06.23.09 | Gary Cahall | Scene StealersPrint this Post
Tags: Character Actors
Of character actors it is often said, "I can't remember the name, but the face is familiar." That saying may have never been truer than in the case of Vincent Schiavelli, whose sad-eyed, hangdog features allowed him to easily move between comedic and dramatic roles and who was regularly seen in movies and on TV for over 35 years.
Born in Brooklyn in November, 1948 to an Italian-American family, Schiavelli studied drama at New York University and was active in stage work in the late '60s. His first screen appearance came in director Milos Forman's English-language debut feature, the 1971 counterculture satire Taking Off. The two must have hit it off, because the filmmaker would use Vincent in five more films, including turns as one of the hospital inmates in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as F. Murray Abraham's valet in Amadeus, and as one of Woody Harrelson's cohorts in The People vs. Larry Flynt. A string of guest shots around the same time let TV audiences catch the actor in such popular series as Starsky and Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Taxi, and Moonlighting, where he played opposite future first wife Alyce Beasley.
Schiavelli's best-known movie roles were as Mr. Vargas, the science teacher with the hot wife (Phil Spector murder victim Lana Clarkson) who takes his class on a field trip to the morgue in Fast Times at Ridgemont High; an eighth-dimensional "Red Lectroid" working for alien mastermind John Lithgow in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai; the subway-haunting spectre who instructs newly deceased Patrick Swayze in the use of his abilities in Ghost; in Batman Returns as the machine-gun wielding organ grinder in the Penguin's circus gang; and as the assassin Dr. Kaufman in the James Bond actioner Tomorrow Never Dies.
Inheriting a love of food from his grandfather, who was a cook for an Italian nobleman, Schiavelli would move back to his family's Sicilian homeland and penned several food magazine articles and cookbooks, while continuing to work on the big and small screen, before passing away from lung cancer in December, 2005 . Oh, and his distinctive features were the result of a medical condition known as Marfan syndrome, which Schiavelli helped fight as honorary co-chairman of the National Marfan Foundation.
