Mario Roccuzzo

Mario Roccuzzo was an American actor who started out in the early 1960s and was best known for episodic work on television police dramas. Born in Boston, he grew up with parents who acted in an East Coast Italian repertory company, and he took acting classes at night with Jeff Corey and Corey Allen. In 1960 he talked his way into director John Frankenheimer's office at Columbia Studios and asked for an audition, which led to his first role as Diavolo in The Young Savages. He went on to play Nicky on The Untouchables and was typecast as a bad guy before moving into a wider range of police and crime shows, dramas and comedies. His television appearances included Hill Street Blues, Barney Miller, NYPD Blue, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. He had more than 250 television roles and a dozen feature films, and in 1958 he wrote the Eddie Cochran rock song Nervous Breakdown. He died in 2021.