American actor Mark Margolis, who appeared in numerous films and series, but who was best known to the younger audience as Hector “Tio” Salamanca from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, died at the age of 83.
Margolis was born in 1939 in Philadelphia. At the age of fourteen, he started attending Stella Adler’s acting school. His first role was in the porn film The Opening Of Misty Beethoven in 1979, but not in a porn role. Appearing in the Brian De Palma film Dressed to Kill, the director later gave him a more important role in Scarface, where he already played an assassin.
Margolis has appeared in six Darren Aronofsky films (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Source, The Pancrator, Black Swan Noah), the groundbreaking HBO series Oz, but many may know him as Ace Ventura’s unpleasant neighbor from the Jim Carrey comedy. There are even more from Breaking Bad: in the second part of the second season, he appeared as Salamanca in a wheelchair, who could only communicate with his facial expressions and an extremely annoying bell.
In 2012, he was nominated for an Emmy Award for the role, and in 2016 he played a younger Tio in the prequel series Better Call Saul. Margolis died after a brief illness in New York.
The Hollywood Reporter
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