Henry Silva, an actor who rose to prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s playing villains, died Sept. 14 in Los Angeles. He was 95.
He told the Chicago Sun-Times that mobsters and other criminals often complimented his work. “They say, ‘My God, where did you learn how to play us?’ I say, ‘I lived with “us.” I grew up with “us” in New York.’ I used to know the guys who used to run the whole areas, the prostitution rings. I used to shine their shoes. They’d say, ‘Kid, c’mere. I want ya to shine my shoes. You [mess] up, I’ll bust your head.
Mr. Silva, the son of Puerto Rican parents, was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 23, 1926, and grew up in Spanish Harlem. He was about six months old when his father left the family. His mother was illiterate. Mr. Silva was a shy student, often scared in grade school because he barely understood English until he was 8.Mickey Rooney
about an all-American teenager. “It was about families — something I never had,” Mr. Silva told the Los Angeles Times. He quit school and left home in his mid-teens, working as a dishwasher and longshoreman, among other jobs, to save money for acting school.“I spent six years knocking on doors, and hearing, ‘No,’ before I got a job as an extra on a television show for $5,” he recalled to the Tribune. He enrolled at the Actors Studio workshop, where Michael V.
Mr. Silva’s marriages to Mary Ramus, actress Cindy Conroy and actress Ruth Earl, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce. Survivors include his sons, Michael Silva and Scott Silva, both of Los Angeles.as a ruthless mob enforcer. He also became a mainstay of action films of the 1980s and 1990s, including “Above the Law” with Steven Seagal and “Dick Tracy” , and he played a boxing spectator in director Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 all-star reboot of “Ocean’s Eleven.
“I see a lot of actors who play heavies, but they always play the same heavies,” he told the Tribune in 2000, when asked about his endurance as a screen bad guy. “I have a seven-minute reel of clips from my movies, and none of the guys are the same. I don’t always go to the same place, because that would be boring. I read the page and it tells me who the character is. I don’t intrude myself on the page — I let it affect me — but I don’t play it safe either.
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