Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in September of 2013.
Robert Loggia’s half-century-plus career in stage, screen and TV was testament to the saying that there are indeed second acts in life and Hollywood.
Born Salvatore Loggia in 1930 to immigrants from Sicily and raised on Staten Island and New York’s Lower East Side, the versatile actor’s early career choice was journalism, which he studied at the University of Missouri. But after a stint in the Army and anchoring a newscast in the Panama Canal Zone, he appeared in a production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Realizing that he wanted to be a thespian, he enrolled in The Actor’s Studio in New York.
After an uncredited part as a mobster in the Paul Newman Rocky Graziano boxing bio Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), and steady supporting work in films and on TV dramas such as Playhouse 90 and Studio One, Loggia received attention for a key supporting role as an Italian-American union organizer in 1957’s The Garment Jungle. He then landed the lead in the 1958 Walt Disney miniseries The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca, portraying the dashing real-life exploits of a pencil-mustached, sharp-shooting lawman who kept the peace in 1880s New Mexico.
The popularity of the series led to steady TV work through the mid-‘60s on such shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables, Combat! and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and some film roles (notably Joseph in George Stevens’ New Testament epic The Greatest Story Ever Told), before being cast as acrobat/cat burglar-turned-security expert/bodyguard Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat in T.H.E. Cat, an action series that ran on NBC during the 1966-1967 season.
Produced by Boris Sagal (Katey’s father) and developed by Dirty Harry creator Harry Julian Fink, the show had a film noir feel to it, even though it was shot in color. The judo-trained Romani protagonist operated out of a San Francisco club called Casa Del Gato. The show had a distinctive credit sequence featuring animation and a jazzy, flute-inflected theme song by Lalo Schiffrin (Mission: Impossible) with a voiceover narration that explained its premise: “Out of the night comes a man who saves lives at the risk of his own. Once a circus performer, an aerialist who refused the net. Once a cat burglar, a master among jewel thieves. Now a professional bodyguard. Primitive… savage… in love with danger. The Cat!”
While the stylish show lasted only one season, it garnered Loggia more attention, and he quickly became an even bigger go-to guy when it came to television guest roles. For the next 15 years, the actor worked non-stop on nearly every small screen drama and western that aired, from The Wild Wild West and The High Chaparral to Kojak, Mannix and Wonder Woman. His gruff voice, streetwise demeanor and rugged good looks put in demand for playing cantankerous (and usually ethnic) cops and hoods. Still, after starring in two series, his career was now essentially under the radar.
Then, in 1982, after a part as Egyptian president Anwar Sadat alongside Ingrid Bergman’s Golda Meir in the highly praised TV biodrama A Woman Named Golda, Loggia got cast in An Officer and a Gentleman as Byron Mayo, an alcoholic former Naval officer and father to Aviation Officer Candidate School enlistee Zach Mayo (Richard Gere). The surprise hit not only brought career heat to cast members Gere, Debra Winger, David Keith, and Oscar-winning Best Supporting Actor Lou Gossett, Jr., but Loggia also got a boost—and offers to work in lots of features.
In quick succession, Loggia appeared as aging Miami drug dealer Frank Lopez, who serves as a mentor of sorts to Cuban immigrant Tony Montana (Al Pacino), in Brian De Palma’s Scarface; Norman Bates’ psychiatrist in Psycho II; and villainous mobster Bruno Langois in two Pink Panther outings (he had worked with director Blake Edwards earlier in Revenge of the Pink Panther and S.O.B.). At the same time, Loggia kept his TV slate busy with spots on Falcon Crest, Matt Houston and a regular part as an admiral in the short-lived, Navy-themed Emerald Point S.A.S. with Dennis Weaver.
1985 proved to be a banner year for the then-55 year-old actor. In John Huston’s Oscar-winning mob-edy Prizzi’s Honor, he played Eduardo Prizzi, a lawyer and the youngest son of Don Corrado Prizzi (Academy Award-nominated William Hickey), ancient patriarch of a New York crime family. 
