Gregory Sierra, a longtime actor who appeared on television shows and films, mainly in “Barney Miller” and “Sanford and Son”, died on January 4 in Laguna Woods, California, of cancer. He was 83 years old.
Born in New York, Sierra’s discovery came when he was cast as Julio Fuentes, Fred Sanford’s Puerto Rican neighbor of Redd Foxx in “Sanford and Son”.
After he left that series, Sierra played one of the original detectives who worked in the diverse 12th District in Greenwich Village on ABC’s “Barney Miller” program. He was pulled from the series after the second season to star in “AES Hudson Street”, a comedy about a frantic emergency room, but it only lasted six episodes.
Sierra also appeared as a radical Jewish vigilante in “Archie Is Branded”, a 1973 episode of CBS’s “All in the Family”, in which someone paints a swastika on Archie’s door. The episode, which ends in silence, was one of the most memorable in the long series.
Born on January 25, 1937 in Spanish Harlem, Sierra attended Cathedral College at Immaculada Conceição in Brooklyn. After school, he worked with the National Shakespeare Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival before moving to Los Angeles, where he started getting small television roles and supporting roles in films like “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”, “Getting Straight , ”“ Papillon ”and“ The Towering Inferno. ”
He has had recurring roles on several television shows, including “Hill Street Blues”, “Miami Vice” and “Murder, She Wrote”, and has made appearances in a number of other series.
“Miami Vice” star Edward James Olmos tweeted who read news of Sierra’s death and cried. “Gregory Sierra will be with us forever,” wrote Olmos. “Those who knew him. Your laugh. Your intelligence. Your kindness. His extraordinary artistic ability. He was a friend, a Mentor, a force of nature that I was very grateful to have known and worked with. REST IN PEACE.”