Frank Yaconelli Biography

Born in Italy, Frank Yaconelli emigrated to the U.S. after WWI, where he thrived in vaudeville as a monologist, dialectician, and comic musician. Yaconelli went to Hollywood in 1929, spending the next three decades playing innumerable character bits in such films as W.C. Fields' The Barber Shop (1933) and the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (1935). In the early '40s, he began showing up as comic relief in Tex Ritter's B-Westerns. Frank Yaconelli later played Pancho opposite Gilbert Roland's Cisco in a series of Cisco Kid Westerns for Monogram. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi