Marc Lawrence

Marc Lawrence, born Max Goldsmith on February 17, 1910, in New York City, was an American character actor whose Broadway appearances spanned from 1930 to 1948. His mother, Minerva Norma (née Sugarman), was of Polish Jewish descent, and his father, Israel Simon Goldsmith, was of Russian Jewish origin. Lawrence developed an early interest in performance through school plays before enrolling at the City College of New York. In 1930, he was awarded a two-year scholarship to the repertory theater run by Eva Le Gallienne, the same year he began his Broadway career. His stage credits included The Survivor, the musical The Ham Tree, and Romeo + Juliet. He also worked under the alternate screen credits F. A. Foss, Marc Laurence, and Marc C. Lawrence.

Lawrence's film career began in 1933, and his pock-marked complexion, brooding presence, and New York street accent established him as a natural fit for criminal roles. He portrayed gangsters and mob bosses across six decades of film and television work. Studio executive Harry Cohn once relayed to Lawrence that mobster Johnny Roselli had called him the best hood in films, and Lawrence noted that Italian gangsters told him he played their type better than anyone else.

In 1951, two government agents visited Lawrence at his Los Angeles home and accused him of membership in the Communist Party USA. He was subsequently subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and appeared before it on April 24, 1951, acknowledging that he had belonged to the CPUSA during the late 1930s. He named fourteen film industry associates as Communists, among them actors J. Edward Bromberg, Morris Carnovsky, Jeff Corey, Howard da Silva, Lloyd Gough, Sterling Hayden, Larry Parks, Anne Revere, and Lionel Stander. Despite his cooperation, Lawrence was not fully spared from the blacklist. He, his wife — screenwriter Fanya Foss, whom he had married in 1942 — and their two children relocated to Italy in 1951 and remained abroad for six years. During that period he appeared in Italian productions and took the role of Diomedes in Robert Wise's Helen of Troy (1956).

After the blacklist pressure eased in the late 1950s, Lawrence and his family returned to the United States. He secured guest appearances on television series including The Detectives and The Untouchables before resuming his film career. He played gangsters in two James Bond productions: Diamonds Are Forever (1971), opposite Sean Connery, and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), opposite Roger Moore. He portrayed a henchman alongside Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man (1976) and appeared as a Miami mob boss alongside Jerry Reed and Dom DeLuise in Hot Stuff (1979).

Lawrence also accumulated directing credits, including the films Nightmare in the Sun (1965) and Pigs (1973), as well as episodes of the television series Lawman, The Roaring 20's, 77 Sunset Strip, and Maverick. Among his later acting roles, he played Volnoth, a member of the Gatherers, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Vengeance Factor" (1989), and appeared as the elderly motel owner in From Dusk till Dawn (1996). He returned to the Star Trek franchise as Mr. Zeemo in the Deep Space Nine episode "Badda-Bing Badda-Bang," which aired in February 1999. His final film performance came in Looney Tunes Back in Action (2003), in which he played an Acme Corporation vice president.

In 1991, Lawrence published his autobiography, Long Time No See: Confessions of a Hollywood Gangster. He was also the subject of a novel, The Beautiful and the Profane, published in 2002. His wife Fanya Foss died in 1995. His daughter Toni was married to Billy Bob Thornton from 1986 to 1988. In 2003, at the age of 93, Lawrence married a woman named Alicia. He died of heart failure at his Palm Springs home on November 28, 2005, at the age of 95.