Tony Lo Bianco, an actor whose film roles included villains in “The French Connection” and “The Honeymoon Killers” and whose stage career earned him stellar reviews for an Arthur Miller tragedy and an Obie Award for a baseball drama, died on Tuesday at his home in Poolesville, Md. He was 87.
The cause was prostate cancer, his wife, Alyse Lo Bianco, said.
Mr. Lo Bianco made a vivid impression in “The Honeymoon Killers” (1970), a low-budget black-and-white film, based on a true story, that came to be regarded as a cult classic. With a heavy Spanish accent and serious sideburns, he played Raymond Fernandez, a con man who courted, married and murdered lonely women for their bank accounts, passing off his real lover (Shirley Stoler) as his sister. The Guardian called the film the movies’ first “super-realist depiction of the banality of evil.”
A United Press International writer once labeled Mr. Lo Bianco “a natural-born heavy” because of his dark hair, bushy eyebrows and sharp features. In “The French Connection” (1971), moviegoers saw him as the owner of a modest Brooklyn diner, Sal and Angie’s, dressed to the nines and driving a car with European plates, courtesy of international drug money. In “The Seven-Ups” (1973), he was a mortician at one of the Mafia’s favorite funeral homes.
But Mr. Lo Bianco was a stage actor at heart. He won an Obie Award in 1975 for “Yanks 3, Detroit 0, Top of the Seventh,” in which he played Duke Bronkowski, a baseball player with age and time breathing down his neck who is trying to pitch a perfect game during his 14th season in the major leagues.
In 1983, Mr. Lo Bianco triumphed on Broadway in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” as a Brooklyn longshoreman destroyed by his obsession with his 17-year-old niece. The performance brought him a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a play.
Frank Rich, in his New York Times review, called it a “tumultuous star performance” and described Mr. Lo Bianco as “such a dynamic and enveloping force” that the audience never questions the play’s action. He “looms up,” Mr. Rich wrote, “to make the theater shake.”
Mr. Lo Bianco’s success stemmed in part from previous experience with the role, which he had played in summer stock in the 1960s. “I knew 20 years ago this would happen,” he said of the play’s reception. “It doesn’t surprise me at all. I knew the power of this play.”
Anthony Lo Bianco was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 19, 1936. His parents — Carmelo Lo Bianco, a taxi driver, and Sally (Blando) Lo Bianco — were first-generation Italian Americans. Anthony attended a vocational high school, where a speech and drama teacher suggested that he study acting.
First, he tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers in high school, though he felt sure he wasn’t a good enough baseball player. “I was too short for first base, I don’t think I had a strong enough arm for pitching, and I wasn’t fast enough for the outfield,” he told The Times in 1975. “I was left‐handed, so that left out the infield and catching.”
Instead, he enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop of the New School and, in 1963, created the Triangle Theater Company, where he directed productions and appeared in “The Adding Machine,” “Nature of the Crime,” “The Threepenny Opera” and other plays. His Broadway credits included “Tartuffe,” “Incident at Vichy,” “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” and “The Ninety-Day Mistress.”
In 1970, Clive Barnes of The Times dismissed the play “Nature of the Crime” as puzzling and murky. But, he wrote, “Mr. Lo Bianco acts with a naturalness that defeats the script,” adding, “His whole manner is so convincing that once in a while you can believe the impossibilities of his role and revel in the author’s moral rectitude.”
Mr. Lo Bianco made his television debut as Dr. Joe Corelli on the daytime drama “Love of Life” in the early 1970s and went on to play more than 90 other TV roles. He was the heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano in “Marciano” (1979) and Frankie Carbo, a Mafia-connected boxing promoter, in “Rocky Marciano” (1999). He appeared in television movies like “Jesus of Nazareth” (1977) and “Bella Mafia” (1997); the Italian mini-series “La Romana” (1988), with Gina Lollobrigida; and series including “Police Story,” “Law & Order,” “Palace Guard” and “Homicide: Life on the Street.”
His films also included “Bloodbrothers” (1978), “F.I.S.T.” (1978), John Sayles’s “City of Hope” (1991), Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995) and his last, “Somewhere in Queens” (2022), a comedy-drama starring and directed by Ray Romano. He also taught acting at the Stella Adler Studio.
Mr. Lo Bianco was married and divorced twice — to Dora Landey, a theater actress at the time, with whom he had three daughters, from 1964 to 2002; and to Elizabeth Eileen Natwick, from 2002 until 2008. He married Alyse Best Muldoon, a writer, in 2015. They had homes in Poolesville and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Yummy Helmes and Nina Landey; a brother, John; two stepchildren, Tristan Hamilton and Lanah Fitzgerald; six grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren. Another daughter from his first marriage, Anna Lo Bianco, died of breast cancer in 2006.
Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s flamboyant mayor in the 1930s and ’40s, became Mr. Lo Bianco’s favorite subject. He originated the role in “Hizzoner!” in an Albany theater in 1984; it had a short run on Broadway in 1989 and won a local Emmy when it was filmed for the New York PBS station WNET.
He returned to the role again and again, in the United States and abroad, in rewritten versions called “LaGuardia” and “The Little Flower.” And he talked about La Guardia as a role model more than he talked about his own character.
“He was a man of action,” Mr. Lo Bianco told Newsday in 2005. “He was a dreamer and a doer. I want people to be inspired.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
