Tony Lo Bianco, actor from “French Connection”, has died at the age of 87

Tony Lo Bianco, an actor who played villains in films including “The French Connection” and “The Honeymoon Killers” and whose stage career earned him excellent reviews for an Arthur Miller tragedy and an Obie Award for a baseball drama, died Tuesday at his home in Poolesville, Maryland. He was 87.

The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife Alyse Lo Bianco.

Mr. Lo Bianco made a vivid impression in “The Honeymoon Killers” (1970), a low-budget black-and-white film based on a true story that became a cult classic. With a thick Spanish accent and serious sideburns, he played Raymond Fernandez, a con man who courted, married and murdered lonely women to fund their bank accounts, passing off his real-life lover (Shirley Stoler) as his sister. Britain’s The Guardian newspaper called the film the cinema’s first “super-realistic depiction of the banality of evil.”

A writer for United Press International once called Lo Bianco a “born philanderer” because of his dark hair, bushy eyebrows and strong features. In “The French Connection” (1971), moviegoers saw him as the owner of a modest Brooklyn restaurant, Sal and Angie’s, who dressed like a fool and drove a car with European plates earned thanks to international drug money. In “The Seven-Ups” (1973), he was an undertaker at one of the Mafia’s favorite funeral homes.

But at heart, Mr. Lo Bianco was a stage actor. He won an Obie Award in 1975 for “Yanks 3, Detroit 0, Top of the Seventh,” in which he played Duke Bronkowski, a baseball player, caught up in age and time, trying to throw a perfect game in his 14th major league season.

Eight years later, he triumphed on Broadway in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” (1983) as a Brooklyn dockworker who is destroyed by his obsession with his 17-year-old niece. For this performance, he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor.

Frank Rich, in his New York Times review, called it a “turbulent star performance” and described Lo Bianco as “such a dynamic and engaging force” that the audience never questions the play’s plot. He “shows up,” Rich wrote, “to make the theater shake.”

Lo Bianco’s success was based in part on previous experience with the role, which he had played in the summer theater in the 1960s. “I knew 20 years ago that this would happen,” he said – modestly – about the reception of the play. “I am not at all surprised. I knew what power this play had.”

Anthony Lo Bianco was born in Brooklyn on October 19, 1936. His parents – Carmelo Lo Bianco, a taxi driver, and Sally (Blando) Lo Bianco – were both first-generation Italian-Americans. Anthony attended a vocational school, where a speech and drama teacher suggested he study acting.

He first tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers in high school, but was sure he wasn’t good enough. “I was too small for first base, I don’t think my arm was strong enough to pitch, and I wasn’t fast enough for the outfield,” he told the Times in 1975. “I was left-handed, so I was out of the question for the infield and catcher.”

Instead, he attended the New School’s Dramatic Workshop and founded the Triangle Theater Company in 1963, where he directed and performed in “The Adding Machine,” “Nature of the Crime,” “The Threepenny Opera,” and other plays. On Broadway, he has appeared in “Tartuffe,” “Incident at Vichy,” “The Royal Hunt of the Sun,” and “The Ninety-Day Mistress,” among others.

In 1970, Clive Barnes of The Times dismissed the play Nature of the Crime as enigmatic and obscure. But he wrote, “Mr. Lo Bianco plays with a naturalness that belies the script,” adding, “His whole manner is so convincing that, at times, one can believe the impossibility of his role and rejoice in the moral rectitude of the author.”

He made his television debut in the early 1970s as Dr. Joe Corelli on the soap opera Love of Life, and went on to play over 90 other roles on the small screen. He played heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano in Marciano (1979) and Frankie Carbo, a Mafia-connected boxing promoter, in Rocky Marciano (1999). He appeared in such television films as Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and Bella Mafia (1997); the Italian miniseries La Romana (1988) with Gina Lollobrigida; and in such series as Police Story, Law & Order, Palace Guard, and Homicide: Life on the Street.

His films also included “Bloodbrothers” (1978), “FIST” (1978), John Sayles’ “City of Hope” (1991), Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995), and his most recent, “Somewhere in Queens” (2022), a comedy starring and directed by Ray Romano. He also taught acting at the Stella Adler Studio.

Mr. Lo Bianco was married and divorced twice – from 1964 to 2002 to Dora Landey, a stage actress at the time, with whom he had three daughters; and from 2002 to 2008 to Elizabeth Eileen Natwick. He married writer Alyse Best Muldoon in 2015. She had homes in Poolesville and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

In addition to his wife, he leaves behind two daughters from his first marriage, Yummy Helmes and Nina Landey, a brother, John, two stepchildren, Tristan Hamilton and Lanah Fitzgerald, six grandchildren and four step-grandchildren. Another daughter from his first marriage, Anna Lo Bianco, died of breast cancer in 2006.

Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s flamboyant mayor in the 1930s and ’40s, became his favorite subject. He played the role in “Hizzoner!” in 1984 at an Albany theater; the film had a brief run on Broadway in 1989 and won a local Emmy when it was filmed for New York’s PBS station WNET.

He returned to the role again and again in the United States and abroad, in rewritten versions called “LaGuardia” and “The Little Flower.” And he talked more about LaGuardia as a role model than about his own character.

“He was a man of action,” Lo Bianco told Newsday in 2005. “He was a dreamer and a doer. I want people to be inspired.”

Alex Traub contributed to the reporting.