Carmen Argenziano
Carmen Argenziano is an actor, born 1943.
Argenziano came out of Sharon, Pennsylvania, and started at the bottom of the 1970s exploitation market: a tribunal defendant in Punishment Park in 1971, an undercover wrestler in Caged Heat, a supermarket manager in Crazy Mama, Jack McGurn in Capone. He kept working that circuit through the 1980s in Graduation Day, Naked Vengeance, Dangerously Close and Red Scorpion, which is an apprenticeship you cannot buy.
What he became was one of American film's most reliable institutional men. Cops, captains, generals, district attorneys, doctors, priests: the person in the room whose job is to explain the rules and absorb the hero's anger. D.A. Paul Rudolph in The Accused, Molina in Stand and Deliver, General Boone in Broken Arrow, Captain Penelli in Blue Streak, the defence lawyer in Identity, Father Silvano Bentivoglio in Angels & Demons. He gave those parts a weight most character actors skip, playing them as men with procedures and a bad week rather than as obstacles.
Television gave him more room. He was best known for Jacob Carter on Stargate SG-1, a role this catalogue does not carry, and had recurring runs on Booker, L.A. Law, Melrose Place and The Young and the Restless. There are odd corners too: he voiced K.I.T.T. in Knight Rider 2000, and finally got a title role in a 2015 Don Quixote, four decades in.
The extract counts more than 73 films and around 100 television appearances. He died in 2019, aged 75.
Movies (42)
- Identity (2003)
- Angels & Demons (2009)
- Broken Arrow (1996)
- Caged Heat (1974)
- Swordfish (2001)
- Blue Streak (1999)
- Singularity (2017)
- The Accused (1988)
- Stand and Deliver (1988)
- Sudden Impact (1983)
- Unlawful Entry (1992)
- Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)
- Don Juan DeMarco (1994)
- Into the Night (1985)
- Red Scorpion (1988)
- The Institute (2017)
- Future World (2018)
- Knight Rider 2000 (1991)
- Bella Mafia (1997)
- Dangerously Close (1986)
- Capone (1975)
- Punishment Park (1971)
- The Single Moms Club (2014)
- A Murder of Crows (1999)
- The Mercenary (2020)
- When a Stranger Calls (1979)
- Momentum (2003)
- Perry Mason: The Case of the Skin-Deep Scandal (1993)
- The First Power (1990)
- Naked Vengeance (1985)
TV (17)
- House (2004)
- CSI: NY (2004)
- Viper (1994)
- Lou Grant (1977)
- The Greatest American Hero (1981)
- Booker (1989)
- Blind Justice (2005)
- Dialing Home (2017)
- Mr. Merlin (1981)
- Shades of L.A. (1990)
- Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1996)
- Meteor (2009)
- The Powers of Matthew Star (1982)
- Monty Nash (1971)
- The New Odd Couple (1982)
- The Court (2002)
- Level 9 (2000)
Where to start with Carmen Argenziano
The Accused is the one to see first. It is a serious film about a rape trial, and Argenziano plays the prosecutor's superior, the man who explains why the case is going to be argued the way it is, which is exactly the kind of role he made a career out of making bearable.
Stand and Deliver pairs with it well, and Punishment Park shows him at the very start of it all, in a genuinely radical piece of 1971 pseudo-documentary that almost nobody saw at the time. For the popcorn end, Broken Arrow and Identity both use his authority as shorthand, and Angels & Demons hands him the best-dressed version of it. His single episode of House is worth ten minutes of your time as a demonstration of how quickly he could establish a whole man and then hand the scene over.