A Short Biography of Richard Conte

Richard Conte was born Nicholas Richard Conte on March 24, 1910, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of an Italian-American barber. The young Conte held a variety of jobs before becoming a professional actor, including truck driver, Wall Street clerk and singing waiter at a Connecticut resort. The gig as a singing waiter led to theatrical work in New York, where in 1935, he was discovered by actors Elia Kazan and Julius Garfinkle (later known as John Garfield) of New York City's Group Theatre.

(Another version of his "discovery" holds that a summer stock director, needing a warm body after an actor quit his play, decided Conte would make an ideal replacement, and prevailed on the owner of the resort employing Conte to get him to agree. It's a story worthy of the man who would one day play a mafia chieftain.)

On Broadway

The generally accepted story is that Elia Kazan helped Richard Conte obtain a scholarship to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, which was headed by Sanford Meisner, a Group Theatre member who became one of America's greatest acting teachers. Conte became a star student.

He made his Broadway debut in the Group Theatre's production of My Heart's in the Highlands in 1939, following that with the Group Theatre's 1940 production of Clifford Odets' Night Music , a flop that lasted only 20 performances. His next Broadway acting gig of 1940, Heavenly Express (directed by Group Theatre member Robert "Bobby" Lewis, who later went on to become a famous acting teacher) also was a flop of 20 performances. Free of the Group Theatre, Conte's luck on Broadway, which was bad, held, as his next play, 1941's Walk Into My Parlor was a flop that lasted 29 performances.

In 1942, he appeared again on Broadway in Jason , which managed 125 performances, but the following year, he appeared on the boards of the Great White Way for the last time in The Family , another flop that lasted but seven performances. His stage work paid off in that it led to movie work.

The Movies

Richard Conte made his mvoie debut in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939), in which he was billed as "Nicholas Conte." His movie career started to thrive during the Second World War, when many Hollywood actors were away in the military. Signing on as a contract player with 20th Century-Fox in 1942, Conte was promoted by the studio as, ironically, as "New John Garfield," the man who helped discover him.

He made his first picture at Fox under the name "Richard Conte" in the memorable Guadalcanal Diary (1943). During World War II, Conte appeared mostly as soldiers in war pictures, though after the war he became a fixture in the studio's "film noir" crime melodramas. His best role at Fox was as the wrongly imprisoned man exonerated by James Stewart's reporter in Call Northside 777 (1948). He also shined as a trucker in Thieves' Highway (1949).

In the 1950s, Richard Conte essentially evolved into a B-movie actor. His best performances coming in The Blue Gardenia (1953) and Highway Dragnet (1954). After being set free of his Fox contract in the early 1950s, his career lost momentum as the film noir cycle exhausted itself, although he turned in a first-rate performance as a vicious but philosophical gangster in Joseph H. Lewis's film-noir classic The Big Combo (1955).

Richard Conte appeared often on television, including a co-starring gig on the syndicated series "The Four Just Men" (1959), but by the 1960s his career was in turnaround. Frank Sinatra cast him in his two Tony Rome detective films, the eponymous Tony Rome (1967) and Lady in Cement (1968), but Conte eventually relocated to Europe. He directed Operation Cross Eagles (1968), a low-budget war picture shot in Yugoslavia in which he also starred in with the similarly not-quite washed-up Rory Calhoun.

The Godfather

Richard Conte's last hurrah in Hollywood role was as Don Corleone's rival, Don Barzini, in The Godfather (1972). Ironically, Paramount -- which produced The Godfather -- had considered Conte for the title role, when it was considering making the movie as a relatively low-budget affair set in contemporary New York. With the great success of the Mario Puzo's novel, Paramount decided to up the ante, and Conte (along with such other contenders as Ernest Borginne) was dropped as the casting list was whittled down to Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. (Olivier was sick and the studio took the gamble on Brando, who won his second Best Actor Oscar as Don Corleone.)

His consolation prize was to be cast as Don Corleone's deadly rival. The role of Don Barzini assured that Richard Conte would always be a part of cinema immortality, as many critics and filmmakers, including the late Stanley Kubrick, consider it the greatest Hollywood film of all time, surpassing even Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. After The Godfather, Conte - whose character was assassinated in that picture, so does not appear in the equally classic sequel - continued to appear in European films.

Richard Conte was married to the actress Ruth Storey, with whom he fathered film editor Mark Conte. He died of a heart attack on April 15, 1975 at the age of 65.

Note:

A version of this article originally appeared on the Internet Movie Database

Sources:

Wikipedia: Richard Conte Biography