Taxi Driver actor, novelist Leonard Harris
Outside of New York, Harris was known for his role as Senator Charles Palantine in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). In the Oscar-nominated drama, Palantine is running for president on a platform of radical social change, at one point sympathizing with Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a mentally unbalanced taxi driver-turned-vigilante who wants to rid New York of its “scum and filth.” The eventual results aren’t pretty.
Palantine is also the link between Bickle and the senator’s presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a classy-looking blonde with whom Bickle becomes obsessed. According to Harris’ New York Times obit, Scorsese knew Harris “through the New York drama scene.”
Harris played another politician, a mayor, in Martin Davidson’s critically derided comedy Hero at Large (1980), starring John Ritter and Anne Archer.
When not making movie cameos, Harris wrote three novels, including the well-received The Masada Plan. Additionally, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he served in the Tony Award Nominating Committee.
Hans Christian Andersen, The Glass Slipper choreographer Roland Petit
French dancer and choreographer Roland Petit died at age 87 in Geneva on July 10.
Associated with the Paris Opera Ballet and the Ballet de Marseille for a number of years, Petit was credited for creating more than 100 ballets throughout his career. Additionally, he choreographed dance sequences for a handful of movies, notably Samuel Goldwyn’s Hans Christian Andersen (1952), a color extravaganza starring Danny Kaye, Farley Granger, and Petit’s future wife Zizi Jeanmaire; two 1955 Leslie Caron vehicles, the Cinderella tale The Glass Slipper and Daddy Long Legs, which paired Caron with Fred Astaire; and Henri Decoin’s Folies-Bergère (1956), with Jeanmaire, Eddie Constantine, and Nadia Gray.
“With his muse Zizi Jeanmaire,” whom Petit married in 1954, “he wrote some of the most beautiful pages of contemporary music hall,” French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand eulogized. Roland Petit and Zizi Jeanmaire remained married until his death.
Mitterrand quote via the BBC.
Grease actress Annette Charles
Annette Charles, the high-school dancer Cha Cha in the 1978 blockbuster Grease, died on Aug. 4 in her Los Angeles home. Charles, who was 63.
In Grease, Charles was the girlfriend of the Scorpions gang leader, Leo (Dennis C. Stewart). At one point, she dances with John Travolta’s Danny Zuko and Jeff Conaway’s Kenickie at a school dance competition. Conaway died earlier this year at age 60.
Besides Grease, Charles appeared in only two more features: In Search of the Historic Jesus (1979) and, as Annette Cardona, Latino (1985). The former was Henning Schellerup’s low-budget mix of interviews and dramatic reenactments about the life of Jesus, with Charles as Mary Magdalene opposite John Rubinstein’s Jesus; the latter was set in Nicaragua during the U.S.-abetted civil war between the leftist Sandinista government and the Contra rebels/terrorists. Charles played a local woman; cinematographer Haskell Wexler directed.
Charles also appeared on a number of television series, including Bonanza, Barnaby Jones, The Man from Atlantis, and Magnum P.I.
Dark of the Moon voice actor Francesco Quinn was Anthony Quinn’s son
Francesco Quinn, son of two-time Academy Award winner Anthony Quinn and Dino’s voice in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, has died. Quinn collapsed while jogging with his son Max in Malibu’s La Costa neighborhood on Friday evening (Aug. 5). He was 48.
One of Mexican-born, two-time Oscar winner Anthony Quinn’s 13 children, Francesco Quinn was born in Rome on March 22, 1963. His mother was costume designer Jolanda Addolori.
An actor for 25 years, Quinn was featured in more than 30 titles. His big-screen debut took place in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Platoon (1986), in which he played the drug-dealing character Rhah. Among his other credits, usually in minor fare, were Casablanca Express (1989), Cannes Man (1996), and Man vs. Monday (2006). According to online sources, he has one movie coming out: Giuseppe Ferrara’s Roma nuda. Charles Leinenweber and Thadd Turner’s Buttermilk Sky was in pre-production for a possible 2012 release.
Additionally, Quinn had roles in three of his father’s films: Giacomo Battiato’s Stradivari (1988), which also featured Anthony Quinn’s sons Danny Quinn and Lorenzo Quinn; Jud Taylor’s television movie The Old Man and the Sea (1990), in which Francesco played his father as a young man; and Jim Kaufman’s A Star for Two (1993), featuring veterans Lauren Bacall, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Zorba the Greek’s Oscar winner Lila Kedrova.
Among Francesco Quinn’s numerous television roles were those in the soap opera The Young and the Restless, and the series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, ZAG, CSI: Miami, and Zen. He was also featured in the recent Italian series Il Commissario Manara, starring Guido Caprino, Jane Alexander, and Massimo Andrei.
Anthony Quinn died in 2001 at the age of 86. His two Academy Awards were for Best Supporting Actor in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952) and Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956). He was also nominated twice for Best Actor: George Cukor’s Wild Is the Wind (1957) and Michael Cacoyannis’ Zorba the Greek (1964). Cacoyannis died on July 25.
Francesco Quinn’s widow, actress Valentina Castellani-Quinn (Wake Up, The Crying Museum), told the Malibu Patch newspaper, “Francesco was my soulmate … I will love him forever.”
Police Academy actor, NFL player Bubba Smith
Bubba Smith, one of the performers in the Police Academy movies and a 6-foot-7 former National Football League player, was found dead on Aug. 3 at his Baldwin Hills home in Los Angeles. Smith was 66. No foul play is suspected.
As a professional football player, Charles Aaron ‘Bubba’ Smith (born Feb. 28, 1945, in Beaumont, Texas) played with the Baltimore Colts, Oakland Raiders, and Houston Oilers from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s.
From the late 1970s on, Smith began to sporadically appear in films. His one notable big-screen role was that of soft-spoken florist-turned-police cadet Moses Hightower, later promoted to sergeant and finally lieutenant in the Police Academy movies of the mid-to-late 1980s.
These were inane slapstick fare that was generally derided by critics; the first movie in the series, however, became a major box office hit, collecting more $81 million in 1984 (or about $192 million today). Hugh Wilson directed, and Steve Guttenberg and Kim Cattrall starred.
Among Smith’s other film roles were those in Nico Mastorakis’ The Naked Truth (1993), Ezio Greggio’s The Silence of the Hams (1994), and Shedrack Anderson III’s Blood River (2010). He also costarred with former NFL player Dick Butkus in the short-lived television series Blue Thunder.
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*last modified in July 2025.