Brooding American method actor Anthony Franciosa, who was once married to Oscar-winning screen star Shelley Winters, has died, just five days after his famous ex-wife, his publicist said on Friday.
Franciosa, who was 77, died on Thursday in a hospital in Los Angeles, where the double Academy Award winner Winters — his wife from 1957 to 1960 — passed away at the age of 85 last Saturday.
News reports said Franciosa, who starred in a string of television and big-screen movies in a career spanning four decades, died of a massive stroke, but his publicist declined to confirm the cause of death.
”I can say only that you that Mr Franciosa died yesterday [Thursday] just before 1pm at the UCLA Medical Centre,” publicist Dick Guttman said.
”His funeral service is going to be held in a private ceremony, but it has not been determined yet,” he added.
The New York-born Franciosa was one of a group of actors who were devotees of the intensely realistic performance style known as method acting, who included James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Winters.
Born Anthony Papaleo in October 1928, he grew up poor before falling into acting at the age of 18, going on to win a Oscar nominations for Fred Zinnemann’s 1957 drama A Hat Full of Rain.
He also won a nomination for a Tony Award in 1956 for his Broadway role in the play of the same name.
He took roles in such films as 1982’s Death Wish II opposite Charles Bronson.
Franciosa was married four times and had three children, including two with his widow, Rita Thiel, whom he married in 1970.
His second wife, Winters, who sprang to fame in roles as tough-talking yet vulnerable victims, died of heart failure in another Los Angeles-area nursing home.
Winters won best supporting actress Oscars for 1959’s The Diary of Anne Frank, in which she played a Dutch Jew, and for her role as the cruel mother of a blind girl in A Patch of Blue (1965). — AFP
