An association with rising star Sylvester Stallone landed him extra work in the Columbia Pictures nostalgia piece "The Lords of Flatbush" (1974).
#ARMAND ASSANTE ACTOR PROFESSIONAL#
Winning the Jehlinger Prize for promising new actors in 1969, he was invited to study opera at the Manhattan School of Music but pointed himself instead toward the life of a professional actor.ĭuring his journeyman years as a jobbing actor on Broadway and in regional theatre, Assante scored an early coup with a recurring role on the NBC soap opera "The Doctors" (1963-1982). Marines after his graduation from Cornwall High School, Assante enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. Although he had flirted with the notion of joining the U.S. Interested initially in music, Assante was a drummer for the local band the Phaeton Four, performing professionally on weekends. The middle child and only son of Armand Assante, Sr., a fine artist-turned-Madison Avenue ad man, and Katherine Healy, a published poet and teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, Assante moved with his family to the upstate New York town of Cornwall in 1957 but never forgot the lessons in tolerance and compassion he had learned in his ethically mixed neighborhood in Washington Heights.
The actor spent the better part of his career bouncing between low budget films and made-for-TV fare, lending an inarguable intensity and a disarming level of intelligence to any job he chose to take on.Īrmand Anthony Assante, Jr., was born on Oct. Disinclined to trade on his looks for A-list status, Assante quit Hollywood to live off the grid with his family in upstate New York. More successful on the small screen, Assante subspecialized in mobster roles in the trashy miniseries "Rage of Angels" (NBC, 1983), Jack Nicholson's "Hoffa" (1992) and the HBO biopic "Gotti" (1996), while proving a credible leading man in the indie "Belizaire, the Cajun" (1986) and "The Mambo Kings" (1991) with Antonio Banderas. Typed as a slightly unreliable romantic leading man, Assante scored with moviegoers in "Private Benjamin" (1980) opposite Goldie Hawn and "Little Darlings" (1980) with Tatum O'Neal, but his first star outing, as Mike Hammer in the 1982 "I, the Jury" remake, was a box office dud. Although Assante was courted by such 1970s auteurs as Francis Ford Coppola and Terence Malick, it was future action star Sylvester Stallone who gave him his first big breaks - as an extra in "The Lords of Flatbush" (1974) and as his co-star in "Paradise Alley" (1978). The native New Yorker paid his dues in regional theatre and as a regular on the soap opera "The Doctors" (NBC, 1963-1982), but work in films was longer in coming. With his ethnic name and exotic good looks, Armand Assante was often mistaken by casting agents early in his career for foreign talent.
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