William Edmunds

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William Edmunds (born July 15, 1886 in San Fele , Potenza as Guillermo Bocconcini , † December 7, 1981 in Los Angeles , California ) was an Italian - American actor who made almost 100 film and television appearances between 1934 and 1959. Mostly he was cast as a southern European in smaller supporting roles.

life and career

William Edmunds was born under his maiden name Guillermo Bocconcini in the Italian village of San Fele. However, there are some discrepancies about his exact date of birth: There are sources which assume January 1, 1885 as Edmund's birthday, but the great majority assume that Edmunds was born on July 15, 1886. The actor emigrated to the United States before World War I , where he worked as a stage actor in the following decades. In January 1910 he was seen with the play The Young Turk for the first time on Broadway in New York , where he also appeared occasionally over the next few decades. Edmunds did not make his film debut until 1934 - at the age of almost 50 - with Bob Hope in Going Spanish , which was also shot in New York. After the character actor had played in the Broadway play Siege in December 1937 , he was drawn to the film industry in Hollywood in 1938.

There he took on minor supporting roles in numerous feature films over the next decade, often without receiving a credit for them. With his gaunt, southern appearance and his heavy accent he always embodied foreigners: mostly southern Europeans such as Italians, Spaniards and French; but occasionally more exotic figures such as Arabs and Polynesians . His best-known role is the Italian bar owner Mr. Martini in the classic film Isn't Life Beautiful? from 1946. He had played another restaurant owner five years earlier in Alfred Hitchcock's comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith . He also played a gypsy leader in the horror film Frankenstein's House (1944) and Groucho Marx 's pitiful superior in the comedy Double Dynamite (1951). He also has a short appearance in the cult film Casablanca , in which, as a seedy smuggler, he promises a refugee an illegal ship passage to America.

In the 1950s, Edmunds withdrew increasingly from the acting business, but completed a few guest appearances on US television. In 1959, after almost 100 film and television appearances, he said goodbye to the big screen. After William Edmunds died in 1981 at the old age of 95, his ashes were thrown into the sea.

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Commons : William Edmunds  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Edmunds at the Internet Broadway Database
  2. William Edmunds at Find A Grave