Richard Libertini (May 21, 1933 - January 7, 2016) was an American actor who appeared in S3's Twelve Angry Appliances as grasping repair man Augustus J. Strand who gets into a feud with Mindy over her record player, and suffers Mork's own particular brand of justice.
Biography[]
Richard Joseph Libertini was born in E. Cambridge, Massachusetts, to parents who had come to America from southern Italy. Having grown up in a household where both Italian and English were spoken, he developed an ear for foreign accents. A facility he would later use to advantage on stage and in films.
He graduated from Emerson College in Boston, and for a while earned a living as a trumpet player in the Boston area. Later, he moved to New York, where he teamed up with two former college classmates, MacIntyre Dixon and Lynda Segal, to create an off-Broadway revue called "Stewed Prunes." (This was during the coffee house revolution in the 1960s. Bob Dylan was playing around the corner.) The show was quite successful and after running a year in New York they took it on the road. While playing Chicago, he was asked to join the renowned Second City Improvisational Theatre Group, an association which continues to the present, and from which is acting career stemmed.
Libertini married actress Melinda Dillon on September 30, 1963, and had one child with her, Richard. They divorced in 1978. He passed away on January 7, 2016, at age 82, in Venice, California, from cancer with which he had been diagnosed two years prior.
Career[]
He spent a number of years doing stage work in New York and was an original cast member of The Mad Show, a 1966 Off-Broadway musical-comedy produced by Mad magazine, among many others) he eventually moved to L.A. where he began doing films. Though he returned to Broadway and from October 2011 through January 2012, Libertini appeared on Broadway as a rabbi in "Honeymoon Motel," the Woody Allen-penned segment of Relatively Speaking
His first film appearances were in The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968),(Woody Allen's Don't Drink the Water (1969) Catch-22 (1970). and Paul Sills' Story Theatre (1971) He played a traveling vaudevillian in Terence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) inThe In-Laws (1979) he played General Garcia, an insane Latin-American dictator whose closest advisor was a cartoon face drawn on his own hand a la Señor Wences. The greengrocer George W. Geezil in Robert Altman's Popeye (1980) with Robin Williams. Nosh, an electronics expert who is the childhood best friend of Burt Reynolds's character, in Sharky's Machine (1981). A Hispanic priest in Best Friends (1982), the servant Giuseppe in Unfaithfully Yours (1984), spiritual advisor Prahka Lasa ("Back in Bowl!") in All of Me (1984), Chevy Chase's character's doubting editor in Fletch (1985), and the 1989 sequel Fletch Lives, and a rabbi in Lethal Weapon 4 (1998).His final film role was that of a fisherman in the 2011 film Dolphin Tale.
On television, his first screen credit was in Marlo Thomas's 'That Girl' (1970), followed up by the Mary Tyler Moore Show (1971), the Jeffersons, and a recurring role on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976). He also guested on Tabitha, the show Pam Dawber just missed out on, prior to Mork & MIndy., and he became a series regular in the first season of Soap as the Godfather. He appeared as 3 different characters in Barney Miller. He also appeared in "Evaluation" (1978) and "Middle Age" (January 1979). He guest starred in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Accession" as a Bajoran named Akorem Laan, and in the Sonny with a Chance episode "Dakota's Revenge" as Izzy, an insane mechanic. He also voiced Wally Llama on Animaniacs, and starred in three short-lived sitcoms: Family Man (1988), in which he played a middle-aged comedy writer who married a much 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 appeared on the TV show Supernatural, and his last screen appearances came in the show Aquarius in 2015.
Mork & Mindy[]
Richard Libertini's next screen credit immediately after returning from Malta and the shooting of Popeye with Robin Williams under Robert Altman, was his role on Mork & Mindy as Augustus J. Strand, who after falling foul of Mindy's ire for not doing his job properly is subjected to trial by Mork and the unfixed items in his shop in Twelve Angry Appliances.