Seymour Cassel ✝

Seymour Joseph Cassel (January 22, 1935 – April 7, 2019) was an American actor who appeared in over 200 films and television shows, with a career spanning over 50 years. He first came to prominence in the 1960s in the pioneering independent films of writer/director John Cassavetes. The first of these was Too Late Blues (1961), followed by Faces (1968), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and won a National Society of Film Critics Award. Cassel went on to appear in Cassavetes' Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977), and Love Streams (1984). He also appeared in other notable films, including: Coogan's Bluff (1968), The Last Tycoon (1976), Valentino (1977), Convoy (1978), Johnny Be Good (1988), Mobsters (1991), In the Soup (1992), Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), Beer League (2006), and Fort McCoy (2011). Like Cassavetes, Wes Anderson frequently cast Cassel – first in Rushmore (1998), then in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and finally in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). Cassel was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Pancretia Ann (née Kearney), a performer, and Seymour Joseph Cassel, a nightclub owner. His mother was remarried to a master sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Forces, and the family moved to Panama, where Cassel's stepfather was said to have won a nightclub in a game of craps. After his mother filed for divorce in the late 1940s, she sent Seymour to live with his godmother in Detroit, where he soon joined a gang. He later said that at 17, he was given a choice: join the Navy, or go to jail. He picked the military, and after three years of service and a brief stint in college, he returned to Detroit, where he built props for a theater company and took small acting roles. Convinced he had a future in theater, he bought a bus ticket to New York, only to bomb at an Actors Studio audition.