The New York native also played a Jewish watchman in a troubling episode of ‘All in the Family’.
Gregory Sierra, who won the sympathy of sitcom fans from the 1970s as the genius Julio Fuentes in Sanford and Son and the passionate Sgt. Miguel “Chano” Amenguale in Barney Miller, died. He was 83 years old.
Sierra died on January 4 in Laguna Woods, California, after a battle with cancer, said family spokesman Rick Voll The Hollywood Reporter.
A native of New York’s Spanish Harlem, Sierra also made a memorable appearance as a radical Jewish watchman in “Archie Is Branded”, a 1973 episode of CBS. Everyone in the family that was one of the sitcom’s most shocking episodes. And he played Carlos “El Puerco” Valdez, a counter-revolutionary from Malaguay who kidnaps Jessica (Katherine Helmond) on ABC Soap.
The big breakthrough in his career came in 1972, when he was cast as the relaxed Julio, Puerto Rican neighbor of junkman Fred Sanford, on NBC Sanford and Son, Developed by Everyone in the family creators Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear. Presented in the second season episode “The Puerto Ricans Are Coming”, Julio was an easy target for the eccentric and fanatical Fred (Redd Foxx).
“Do you know what the national anthem of Puerto Rico is? ‘Let’s stay with Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too …'” Fred complains to his son, Lamont (Demond Wilson), when he finds out who is moving to house next door. “Julio Fuentes? That doesn’t sound like any names – it sounds like something you earn by drinking their water.”
After he left that series, Sierra played one of the original detectives working outside the diverse 12th District in Greenwich Village at ABC’s Barney Miller, joining Hal Linden, Abe Vigoda, Ron Glass, Max Gail and Jack Soo when the show opened in 1975.
A proud Puerto Rican New Yorker, Sierra’s Chano was dedicated and fearless, a policeman who was emotionally involved in his work. Nowhere was this better displayed than in the 1975 episode “The Hero”, in which your character kills two suspects while avoiding an assault. His colleagues believe he deserves praise, but an anguished Chano thinks otherwise and passes out and cries.
“I think Barney Miller is much more real than any other police show,” Sierra said in an interview for the 1976 book. TV Talk 2: Exploring TV Territory. “The people on the show have real problems. Kojak never cares. He knows what is done. Everything is always under control in that show. You never see the frustrations of police work or the kind of joke that happens between real policemen. Those are the types of things that we show in Barney Miller. “
Chano was removed from the series at the end of the second season so that Sierra could star in a new sitcom for Barney Miller creator Danny Arnold, located in a frantic New York emergency room. AES Hudson Street premiered in 1977, but was canceled after six episodes.
Just two weeks after filming the series, his second wife, Susan, committed suicide. “We were separated by her will,” said Sierra in 1978. “We had been together for six years, and her death makes me feel guilty and also suffering.”
Born on January 25, 1937, Sierra was raised by his aunt after his parents abandoned him when he was 6 years old. “When I was a baby, we were a typical Puerto Rican family,” he said. “They all lived together – grandmother, grandfather, aunt, two uncles, mother, father … little by little everyone went on their way.”
The neighborhood was difficult and Sierra flirted with gang life as a teenager and was once stabbed. He attended Cathedral College at the Immaculate Conception, a Brooklyn prep school for boys seeking the priesthood. “I wasn’t going to be a priest!” he said. “It was difficult to study to be a priest during the day and go out to plan a gang war at night!”
Sierra was with a friend who was auditioning for an acting class when the teacher invited him to try improvisation and was impressed. Eventually, he worked with the National Shakespeare Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival, appeared in off-Broadway productions and, in brief contact with Broadway, was a replacement for The Lady of the Ninety Days in 1967.
He moved to Los Angeles, made his on-screen debut in a non-speaking role like about jewelry in a 1969 episode of It takes a thief and then appeared on other programs like medical Center, The high chaparral, Mod Squad and The flying nun. He played an Armenian in Kung Fu, an Italian in Banacek, a Native American in Gunsmoke and a Hawaiian in Hawaii Five-O.
In the meantime, he was getting supporting roles in resources like Below the planet of monkeys (1970), Staying straight (1970), Papillon (1973), The Towering Inferno (1974) and the long-term Orson Welles project The other side of the wind, finally released in 2018.
Sierra modeled Julio Sanford and Sun after an uncle who was “a very cheerful and very good man”, he said once. The more Fred tried to irritate Julio, the more Julio got the better of him.
Sierra appeared in 12 episodes over three seasons. In season five, the character had moved away. (The Sanfords bought their property and turned it into a pension.)
“The loss of Gregory Sierra as Julio at the beginning of the fifth season (he was constantly being eliminated even during the fourth season) represented the first signs of trouble for the show,” wrote Paul Mavis in a 2008 post for the Talar website DVD . “His character functioned very much like George Jefferson as Archie Bunker’s neighbor – a constant racial irritant – and without sweet Julio beating Fred over and over again (and without being there as a frame for some of Foxx’s most outrageous Insults. ), the show has lost much of its underlying advantage. ”
In his episode of Everyone in the family, after a swastika is painted on his front door, Archie (Carroll O’Connor) is visited by Paul Benjamin, of Sierra. The guard wants to go after the group in charge – and Archie has no problem with that – but is killed by a car bomb that explodes outside the house. It is believed to be the only episode of the famous sitcom to end with absolute silence, rather than applause from the studio audience.
Sierra started to play recurring characters like ADA Alvarez in Hill Street Blues, Commander Paco Pico at Zorro and son, Det. Lieutenant Lou Rodriguez in Miami Vice and Lieutenant Gabriel Cáceres about murder, she wrote. He also appeared in Quincy, ME, Simon & Simon, Magnum, PI, Growing Pains, The x file, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Walker, Texas Ranger.
His big screen resume also included The problem with spies (1987), Honey, I blew up the child (1992), Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993), A dirty shame (1994), Vampires (1998) and Mafia! (1998).
Survivors include his wife, Helene.