which is often considered a Hollywood classic film.
Loggia also acted in several widely acclaimed films such as An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Prizzi's Honor (1985), and Independence Day (1996). Other films starring Loggia include Over The Top (1987), Necessary Roughness (1991), and Return to Me (2000).