Ernest Borgnine – Italian American Actor

Ernest Borgnine – Italian American Actor

Ermes Effron Borgnino was born on January 24, 1917, in Hamden, Connecticut, the son of Italian immigrants. His mother, Anna Boselli hailed from Carpi, near Modena, while his father Camillo Borgnino was a native of Ottiglio near Alessandria. Borgnine’s parents separated when he was two years old, and he then lived with his mother in Italy for about four and a half years. By 1923, his parents had reconciled, the family name was changed from Borgnino to Borgnine, and his father changed his first name to Charles. The family settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where Borgnine graduated from James Hillhouse High School. He took to sports while growing up, but showed no interest in acting.

Borgnine joined the United States Navy in October 1935, after graduation from high school.He served aboard the destroyer/minesweeper USS Lamberton and was honorably discharged from the Navy in October 1941. In January 1942, he reenlisted in the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Borgnine returned to his parents’ house in Connecticut after his Navy discharge without a job to go back to and no direction.

He took a local factory job, but was unwilling to settle down to that kind of work. His mother encouraged him to pursue a more glamorous profession and suggested to him that his personality would be well suited for the stage. He studied acting at the Randall School of Drama in Hartford, then moved to Virginia, where he became a member of the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. In 1949, Borgnine went to New York, where he had his Broadway debut in the role of a nurse in the play Harvey. More roles on stage led him to being cast for decades as a character actor.

An appearance as the villain on TV’s Captain Video led to Borgnine’s casting in the motion picture The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951) for Columbia Pictures. That year, Borgnine moved to Los Angeles, California, where he eventually received his big break in Columbia’s From Here to Eternity (1953), playing the sadistic Sergeant “Fatso” Judson, who beats a stockade prisoner in his charge, Angelo Maggio (played by Frank Sinatra). Borgnine built a reputation as a dependable character actor and played villains in early films, including movies such as Johnny Guitar, Vera Cruz, and Bad Day at Black Rock.

In 1955, he starred as a warmhearted butcher in Marty, the film version of the television play of the same name. He gained an Academy Award for Best Actor over Frank Sinatra, James Dean, and former Best Actor winners Spencer Tracy and James Cagney.

Borgnine’s film career flourished for the next three decades, including roles in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Ice Station Zebra (1968), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Emperor of the North (1973), Convoy (1978), The Black Hole (1979), and Escape from New York (1981).One of his most famous roles was that of Dutch, a member of The Wild Bunch in the 1969 Western classic from director Sam Peckinpah. 

Borgnine died of kidney failure on July 8, 2012 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. He was 95 years old. 

In 1994, Borgnine received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor from the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations. In 2006 the comune of Ottiglio, Italy, his father’s birthplace, gave him honorary citizenship.

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David Chase – Italian American Director & Producer

David Chase – Italian American Director & Producer

David Henry Chase was born into a working-class Italian American family in Mount Vernon, New York. His father Henry Chase, a hardware store owner, had changed his surname from “DeCesare” to “Chase” well before his son was born. He was an only child and grew up in a small garden apartment in Clifton, New Jersey, and in North Caldwell, New Jersey. 

Chase started in Hollywood as a story editor for Kolchak: The Night Stalker and then produced episodes of The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure, among other series. He also worked as a writer of 19 episodes while on The Rockford Files—a show which he worked on in various capacities for more than four years. He won several Emmy awards, including one for a television movie, Off the Minnesota Strip, the story of a runaway he scripted in 1980.

Chase worked in relative anonymity before The Sopranos debuted. Chase had been fascinated by organized crime and the mafia from an early age, witnessing such people growing up. He also was raised on classic gangster films such as The Public Enemy and the crime series The Untouchables. The series is partly inspired by the Richard Boiardo family, a prominent New Jersey organized crime family when Chase was growing up, and partly on New Jersey’s DeCavalcante family. He has mentioned American playwrights Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as influences on the show’s writing, and Italian director Federico Fellini as an important influence on the show’s cinematic style. The series was named after high school friends of his.

