Tomas Milian
From The Spaghetti Western Database
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| * March 3, 1933 |
Tomas Milian/Thomas Milian
Tomas Milian (Tomás Quintin Rodriguez Milian) was born on the 3rd of March 1933 in Havana. His father was Tomas Rodriguez, a general serving the dictatorship of Gerardo. After having problems in his childhood and having been the eyewitness of his fathers suicide he decided in 1955 to leave Cuba to become an actor in America. Arriving in Miami he began with a score of small jobs (dish-washer,car-park attendant...),which might have proved good inspiration for his latter workingclass heroes and ever-changing, on-screen personas. After being a few months in the Navy ,to get his American citizenship, he passed an audition at Elia Kazan's Actor's Studio, where he was taught the seminal "Stanislavskij method" of acting. He acted a Broadway piece that had been written just for him, Maidens and Mistresses at home at the Zoo by Meade Roberts. Now he wanted to play bigger roles so he left the US to got to Italy. Soon he worked with Italian arthouse film-directors and played in several Italian productions. His first big roles in Spaghetti Westerns was in Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown(1967) and in Giulio Questi's infamous Django Kill!(1967). After the Spaghetti Western era his career slowed down and he moved back to America, where he pursued a low-key career as a character actor. You can see him in Stephen Soderberghs's Traffic(2001) or Oliver Stone's JFK (1991).Having an amazing, more than thirty year long acting career there seems to be no stopping to the talents of this Cuban chameleon.
Filmography
- at the Imdb.com
- Click here for all his Spaghetti Western works
Trivia
- At the set of Face to face he had a strong argumentation about politics with Gian Maria Volonte who his a communist. So both got so angry about each other that they had a fight. And Sergio Sollima had to settle the dispute and in the end both apologized to each other and shooting could continue
External Links
- Italo-Phile.net is a great site about the Italian Cinema and with a large section about Tomas Milian
