Tomás Milián

Tomás Milián (born March 3, 1932) is a Cuban-American actor best known for having worked extensively in Italian films from the early 1960s to the late 1980s.

Tomás Milián was born in Havana as Tomás Quintín Rodríguez, the son of a Cuban general. His father was arrested and jailed after Fulgencio Batista took power in Cuba: he later committed suicide. Milián then decided to leave Cuba and pursue his wishes of being an actor. He settled in the United States to study at New York's Actors Studio and later became an American citizen.

After starting a career in the United States, he went to Italy in 1958 to take part to a theater festival in Spoleto. He eventually decided to relocate to Italy, where he lived for over 25 years, gradually becoming a very successful performer.

Although his voice was dubbed most of the time by Ferruccio Amendola, Milián wrote his own lines in Roman slang. Milián's inventive use of romanesco (roman dialect) made him somewhat of a cult performer in Italy, even though his later films were critically panned. Bruno Corbucci, the director of many of these films commented, "At the cinemas as soon as Tomás Milián appeared on the screen, when he made a wisecrack and in the heaviest situations, then it was a pandemonium, it was like being at the stadium."

As he grew older, Milián decided to go back to the United States. He appeared in Sidney Pollack's Havana, Steven Spielberg's Amistad, Steven Soderbergh's Traffic as well as Andy García's The Lost City, about Revolutionary Cuba. He has also played many roles on stage. He portrayed Generalisimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina in the film version of Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Feast of the Goat.

Tomás Milián resides in Miami, Florida.

Thank you, "Italian Wise-Guy"