Chase’s feature film debut was released on December 21, 2012. It centers on the lead singer of a teenage rock ‘n’ roll band (played by John Magaro) in 1960s New Jersey. Described as “a music-driven coming-of-age story,” the film reunites Chase with James Gandolfini (former star of Sopranos), who co-stars as Magaro’s father. Other cast members include Bella Heathcote, Christopher McDonald, Molly Price, Lisa Lampanelli, Jack Huston and Brad Garrett. Chase himself has described the film as about “a post-war, post-Depression-era parent who has given his kid every advantage that he didn’t have growing up, but now can’t help feeling jealous of the liberated, more adventurous destiny his son is able to enjoy.” Another former Sopranos cast member, Steven Van Zandt, served as music supervisor and executive producer.

After graduating from NYU in 1968, Chase moved to California and married his high school sweetheart Denise Kelly. He is the father of actress Michele DeCesare who appeared in six of The Sopranos episodes as Hunter Scangarelo.

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Michela Musolino – Episode 13

Michela Musolino – Episode 13

On this episode of the Italian American Entertainment Podcast, Vince Chiarelli, of the Vince Chiarelli Band, interviews the great singer and entertainer Michela Musolino. Known for her fiery and passionate interpretations of both traditional and contemporary Sicilian folk and roots music, Michela turns world fusion songs into timeless pieces and infuses her vocals with the emotions of life.

Find out more about Michela at her website: https://www.michelamusolino.com/

Bob Montana – Italian American Artist

Bob Montana – Italian American Artist

Robert William Montana was born in 1920 in Stockton, California, to Italian American parents Roberta Pandolfini and Ray Montana. Both were in show business: Roberta had been a Ziegfeld girl, and Ray performed banjo on the vaudeville circuit. As a result, Bob Montana traveled extensively as a child. He attended Haverhill High School in Haverhill, Massachusetts and graduated from Manchester High School Central in Manchester, New Hampshire.

While freelancing at True Comics and Fox Comics, Montana created an adventure strip about four teenage boys and tried to sell it without success. Montana started working for MLJ Comics (which would later be known as Archie Comics). He was asked to work up a high school style comic strip story, featuring Archie Andrews. The success of the Archie and friends story in MLJ Comics’ Pep Comics (Dec. 1941) led MLJ to assign Montana to draw the first issue of Archie (Nov. 1942). Montana was soon drawing the Archie comic strip, doing both the daily and Sunday strip, which over the next 35 years ran in over 750 newspapers

According to Jane (Donahue) Murphy, a high school classmate of Montana’s, Archie and his friends were based on people from their hometown and high school. She said Archie Andrews was based on Donahue’s cousin, Richard Heffernan; Veronica Lodge on Agatha Popoff, the daughter of the local football team’s doctor; Jughead Jones on a mischievous teen named “Skinny” Linnehan; while Miss Grundy may have been based on a high school typing and shorthand teacher named Lundstrom; however, Haverhill’s school librarian is also believed to be the model for Grundy.

Montana married Peggy Bertholet and they had four children. He died at age 54 of an apparent heart attack while cross-country skiing near his New Hampshire home.

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Dom Irrera – Italian American Comedian

Dom Irrera – Italian American Comedian

Domenick Jack “Dom” Irrera is an Italian American actor and stand-up comedian. Much of his material is in the form of stories about his life, especially his childhood years and growing up in an Italian American family.

Irrera has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The View, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 1986, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and The Late Show with David Letterman, and has made numerous cameo appearances on TV shows.

Irrera is a regular performer at the Cat Laughs in Kilkenny; he has made 22 appearances at the festival – more than any other comic. He appeared on an episode of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld as Ronnie Kaye, the prop comic and on the CBS sitcom The King of Queens as Spero Demopolous. Irrera made 11 appearances as himself on the animated series Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, and is the only comic to appear in all six seasons.

Irrera was voted one of the hundred funniest comics of all time by Comedy Central. He was the Judge on the Supreme Court of Comedy on the 101 exclusively on DirecTV.

He also did some voiceovers for Nickelodeon as Ernie Potts on Hey Arnold! and as Duke on Back at the Barnyard, and played a chauffeur in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski.

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