Gregory Sierra article, "The Morning Record", 12/6/1975

[catlover79]

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id...y+sierra&hl=en

I just found this!! It's always great to read and learn more about my guy.


The Morning Herald, December 6, 1975

HOLLYWOOD – Things are going well for Gregory Sierra these days. As a part of the Barney Miller company on ABC – he plays Chano – he’s in a hit, and that’s always nice. Moreover, the network is talking in terms of a pilot movie, in which he’ll star.

“I’m not sure what it will be,” Sierra says, “although they tell me it’s something set in a hospital.”

So life is good for Sierra at the moment. And this is doubly rewarding because it wasn’t always thus.

He’s a kid from New York’s Spanish Harlem where life was not always a bowl of petunias. In fact, Sierra started out with a bunch of strikes against him.

He’s a Puerto Rican – as is his character, Chano – but he was born in New York. When he was about six, both his father and mother left. For a kid, it’s hard when one parent or the other deserts the home, so you can imagine what it is when both of them leave.

“I learned to live with it,” he says, simply.

After his parents moved out, he was raised by an aunt. And, he says, there was an uncle who came over to see him every week.

“He was a very jolly and very nice man,” Sierra says. “Later, I used him not only as the model but the namesake of the character I played on Sanford & Son, Julio Fuentes.”

As a kid, Sierra flirted with the gangs that then flourished in his seedy section of the city. He was a member of the Sea Hawks, a splinter group of the notorious Dragons. Fortunately, he survived that, too.

Early in his professional life, he decided to become a singer.

“I wasn’t very good,” he says now. “I could only sing when I was high, so I got high a lot of the time.”

He worked as a car washer and in various other menial jobs, to support his liquor bills which were necessary, at the time, for his singing career. And liquor grew to be a major problem in his life.

“Drinking was a long-time trouble for me,” he says. “But I’ve kicked it. I went off the stuff with a grand last stand – I downed a quart of Courvoisier.”

One day, he went with a friend who was auditioning at an acting school. It’s the old story – the friend didn’t make it, but the instructor, Sal Dane, liked what Sierra did. He became an ex-singer at that moment.

He did a lot of off-Broadway plays, one on-Broadway play as a standby Che never went on. Then he came to Hollywood to get married. The marriage didn’t last, but the Hollywood career did.

Now a successful character actor, he’s played almost all nationalities, even an American. He and his current wife, Susan, live in Malibu.

“She’s opening up new vistas for me,” he says. “For one thing, we go camping. It’s kind of scary for a kid from the sidewalks of New York. The first time, I kept complaining of being cold. Susan assured me it wasn’t cold, it was really warm. I finally identified the source of the cold – it was fear.”

[catlover79]

Before reading this, I had no idea that he'd had a drinking problem OR that both of his parents up and left him. I read in another article that he'd been largely raised by his grandmother and aunt, but I'd always assumed that he'd been orphaned. How terrible to have to go through that...and a few short years after this article was written, his wife Susan took her own life. To go through all that and thrive...God bless him!!!