Loggia actually competed against Hickey in the Best Supporting Actor category that year for his scene-stealing work in Jagged Edge (The sentimental favorite–Don Ameche’s breakdancing senior in Cocoon–took home the prize that night). Loggia, however, was memorable in Jagged Edge as Sam Ransom, the world-weary, profanity-spouting investigator employed by lawyer Teddy Barnes (Glenn Close), defending a San Francisco newspaper publisher (Jeff Bridges) accused of murdering his wealthy wife.
Despite the high profile cast, Loggia stole the picture with his profanity-strewn turn. Sample dialogue:
Teddy Barnes (Close): Did your mother ever wash your mouth out with soap and water?
Sam Ransom (Loggia): Yeah, but it didn’t do any f****ing good.
With these credits, Loggia was a bona fide star supporting actor in features, but he didn’t stop tackling TV projects, either. His most popular ’80s big-screen work may well have come in Penny Marshall’s Big (1988), playing Macmillan, the spry toy company honcho who performs a duet on a jumbo floor keyboard in F.A.O. Schwartz with man-child product toy development exec Josh Baskin (Tom Hanks).
But there certainly has been no shortage of other memorable big and little screen moments from the formidable character actor. In the movies, consider his New York detective investigating Santeria-inspired murders in The Believers (1987), his voice work as Sykes in the Disney-does-Dickens animated feature Oliver & Company (1988), or his over-the-top turn as mob kingpin Sal “The Shark” Macelli in the John Landis bloodsucking mobster film Innocent Blood (1992). There’s Loggia’s bigger-than-life general warning the nation of the imminent danger of invading aliens in Independence Day (1996), or his Mr. Eddy, a thug who meets a most untimely, ultra-violent demise in David Lynch’s out-there Lost Highway (1997), and as Minnie Driver’s Italian grandfather (Carroll O’Connor was his Irish counterpart, the two co-owners of a Chicago Irish spaghetti house), in the offbeat romcom Return to Me (2000).
In regard to Lost Highway, which the actor claims started out as a straightforward thriller before it landed in Lynch-land, Loggia’s address to a tailgater who ran him off the road is classic:
“Don’t tailgate! Don’t you ever tailgate! Do you know how much space is needed to stop a car traveling at 35 miles per hour? Six car lengths! Six f***in’ car lengths! That’s a hundred and six f****in’ feet, mister! If I had to stop suddenly, you woulda hit me! I want you to get a f***in’ driver’s manual, and I want you to study that m**********r! And I want you to obey the goddamn rules of the road! Fifty-f***in’ thousand people were killed on the highways last year ’cause of f***in’ assholes like you! Tell me you’re gonna get a manual!”
For TV, Loggia has delivered as the title federal agent in the 1989-90 crime drama Mancuso, FBI and as a powerful senator in the Orwellian miniseries Wild Palms. He’s also provided voices for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim animated series Tom Goes to the Mayor and, as himself, the beloved underrated actor everybody loves, on Family Guy. Of course, fans of The Sopranos recall Loggia as “Feech” La Manna, who wants back into the crime game after spending 20 years in prison and gets under Tony Soprano’s skin in the process.
Loggia, a proponent of meditation, credits a teacher for his long and varied career. “I’d have to thank Stella Adler for that,” he said in an interview. “She didn’t want her actors to be a one-trick pony. An actor is an impersonator; he plays many different roles. If you played the same role all the time…God, that’d be a boring career. When you take on different roles and become a different person, that’s called acting … It’s a challenge. When you read a script, you don’t want to be the same guy all the time, you want to change, you’re a different person. That’s why acting is a wonderful career. You’re not the same guy all the time.”
True to form, Loggia kept working into the new century and even as he and his family dealt with a 2010 Alzheimer’s diagnosis. It was from complications from the disease that the actor passed away on December 4, 2015 at 85. According to the Internet Movie Database, there are several films being prepared for release featuring Robert Loggia, still as tough as nails on the outside. No f***in’ surprise there.