Tomas Milian

Fleeing Cuba after his general father was arrested, Tomas Milian trained at the Actors Studio in New York, but found fame in Italy.

In 1959, he was spotted on stage by director Mauro Bolognini, who cast him in the dramas "La Notte brava" and "Il bell'Antonio." But, while he worked with auteurs like Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini on the portmanteau pictures "Boccaccio '70" and "RoGoPaG," Milian tired of playing bourgeois dupes in arthouse dramas and accepted the role of the psychotic fugitive in "The Bounty Killer" to pay his passage home.

Such was his success, however, that his Mexican bandits and revolutionaries became snarling staples of such cult Spaghetti Westerns as "The Big Gundown," "Django Kill!" and "Face to Face." As the genre began to wane in the early 1970s, Milian took leads in diverse outings like the comedy "Where Are You Going All Naked?," the period melodrama "Beatrice Cenci" and the giallo "Don't Torture a Duckling."

But he reinvented himself again by playing petty thief Sergio "Monnezza" Marazzi in a trio of underworld thrillers and Inspector Nico Giraldi in 11 crime comedies for director Bruno Corbucci. In each case, Milian wrote his own dialogue in Roman slang, but he was invariably dubbed by Ferruccio Amendola.

Despite continuing to appear in quality titles like Bernardo Bertolucci's "La Luna" and Michelangelo Antonioni's "Identification of a Woman," Milian eventually returned Stateside and took supports in such prestige dramas as "JFK," "Amistad" and "Traffic."