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Gabriel Dell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gabriel Dell (born Gabriel Marcel Dell Vecchio) (October 4, 1919 – July 3, 1988) was an American actor; one of the more unusual members of what came to be known as the East Side Kids/Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys.
Born in Brooklyn, Dell was, perhaps, the most successful of all of the gang away from their films. Dell almost made his stage debut a few years before Dead End when he and his sister were slated for roles in The Good Earth with Alla Nazimova and Claude Raines.
By the time he was cast in Dead End he had changed his last name to Dell, and after achieving fame with the other youthful thugs, Dell moved back and forth between Warner Bros., Universal and Monogram during the guys' heyday, appearing as a member of the Dead End Kids, East Side Kids and The Bowery Boys before leaving the series in 1950.
He won a role in Tickets Please on Broadway, and also toured with former gang buddy Huntz Hall in a nightclub partnership that eventually caused them both to become divorced. Dell spent the next three years at the Actor's Studio, married and had a son in 1956.
In the late fifties Dell joined the now-legendary stock company of The Steve Allen Show, along with Don Knotts, Louis Nye, Tom Poston, Bill Dana, Pat Harrington, Dayton Allen and Skitch Henderson. During this period Gabe developed a Bela Lugosi imitation that has since become the "official" Lugosi imitation (see any of the recordings done during this period.).
Over the next few years Dell appeared in several critically acclaimed productions on and off Broadway, and supplied all of the voices for an LP recording of "When Famous Monsters Speak". In 1964 Dell won the role that brought him to critical and public fame again: the title character in Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window.
Dell had several other hits, a second son, a third wife, and roles on several prominent TV series in the fifties and sixties. In the latter part of his life, Dell also appeared as the propietor of The Corner Bar (1972) on ABC, a major supporting role in "Earthquake", " a 1976 pilot, Rusko, and A Year at the Top, in which he played opposite Mickey Rooney as the Devil's son.
Dell died in North Hollywood of leukemia in 1988 at age 69.
