Tony Lo Bianco, actor who played tough guys and a famed mayor, dies at 87 (2024)

He had prostate cancer, said his wife, Alyse Lo Bianco.

A former Golden Gloves fighter who grew up near the Brooklyn waterfront, Mr. Lo Bianco was attending vocational school, daydreaming through his classes, when one of his teachers encouraged him to enter a declamation contest. He won, and went on to launch a six-decade acting career in which he appeared in Broadway plays and more than 100 movies and television shows, typically in macho parts where he flashed a sly smile — along with a gun — while operating on the wrong side of the law.

For his breakthrough role, in the acclaimed crime film “The Honeymoon Killers” (1970), he oozed what New York Times journalist William Grimes described as “a thrillingly disgusting smarminess,” adopting a Spanish accent to play a con man who targets single women while going on a murderous rampage with his partner (Shirley Stoler).

The next year, he appeared in “The French Connection” as Sal Boca, who uses his Brooklyn diner as a front while helping a criminal syndicate smuggle heroin from overseas. Starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as a pair of morally questionable police detectives, the modestly budgeted movie became an unexpected sensation, winning five Oscars, including best picture and best director for William Friedkin.

“‘The French Connection’ was my second film,” Mr. Lo Bianco told the website Pop Entertainment, exaggerating slightly. (He had bit parts in a few earlier movies.) “I was always fortunate to get a job. I was fortunate to have been from Brooklyn and to have surroundings that made me understand the human condition. That’s the story of my life, actually: watching and learning and pulling from history.”

Mr. Lo Bianco continued to play crime figures in movies including “The Seven-Ups” (1973), which reunited him with Scheider; “F.I.S.T.” (1978), starring Sylvester Stallone; “City Heat” (1984), with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds; and “Nixon” (1995), as a gangster acquaintance of the titular president (Anthony Hopkins).

He found a wider range of roles on the New York stage, winning an Obie Award in 1976 for starring in Jonathan Reynolds’s one-act comedy “Yanks 3 Detroit 0 Top of the Seventh,” as an aging big league pitcher attempting a comeback.

The play, which was directed by Alan Arkin and ran for months at the American Place Theatre, allowed the sturdy, 5-foot-10 Mr. Lo Bianco to show off some of his athletic abilities. He had been an all-star first baseman while in high school, earning a tryout with the Dodgers at a time when the franchise was still based in Brooklyn (according to the Times, “he suffered a nosebleed the instant he walked onto the infield”), and continued to play ball for years, occasionally declining acting roles that interfered with his softball games in Central Park.

While the play was in rehearsals, he pitched a perfect game in softball with his left hand. He threw with his opposite hand onstage, noting that the character was supposed to be a right-hander. “I like the idea of keeping with the script,” he explained.

Mr. Lo Bianco started out in the theater, making his Broadway debut in 1964 with a small role in Arthur Miller’s wartime drama “Incident at Vichy.” The next year, he was offered a supporting part in an off-Broadway revival of Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” He turned it down and missed the production, by his account, after declaring that he should play the lead — a role that brought him a Tony nomination nearly two decades later, when he played it on Broadway in 1983.

Reviewing the production for the Times, theater critic Frank Rich had his reservations about the play but was overwhelmed by Mr. Lo Bianco’s performance as Eddie Carbone, a Brooklyn longshoreman with a destructive love for his 17-year-old niece. “Volatile one moment, totally withdrawn the next, the actor travels within a cloud of impenetrable turbulence that visibly buffets all around him,” Rich wrote.

The production was shaped in part by the memories Mr. Lo Bianco had of his Brooklyn childhood, down to the pattern of linoleum he recommended for the set.

“Growing up in that neighborhood, it gets to be in your blood,” he said. “You know a lot of the things people do and how they think and act.”

The second of three sons, Anthony Lo Bianco was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 19, 1936. His grandparents had emigrated from Sicily, and his mother looked after the home while his father worked as a cabbie.

Mr. Lo Bianco studied at the Dramatic Workshop, a New York acting school, and in 1963 he co-founded the Triangle Theater, where he produced and directed plays at the Church of the Holy Trinity on the Upper East Side.

Before long, he was also acting on television. Mr. Lo Bianco guest-starred on the NBC crime drama “Police Story” (he directed a few episodes as well), played a Roman officer in Franco Zeffirelli’s all-star miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth” (1977) and drew on his teenage boxing experience to play Rocky Marciano, the undefeated heavyweight champion, in the TV movie “Marciano” (1979).

His first two marriages, to Dora Landey and Elizabeth Natwick, ended in divorce. In 2015, he married Alyse Best Muldoon, a writer and health counselor.

In addition to his third wife, survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Yummy Helmes and Nina Landey; two stepchildren, Tristan Hamilton and Lanah Fitzgerald; a brother; and 10 grandchildren. Another daughter from his first marriage, Anna Lo Bianco, died in 2006.

Mr. Lo Bianco remained a prolific screen actor, appearing in movies including “Bloodbrothers” (1978) and, most recently, “Somewhere in Queens” (2022), in which he played Ray Romano’s father. But late in his career, he was perhaps most closely associated with a stage role, that of La Guardia, the firebrand three-term mayor who led New York from 1934 through the end of 1945.

Mr. Lo Bianco, who got in character by putting on weight and raising the pitch of his voice, first portrayed La Guardia in a one-man show, Paul Shyre’s “Hizzoner!,” that ran in Albany, N.Y., in 1984 and ran on Broadway for two difficult weeks in 1989. (Mr. Lo Bianco had to shuffle around the stage after breaking his foot during previews. He reportedly slid too fast down a fire pole, during a scene that reflected the mayor’s abiding love of the Fire Department.)

The play, which imagined La Guardia’s last day in office, was extensively reworked by Mr. Lo Bianco, who wrote and directed a subsequent version called “The Little Flower.” He took the show on the road, performing at universities and community colleges as well as cities in Russia and Italy, and stored parts of the set in his home, at times keeping the desk and vintage telephone in the living room of his Manhattan apartment.

Interviewed by the Times in 2015, he called the show “a vehicle to express my concerns for the public and the political mess that we’re in, which we continue to be in I think, and try to relate answers to failure.”

“The beauty of it is it appeals to both sides of the aisle,” he added. “Democrats and Republicans both believe I’m talking to them.”