Frank Alvin Silvera (July 24, 1914 – June 11, 1970) was a Jamaican-born American character actor and theatrical director. [1] Born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in Boston, Silvera dropped out of law school in 1934 after winning his first stage role.

Frank Silvera. Actor: Killer's Kiss. He was a highly successful black actor/director in the 1950s and 1960s who - because of his light-skinned appearance - transcended race and ethnicity in his performances.

Jun 12, 1970 · PASADENA, Calif., June 11 (AP)—Frank Silvera, the actor, director and producer who played the role of a Mexican ranch owner on television's “High Chaparral” series, was accidentally...

Frank Silvera. Actor: Killer's Kiss. He was a highly successful black actor/director in the 1950s and 1960s who - because of his light-skinned appearance - transcended race and ethnicity in his performances.

Mar 29, 2009 · By the 1960s, Frank Silvera had become emotionally invested in the ongoing civil rights movement. He openly protested the demeaning roles given African American actors and actively expressed his dissatisfaction with racist and discriminatory practices in Hollywood and across America.

Frank Silvera ‘Fear and Desire’ (1952) Silvera was a multilingual, racially ambiguous, light-skinned, loose-textured man of Jamaican and Cuban descent, whose last name hinted at a possible Portuguese Jewish heritage.

Jul 24, 2024 · Silvera’s career was in a terrific place at the end of his life. He had an important recurring role as Don Sebastian Montoya on the tv show The High Chaparral (1967-70), and supported Burt Lancaster in a fourth-billed role in the western film Valdez is Coming (1971).

Frank Silvera, 56, the veteran character actor who spent a week at Fresno State College last fall in an aborted post as artist-in-residence, died earlier today in his home in Pasadena.

Jul 24, 2015 · Frank Alvin Silvera was one of the 20th century’s greatest character actors. Silvera was known as “the man with a thousand faces” because of his ability to play a wide array of roles due to his light-skinned appearance.

On July 24, 1914, actor, theatrical director, producer, and activist Frank Alvin Silvera was born in Kingston to a black Jamaican mother, Gertrude, and a white Jewish father, Alfred. At the age of 8, Frank, his brothers, and his mother moved to the United States, where they settled in …