Anne DeSalvo, the character actress who enjoyed a gangbusters career in the 1980s, was seen running errands in Los Angeles this week at the age of 77.
The Philadelphia born performer specialized in playing rough-hewn New Yorkers during her peak years. She worked with top-flight names including Jamie Lee Curtis, John Travolta, Whoopi Goldberg and Susan Sarandon.
The Daily Mail has contacted DeSalvo's representatives for comment.
She made an indelible impression in the 1981 comedy Arthur as Gloria, a prostitute hired by Dudley Moore's charmingly drunken playboy character.
Over the course of their shambolic night out, Arthur brings Gloria to an upscale restaurant and introduces her to his straitlaced aunt and uncle as a "princess" from "a very small country in the West Indies."
They are woken the next day by his tart-tongued butler Hobson, played by John Gielgud, for whom Gloria is only able to muster a bleary: "Hi."
"You obviously have a wonderful economy with words, Gloria," Hobson replies. "I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness."
Early life and breakthrough
DeSalvo was born in 1949 and grew up in Overbrook, which she later characterized as one of the "two big Italian ghettoes" of Philadelphia, via the New York Times.
After majoring in art at Temple University in her hometown, she struck out to New York to pursue an acting career but recalled she was tagged as "too ethnic."
"I went to open calls for a year and a half, but I never got to audition for anything major," said DeSalvo, who supported herself as an art teacher in her struggling years.
Her ship finally came in with an Obie-winning performance as an Italian American widow in Albert Innaurato's 1977 Broadway play Gemini.
"Lucille Pompi, the character I play, contains a little of my Aunt Rosie, a little of old Mrs C up the street, a little of a lot of things from my own Italian upbringing," she said.
Working with Woody Allen and television roles
By 1980, she was playing the sister of Woody Allen's filmmaker character in Stardust Memories, his affectionate spoof of Federico Fellini's 8½.
"That guy is, like, the best. When I met him we laughed for 20 minutes," she raved a decade later while discussing Allen to the Los Angeles Times.
She also held a recurring role on the final season of Taxi as Vicki. The character was the fiancée of the good-natured but dimwitted cabbie Tony, played by Tony Danza.
DeSalvo has confessed she was "usually the shrew" in her pictures. One of those was the 1983 action comedy DC Cab, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Mr T, Adam Baldwin, Gary Busey, Max Gail and a young Bill Maher.
Another was My Favorite Year, led by Peter O'Toole in an Oscar-nominated performance as an over-the-hill Old Hollywood star. DeSalvo was slotted into the supporting part of a young, snappy TV writer.
1980s film career
DeSalvo reunited with Taxi's Marilu Henner for the 1985 picture Perfect, a send-up of the fitness-obsessed culture in Los Angeles. She worked alongside Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta in the film.
The picture also featured Saturday Night Live original cast member Laraine Newman, the mother of Hannah Einbinder, and Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner.
Also in 1985, she played the cuckolded wife of a murdered dentist in Compromising Positions. That film was fronted by Susan Sarandon as a bored homemaker who gets coaxed back into her former profession of journalism as a result of the homicide.
She then played a detective in the 1987 heist comedy Burglar, in which Whoopi Goldberg and Bobcat Goldthwait played partners in crime.
The 1980s saw DeSalvo work with Paul Morrissey, a filmmaker primarily known for his association with Andy Warhol, on the mafia comedy Spike of Bensonhurst.
Her character in that film harbored pretensions to being "the Jackie Onassis of Brooklyn," she explained with a laugh on the talk show Joan Quinn, Etc.
"I love playing characters that are completely out of touch with themselves. I think they're the most fun to play, especially in comedy, where there's so much irony as to who people think they are and who they really are, or what they want to project to the world, and that was a character that I really enjoyed doing," she said.
At the close of the decade, she featured in the early Todd Solondz picture Fear, Anxiety and Depression, starring the director alongside Stanley Tucci.
Later roles and directing
As the 1990s dawned, she explored new horizons in the comedy Taking Care of Business, which also featured James Belushi.
She played the atypically vulnerable role of a woman in unrequited love with a married man portrayed by Charles Grodin.
"You get to see me pierced," she said. "People have been referring to my performance as 'adorable.' I have never been called adorable in my profession."
She landed a lead role on the short-lived 1991 sitcom The Man in the Family.
The show starred Ray Sharkey as a man who assumes control of his late father's Brooklyn grocery store, at the head of a cast including pre-fame Leah Remini.
In 1994, she featured in National Lampoon's Attack of the 5ft 2in Women, a made-for-TV satire of the Lorena Bobbitt and Tonya Harding cases.
In 1997 she wrote, directed and starred in the Lifetime comedy short Women Without Implants.
Her feature directorial debut followed in 2001 with The Amati Girls, a drama starring Cloris Leachman as the newly widowed matriarch of an Italian family in Philadelphia.
Throughout her later career, she featured on shows like Cheers, The X-Files, Sex and the City and Entourage. In the 21st century, she has also guested on hit TV series such as Monk, 2 Broke Girls and CSI: Miami.
DeSalvo is still working, with projects in the pipeline including the drama film Judge No Book, featuring Carlito's Way actor Bo Dietl.
