Richard Libertini

Richard Joseph Libertini (May 21, 1933 – January 7, 2016) was an American actor who worked across stage, film, and television throughout a career spanning several decades. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he graduated from Emerson College in Boston before pursuing work in New York City and Chicago. He later relocated to Los Angeles during the 1960s to expand his acting career. He was recognized for his facility with character roles and his command of numerous accents.

Libertini's stage career brought him to Broadway in productions spanning from 1966 to 2011. His Broadway credits include Don't Drink the Water, Paul Sills' Story Theatre, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dunelawn, and George is Dead. In the final months of 2011 and into January 2012, he appeared on Broadway in Relatively Speaking, performing as a rabbi in "Honeymoon Motel," the segment written by Woody Allen. Earlier in his stage career, he was an original cast member of The Mad Show, a 1966 Off-Broadway musical-comedy produced by Mad magazine.

His film career began with appearances in The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) and Don't Drink the Water (1969), followed by Catch-22 (1970). He played a traveling vaudevillian in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) and portrayed General Garcia, an insane Latin American dictator, in The In-Laws (1979). Robert Altman cast him as the greengrocer George W. Geezil in Popeye (1980). He played Nosh, an electronics expert and childhood friend of Burt Reynolds's character, in Sharky's Machine (1981). Additional film roles included a Hispanic priest in Best Friends (1982), the servant Giuseppe in Unfaithfully Yours (1984), and the spiritual advisor Prahka Lasa in All of Me (1984). In the Fletch films, he portrayed Chevy Chase's character's skeptical editor, appearing in both Fletch (1985) and the 1989 sequel Fletch Lives. He played a rabbi in Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) and voiced the bandit Dijon in the Disney animated feature DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990). His final film role was a fisherman in Dolphin Tale (2011).

On television, Libertini was a series regular during the first season of Soap, playing the Godfather. He appeared as three distinct characters across separate episodes of Barney Miller and had roles in the television productions Evaluation (1978) and Middle Age (1979). He guest starred in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Accession" as the Bajoran character Akorem Laan and appeared in the Sonny with a Chance episode "Dakota's Revenge" as Izzy, an insane mechanic. He voiced Wally Llama on the animated series Animaniacs and appeared on Supernatural. Libertini also headlined three short-lived sitcoms: Family Man (1988), in which he played a middle-aged comedy writer who married a younger woman and became a father late in life; The Fanelli Boys (1990–1991), in which he played an Italian priest; and Pacific Station (1991–1992), in which he played a police detective.

Libertini married actress Melinda Dillon on September 30, 1963; the couple had one child, Richard, and divorced in 1978. He died on January 7, 2016, in Venice, California, from cancer, at the age of 82, having been diagnosed approximately two years before his death.