Valentin de Vargas

Valentin de Vargas was an American actor who appeared in films and television from the 1950s onward. Born in Albuquerque, he served in the United States Army, and his first film work came in The Blackboard Jungle, which he made while still a student at Loyola Marymount University after he saw a notice at the school and tried out for a part as a high school student in the film. A string of small and often uncredited parts in films and television series followed before Touch of Evil (1958), in which he played a gangster threatening Janet Leigh. He traveled to Mexico to appear as one of the bandits in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and joined an international cast in Howard Hawks's Hatari! (1962) as Luis Francisco Garcia Lopez. Through the 1960s he worked steadily on television, in programs such as Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, The Streets of San Francisco and Dallas. He died in 2013.