Richard Libertini


Richard Joseph Libertini was an American stage, film and television actor.
He was known for playing character roles and his ability to speak in numerous accents. His films include Catch-22, The In-Laws, Popeye, All of Me, Fletch, Fletch Lives, Awakenings, Lethal Weapon 4, and Dolphin Tale.

Early life

Libertini was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Emerson College in Boston. During his early years, Libertini worked in New York City and in Chicago. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career during the 1960s.

Career

He was an original cast member of The Mad Show, a 1966 Off-Broadway musical-comedy produced by Mad magazine. His first film appearances were in The Night They Raided Minsky's, Don't Drink the Water and Catch-22.
Two of his more memorable film roles came in the comedies Fletch, in which he played Chevy Chase's character's doubting editor, a role he repeated in the 1989 sequel Fletch Lives, and The In-Laws, in which he played General Garcia, an insane Latin-American dictator whose closest advisor was a cartoon face drawn on his own hand a la Senor Wences. He portrayed Nosh, an electronics expert who is the childhood best friend of Burt Reynolds's character, in Sharky's Machine.
He also played a traveling vaudevillian in Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, the greengrocer George W. Geezil in Robert Altman's Popeye, a Hispanic priest in Best Friends, the servant Giuseppe in Unfaithfully Yours, spiritual advisor Prahka Lasa in All of Me, the bandit Dijon in Disney's animated feature film ', and a rabbi in Lethal Weapon 4.
On television, Libertini was a series regular in the first season of Soap as the Godfather. He appeared as 3 different characters in Barney Miller. He also appeared in "Evaluation" and "Middle Age". He guest starred in the ' episode "Accession" as a Bajoran named Akorem Laan, and in the Sonny with a Chance episode "Dakota's Revenge" as Izzy, an insane mechanic. He also voiced Wally Llama on Animaniacs, and starred in three short-lived sitcoms: Family Man, in which he played a middle-aged comedy writer who married a much younger woman and became a father late in life; The Fanelli Boys, in which he played an Italian priest; and Pacific Station, in which he played a police detective.
In September 2008, his final animated role was Takuya in the Cartoon Network series Cooking Mama. Libertini appeared on the TV show Supernatural. His final film role was that of a fisherman in the 2011 film Dolphin Tale. From October 2011 through January 2012, Libertini appeared on Broadway as a rabbi in "Honeymoon Motel," the Woody Allen-penned segment of Relatively Speaking.

Personal life

Libertini married actress Melinda Dillon on September 30, 1963, and had one child with her, Richard. They divorced in 1978.
Libertini died on January 7, 2016, at age 82, in Venice, California, from cancer with which he had been diagnosed two years prior.

Selected filmography