Tomás Milian came to New York from his native Cuba in the early ’50s. He arrived with little more than a dream: to be admitted to Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio. He was one of only three young actors to be chosen that year. Both Jean Cocteau and Gian-Carlo Menotti saw Milian in his first New York stage appearance, and then subsequently invited him to the Spoleto Festival in Italy. There he starred in Cocteau’s The Poet and the Muse.

Italy became Mr. Milian’s home for more than 30 years, during which time he starred in over 100 movies ranging from dramatic roles to romantic and broad comedies to action pictures. Among his favorites are Identification of a Woman, Antonioni’s last great directorial effort in which Milian starred, and which was shown at the New York Film Festival; Visconti’s Bocaccio ’70; Moravia’s Time of Indifference, in which his co-stars were Paulette Goddard, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters and Claudia Cardinale; and Bertolucci’s Luna, in which he co-starred with Jill Clayburgh, and for which he received the Nastro d’Argento, the Italian equivalent of the American Oscar. Milian achieved overwhelming popularity in Europe when he created and starred in Monezza, the story of a tragi-comic rogue cop. The film was so successful that it spawned a dozen sequels, all of which still play on Italian TV and have become part of European pop culture.

Since returning to the United States, Mr. Milian has worked with many outstanding American directors including Sydney Pollack (Havana), Oliver Stone (JFK), Steven Spielberg (Amistad), James Gray (The Yards) and John Frankenheimer (Burning Season for HBO). He also played the role of General Salazar, the drug lord, in Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning feature, Traffic. After Lost City, Mr. Milian returned to Santo Domingo to star in The Feast of the Goat, an epic based on the novel by the renowned Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. The Feast of the Goat depicts the rise and fall of the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, whom Milian portrays.

Filmography: Amistad, Dont Torture A Duckling, The Lost City (2005), Traffic,

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