With his piercing eyes, pockmarked face and brooding air, Bronx-born character actor Marc Lawrence portrayed a memorable array of menacing gangsters over seven decades.
In 1935, he played Lefty Croger, a gang henchman in the Paul Muni crime drama "Dr. Socrates."
In 1948, he played Ziggy, Edward G. Robinson's fedora-wearing fellow mobster who shows up during a lull in the storm to buy a shipment of counterfeit money in "Key Largo."
In 1971, he appeared as one of the three black-suited Slumber Inc. henchmen who tossed Plenty O'Toole (Lana Wood) through a high-rise hotel window into a pool in the James Bond classic "Diamonds Are Forever."
Looking out of the window afterward, Sean Connery as Bond says, "Exceptionally fine shot."
A deadpan Lawrence responds, "I didn't know it was a pool down there."
Lawrence, a stage-trained actor who fell victim to the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s, died of natural causes Sunday at his home in Palm Springs, his family said. He was 95.
Beginning with an uncredited bit part as Gene Raymond's cellmate in "If I Had a Million" in 1932, Lawrence appeared in more than 175 movies. Among them are "The Ox-Bow Incident," "This Gun for Hire," "Cloak and Dagger," "The Asphalt Jungle," "Marathon Man," "Foul Play," "The Man With the Golden Gun," "The Big Easy" and "Ruby."
In a notable change of pace, he delivered a touching performance as a mute hillbilly in the 1941 drama "The Shepherd of the Hills."
But it was as a movie heavy that he made his mark, and more than 60 years after arriving in Hollywood, he was still being cast in such parts as mafia kingpin Carlo Gambino in HBO cable TV's 1996 biographical drama "Gotti."
"Lawrence belonged to that exclusive club of character players so good, so distinctive, that the minute he entered a scene, you knew exactly whom you were dealing with: In his case a baaaad egg cold enough to freeze Lowe's State [theater] in a summer heat wave," film historian and Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne wrote in the Hollywood Reporter in 1998.
Born Max Goldsmith, Lawrence began acting in New York. "I was the best actor in our school," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1998. "I could memorize faster than anyone, and my old uncle in the Yiddish theater said I had stage guts, so I guess he inspired me."
