The New York resident also portrayed a Jewish vigilante in a sobering episode of ‘All in the Family’.
Gregory Sierra, who loved himself with sitcom fans in the 1970s as the genius Julio Fuentes Sanford and Son and the passionate Sgt. Miguel “Chano” Amenguale aan Barney Miller, died. He was 83.
Sierra Voll, family spokesman, died on January 4 in Laguna Woods, California, after a battle with cancer The Hollywood Reporter.
A resident of Spanish Harlem in New York, Sierra, also made a memorable appearance as a radical Jewish vigilante in ‘Archie Is Branded’, a 1973 episode of CBS ‘ Everyone in the family it was one of the most shocking episodes of the sitcom. And he played Carlos “El Puerco” Valdez, a counter-revolutionary in Malaguay who kidnaps Jessica (Katherine Helmond) on ABC Soap.
His breakthrough in his career came in 1972 when he was selected on the NBCs as the comfortable Julio, the rubbish Fred Sanford’s Puerto Rican neighbor. Sanford and Son, developed by Everyone in the family creators Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear. Introduced in the second season of ‘The Puerto Ricans Are Coming’, Julio was an easy target for the fierce, generous Fred (Redd Foxx).
“Do you know what the Puerto Rican national anthem is?” We also take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island … “Fred complained to his son, Lamont (Demond Wilson), when he heard who was moving in next door.” Julio Fuentes? It does not sound like a name – it sounds like something you get from drinking their water. “
After leaving the series, Sierra played one of the original detectives who worked on ABCs from the diverse 12th District in Greenwich Village. Barney Miller, when he joined Hal Linden, Abe Vigoda, Ron Glass, Max Gail and Jack Soo when the show premiered in 1975.
A proud Puerto Rican New Yorker, Sierra’s Chano, was dedicated and undoubtedly a policeman who invested himself emotionally in his work. Nowhere is it better shown than in the episode “The Hero” in 1975, in which his character kills two suspects while preventing a robbery. His colleagues believe he deserves praise, but Chano feels differently, and he breaks out and cries.
“I think Barney Miller is much more real than any other cop show,” Sierra said in an interview for the 1976 book TV talk 2: TV area exploration. “The people in the program have real problems. Kojak is never worried. He knows he made it. Everything is always under control on the program. You never see the frustrations of policing or the kind of joke that happens among real policemen. These are the kind of things we point out. Barney Miller. ”
Chano was written out of the series at the end of the second season so Sierra could play in a new sitcom from Barney Miller creator Danny Arnold, this one in a savage New York emergency. AES Hudsonstraat debuted in 1977 but is canceled after six episodes.
Only two weeks after the series was shot, his second wife, Susan, committed suicide. “We were divorced at her request,” Sierra said in 1978. “We were together for six years, and her death makes me feel guilty and sad.”
Sierra was born on January 25, 1937 and was raised by his aunt after his parents let him down at the age of six. “When I was a baby, we were a typical Puerto Rican family,” he said. “Everyone lived together – grandma, grandpa, aunt, two uncles, mom, dad … everyone gradually went their separate ways.”
The neighborhood was rough, and Sierra flirted with the gang as a teenager and was cut once. He attended the Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, a Brooklyn preschool for boys focused on the priesthood. “I would not become a priest!” he said. “It was hard to study during the day to be a priest and to plan gang warfare at night!”
Sierra was with a friend who was auditioning for a play when the teacher invited him to try improvisation and was impressed. Eventually he collaborated with the National Shakespeare Company and at the New York Shakespeare Festival, appeared in non-Broadway productions and briefly assisted Broadway in The ninety days mistress in 1967.
Moving to Los Angeles, he makes his on-screen debut in a non-speaking role as a jeweler in a 1969 episode of It takes a thief and then appears on other programs such as Medical center, The High Chaparral, Mod Squad and The flying nun. He played an Armenian on Kung Fu, an Italian on Banacek, a Native American on Rifle smoke and a Hawaiian on Hawaii Five-O.
Meanwhile, he has supporting roles in functions such as Under the planet of the apes (1970), Get straight (1970), Papillon (1973), The Towering Inferno (1974) and the long-threatened Orson Welles project The other side of the wind, finally released in 2018.
Sierra modeled Julio on Sanford and Sun to an uncle who was “a very cheerful and very kind man,” he once said. The more Fred tried to get under Julio’s skin, the more Julio gained the upper hand.
Sierra has appeared in 12 episodes over three seasons. By the fifth season, the character had moved away. (The Sanfords bought his property and turned it into a boarding house.)
“The loss of Gregory Sierra as Julio at the start of the fifth season (he was gradually written off even during the fourth season) spelled out the first signs of trouble for the show,” Paul Mavis wrote in a 2008 entry for the DVD -website. Talk. “His character functioned a lot like George Jefferson as Archie Bunker’s closest neighbor – a constant racial annoyance – and without the sweet Julio getting one over Fred time and time again (and without being there as a set-up for some of Foxx’s more outrageous insults), the show has lost much of its underlying edge. ”
On his episode of Everyone in the family, after a swastika was painted on his front door, Archie (Carroll O’Connor) is visited by Sierra Benjamin, Paul Benjamin. The vigilantes want to chase the responsible group – and Archie has no problem with that – but is killed by a car bomb that explodes just outside the house. This is presumably the only episode of the famous sitcom that ends with loud silence rather than applause from the studio audience.
Sierra played such characters as ADA Alvarez Hill Street Blues, Commander Paco Pico to Zorro and Son, It. Lieutenant Lou Rodriguez on Miami vise and Lieutenant Gabriel Caceres about Murder, she wrote. He also showed up Quincy, ME, Simon and Simon, Magnum, PI, Growing pains, The X-Files, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Walker, Texas Ranger.
His resume on the big screen is also included The trouble with spies (1987), Honey, I blew up the kid (1992), Hot shots! Divide Two (1993), A solid dirty shame (1994), Vampires (1998) and Mafia! (1998).
Survivors include his wife, Helene.