Albert Salmi Biography

Brawny, Brooklyn-born Albert Salmi was trained in the late '40s at the Actors Studio and American Theatre Wing. Extremely busy on-stage and live TV in the 1950s, Salmi was seen in such roles as the dimwitted "doom-ded" ballplayer in the 1956 TV adaptation of Mark Harris' Bang the Drum Slowly. His first significant Broadway appearance was as the overexuberant rodeo star in William Inge's Bus Stop. Salmi made his film debut as the epileptic Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov (1958). Equally adept at buffoonery and brutality, Salmi often found himself cast in the 1960s as comic relief on one TV program, only to appear later in the week as a sadistic gunslinger or slavering serial killer on another show. He was also seen on a weekly basis as Yadkin on the Daniel Boone series of the 1960s and as Pete Ritter on the 1970s cop series Petrocelli. Albert Salmi apparently killed both himself and his estranged, terminally ill wife in 1990. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi