Famed, Gravelly-Voiced Actor Robert Loggia Passes Away

Veteran and Oscar-nominated actor Robert Loggia, who has graced the big and small screens for decades in everything from TV series Mancuso, FBI, to films Scarface, Big, and Independence Day, passed away Friday. He was 85.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Loggia’s wife of 33 years, Audrey, said the actor had been battling Alzheimer’s for the past five years.

Loggia is perhaps most recognizable in films playing the “tough guy” roles, his hoarse, gravelly voice perfectly intimidating for the parts, but his catalog of roles was wide ranging.

Loggia has, according to IMDB, over 100 film and TV credits to his name starting back from the early 1950s, but earned only one Academy Award nomination, that for playing a seedy detective  in the 1985 film, Jagged Edge, alongside Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges.

Other notable roles included the famous piano dance scene with Tom Hanks in Big; the no-nonsense coach in Necessary Roughness, as Frank Lopez in Scarface; Richard Gere’s womanizing father in An Officer and a Gentlemen; and General William Grey in the cinema blockbuster, Independence Day.