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Ben Piazza

Ben Piazza was the kind of character actor who could sharpen a scene without asking it to stop and admire him. Born in Little Rock on July 30, 1933, he worked across film, television and the stage, building a career filled with troubled men, authority figures and memorable supporting players. Piazza made his film debut in Sidney J. Furie’s Canadian drama A Dangerous Age in 1959, followed that same year by his Hollywood debut in The Hanging Tree. Although he signed five-year contracts with Warner Bros. and Gary Cooper’s production company, he did not appear in another film until No Exit in 1962. The uneven start eventually gave way to steady character work. In Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, Piazza played the violent boyfriend who scars Liza Minnelli’s character. He later appeared in The Candy Snatchers, The Bad News Bears, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and Nightwing. His best-known comic appearance came in John Landis’s The Blues Brothers, playing the wealthy restaurant patron confronted by Jake Blues, who offers to purchase the man’s wife and daughter. Piazza continued working through the 1980s in films including Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask, Clean and Sober and Guilty by Suspicion, released in 1991. Television gave him further room to operate. He appeared in a dramatic 1975 episode of Barnaby Jones, played Walt Driscoll during the sixth season of Dallas and had a three-month stint on the daytime soap Santa Barbara in 1986. Piazza also wrote plays and published the novel The Exact and Very Strange Truth in 1964. Set around an Italian-American boy coming of age in Little Rock, the book carried clear parallels to Piazza’s hometown, though he resisted treating it as a straightforward account of real people. He dedicated it to his close friend, playwright Edward Albee. Piazza died in 1991, leaving behind a body of screen work defined less by leading-man display than by the precise impact of a dependable character actor.