He went on to have a long and busy career in film and television with hundreds of credits before retiring from acting in 2001.
NEW YORK — Henry Silva, the character actor best known for portraying villains and tough guys in “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Ocean’s Eleven” and other films, has died at age 95.
Silva’s son Scott Silva told Variety that his father died of natural causes on Wednesday at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California.
Silva was a New York City native who dropped out of school as a teenager in the 1940s. In the following decade he was accepted into the Actors Studio, where fellow students included Shelley Winters and Ben Gazzara. He went on to have a long and busy career in film and television with hundreds of credits before retiring from acting in 2001.
He played a leading role as a drug dealer in “A Hateful of Rain” on stage and screen in the 1950s and had supporting parts in two of Frank Sinatra’s most famous films, both from the early 1960s: “Ocean’s Eleven “Las Vegas Heist. The film was a showcase for Joe Sinatra, Dean Martin and other members of the “Rat Pack”; and “The Manchurian Candidate,” a Cold War thriller about the brainwashing and attempted assassination of a presidential nominee starring Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey and Janet Leigh. In his last film, Silva was cast in the 2000 remake of “Ocean’s Eleven” starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt).
“Our hearts are broken at the loss of our dear friend Henry Silva, one of the nicest, kindest and most talented men I’ve ever had the pleasure of calling my friend,” Dan Martin’s daughter Diana Martin tweeted. The last surviving star of the original Oceans 11 movie.
Silva has also appeared in television series such as “Wagon Train” and “The FBI” and in films such as Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy”, Jerry Lewis’ “Cinderella” and “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai”. was In which he played the role of a mobster in the 1999 film directed by one of his admirers, Jim Jarmusch.