In this neighborhood, Henry Silva is the toughest kid on the block and has been for nearly 50 years.
When it comes to playing hoodlums, thugs and assorted godfathers, Silva is the capo di tutti capo. How he’s lasted this long in the Hollywood casting wars, without getting whacked, is anyone’s guess–but talent and razor-sharp cheek bones probably have a lot to do with it.
“Henry Silva’s like an icon to me,” says director Jim Jarmusch, who has installed the 70-year-old Harlem native as a cartoon-addicted mob boss in his latest minimalist epic, “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Sumarai.” “I probably first became fascinated with him in `Johnny Cool,’ when I saw it on late-night television in the ’70s.”
In coming up with the perfect foil for Forest Whitaker’s new-age contract killer in “Ghost Dog”–a moody fusion of Eastern philosophy, gangster flicks and hip-hop culture–Jarmusch wanted to make a comment on Hollywood iconography and provide a bit of smart fun for urban audiences and independent film buffs. Silva was an easy choice as head of the Vargo crime family, which is run from the back of a Chinese restaurant somewhere in New Jersey.
“Henry’s face is almost like a mask, but the things that do flicker across it can be very interesting,” Jarmusch continues. “There’s a lot going on, but it’s a less-is-more situation. We wanted his character to be like the emperor of the family.
“Ray reads books, and he understands the place of his dysfunctional little mob family as warrior class. I think it’s perfectly normal for Henry Silva to play a character like that.”
Silva returns the compliment.
“Jim reminds me of European directors,” the veteran of nearly 100 feature films says. “He called us in to talk about our characters and exchange ideas. I felt I’d known him for a long time.
“Because of his lack of pretension, there wasn’t any gulf between actor and director.”
In “Ghost Dog,” Whitaker is the embodiment of an urban warrior. He raises pigeons on the roof of a tenement, where he also eats, sleeps, listens to music, shapes weapons of intimate destruction and studies the 18th Century warrior text, “Hagakure: The Book of the Sumarai.” The battle is joined when Ray Vargo decides Ghost Dog, whose loyalty rests with a mob soldier who once saved his life, must take the fall for a botched assignment, and he sends his crew out to clean up the mess. After the boys turn Ghost Dog’s pigeon coop into a free-fire zone, he pumps up the volume of his hip-hop muse–the RZH, of Wu-Tang Clan–and goes into action.
Silva says that playing Ray Vargo was at once exceedingly familiar and wonderfully liberating. He could do a passable mob boss in his sleep, but some offbeat Jarmusch touches–vintage cartoons, a “Rashomon”-reading daughter–helped loosen him up.
In fact, he even contributed a rather unusual ad-lib.
“He has Ray do this moose call, when he’s told about Ghost Dog,” says Jarmusch, laughing at the memory. “It was never discussed. It just came out of him, and it took me aback.”
Silva may look like a guy who arrived fully formed one day at Central Casting and has been punching a timeclock ever since. He is, however, someone who trained at the famed Actors Studio–alongside James Dean, Paul Newman, Rip Torn and Shelley Winters, among others–and received a Tony nomination for “A Hatful of Rain.”
The titles in his long and varied film resume include “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Sharky’s Machine,” “Dick Tracy,” “Code of Silence,” “Mad Dog Time” and “The End of Violence.” On television, he’s still remembered with great fondness as Little Charlie on “The Untouchables,” and he’s done the voice of Bane on Batman and Superman cartoons.
“I see a lot of actors who play heavies, but they always play the same heavies,” he explains when asked to describe how he’s lasted so long in the business. “I have a seven-minute reel of clips from my movies, and none of the guys are the same. I don’t always go to the same place, because that would be boring.
“I read the page and it tells me who the character is. I don’t intrude myself on the page–I let it affect me–but I don’t play it safe either.”
Silva, who now lives high up in the Hollywood Hills, grew up on 116th Street in Harlem. The neighborhood proved to be a fertile breeding ground for actors, including Burt Lancaster, Tony Franciosa and Ben Gazzara.
His mother wanted him to become a letter carrier–and he still looks as if he’s capable of going postal at a moment’s notice–but he was determined to act.
“I auditioned at the Actors Studio,” Silva recalls, noting that he did make his mom happy by once taking a temporary job at the post office. “Usually it takes them a few months to make a decision on you, but they called me back in three weeks. After that, I spent six years knocking on doors, and hearing, `No,’ before I got a job as an extra on a television show for $5.”
The star on that show turned out to be Gertrude Berg, one of the early giants of the medium.
“I was playing an Indian at Thanksgiving, and she starts talking to him in Yiddish,” Silva says, cracking a smile. “Years later, I was in a show called `Camino Real,’ written by Tennessee Williams and directed by Elia Kazan, which was a flop, and Gertrude was in it.
“She came up to me and said, `Oh, my God, my Indian!'”
Several years later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he befriended Frank Sinatra and became a silent partner in the Rat Pack.
“One day, many years ago, I was driving down Sunset Boulevard in the first car I ever owned, a Chevy convertible,” says Silva. “I pulled up at a stoplight and heard someone say, `Henry, I like you in movies,’ and it was Frank. I had just finished making a picture at MGM with Audrey Hepburn, and he was there making `Some Came Running.’
“I paid him a visit on the set, and he asked me if I wanted to be in his next picture. That’s it.”
That offer led to a part in the quintessential Kennedy-era ring-a-ding-ding adventure, “Ocean’s Eleven,” and three other projects with Sinatra. The gig also had some fringe benefits. “I was always at Frank’s house having dinner,” Silva says. “I was the only guy who didn’t smoke or drink. Frank never called me on it, but the girls … oh, my.”
