Richard Conte

Richard Conte was born on Mar 24, 1910 in USA. Richard Conte's big-screen debut came with Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence directed by Ricardo Cortez in 1939, strarring Tony Casselli (as Nicholas Conte). Richard Conte is known for The Godfather Saga directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Marlon Brando stars as Don Vito Corleone and Al Pacino as Don Michael Corleone. The upcoming new tvshow Richard Conte plays is The Godfather Saga - Season 1 which will be released on Nov 12, 1977.

Richard Conte was born Nicholas Richard Conte on March 24, 1910, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of an Italian-American barber. He held a variety of jobs before becoming a professional actor, including truck driver, Wall Street clerk and singing waiter at a Connecticut resort. The gig as a singing waiter led to theatrical work in New York, where in 1935, he was discovered by actors Elia Kazan and Julius "Julie" Garfinkle (later known as John Garfield).Kazan helped Conte obtain a scholarship to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where he excelled. Conte made his Broadway debut late in "Moon Over Mulberry Street" in 1939, and went on to be featured in other plays, including "Walk Into My Parlor." His stage work lead to a movie job, and he made his film debut in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939), in which he was billed as "Nicholas Conte." His career started to thrive during the Second World War, when many Hollywood actors were away in the military.Signing on as a contract player with 20th Century-Fox in 1942, Conte was promoted by the studio as, ironically, as "New John Garfield," the man who helped discover him. He made his debut at Fox, under the name "Richard Conte", in Guadalcanal (1943). During World War II Conte appeared mostly as soldiers in war pictures, although after the war he became a fixture in the studio's "film noir" crime melodramas. His best role at Fox was as the wrongly imprisoned man exonerated by James Stewart's reporter in Appelez nord 777 (1948) and he also shined as a trucker in Les bas-fonds de Frisco (1949).In the 1950s Conte essentially evolved into a B-movie actor, his best performances coming in La Femme au gardénia (1953) and Highway Dragnet (1954). After being set free of his Fox contract in the early 1950s, his career lost momentum as the film noir cycle exhausted itself, although he turned in a first-rate performance as a vicious but philosophical gangster in Joseph H. Lewis film-noir classic, Association criminelle (1955).Conte appeared often on television, including a co-starring gig on the syndicated series The Four Just Men (1959), but by the 1960s his career was in turnaround. Frank Sinatra cast him in his two Tony Rome detective films, the eponymous Tony Rome est dangereux ! (1967) and La Femme en ciment (1968), but Conte eventually relocated to Europe. He directed and starred in Opération Cross Eagles (1968), a low-budget war picture shot in Yugoslavia. His last hurrah in Hollywood role was as Don Corleone's rival, Don Barzini, in Le Parrain (1972), which many critics and filmmakers, including the late Stanley Kubrick, consider the greatest Hollywood film of all time. Ironically, Paramount - which produced "The Godfather" - had considered Conte for the title role before the casting list was whittled down to Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. After Le Parrain (1972), Conte - whose character was assassinated in that picture, so does not appear in the equally classic sequel - continued to appear in European films.Richard Conte was married to Ruth Storey, with whom he fathered film editor Mark Conte. He died of a heart attack on April 15, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, aged 65.