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Gregory Sierra, a longtime actor who has appeared in television shows and films including “Barney Miller” and “Sanford and Son,” died Jan. 4 in Laguna Woods, Calif., Of cancer. He was 83 years old.
Hailing from New York, Sierra’s breakthrough came when he was cast as Julio Fuentes, the Puerto Rican neighbor of Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford on “Sanford and Son.”
After leaving that series, Sierra played one of the original detectives working in the 12th Borough of Greenwich Village on ABC’s “Barney Miller”. He was taken off the show after the second season to star on “AES Hudson Street,” a rampant emergency room sitcom, but it only lasted six episodes.
Sierra also appeared as a radical Jewish vigilante in “Archie Is Branded,” a 1973 CBS episode “All in the Family,” in which someone painted a swastika on Archie’s door. The episode, which ends in silence, was among the most memorable in the long series.
Born January 25, 1937 in Harlem Spain, Sierra attended Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, Brooklyn. After school he worked with the National Shakespeare Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival before moving to Los Angeles, where he started getting small television roles and supporting roles in films like “Beneath the Planet of the Apes “,” Getting Straight, “” Butterfly “and” The Towering Inferno “.
He has had recurring roles on several television shows, including “Hill Street Blues”, “Miami Vice” and “Murder, She Wrote”, and has made appearances in many other series.
Star “Miami Vice” Edward James Olmos tweeted that he read the news of Sierra’s death and cried. “Gregory Sierra will be with us forever,” Olmos wrote. “Those who knew him. His laugh. His mind. His kindness. His extraordinary artistic ability. He was a friend, a mentor, a force of nature that I was so grateful to have known and to work with. TEAR.”
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