Actor Tony Ganios is dead

Tony Ganios made a name for himself as an actor in teen comedies like “Porky’s” and attracted attention with his role as Perry in Philip Kaufman’s coming-of-age drama “The Wanderers.”

Now Tony Ganios is dead. As various US media outlets consistently report, citing the family, the American died on February 18th after an operation in a hospital in New York. He was 64 years old.

Ganios’ fiancée shared the news on social media, posting a tweet with a photo of the two holding hands and the caption: “I love you so much my darling. I’m devastated.” Another photo of Ganios followed later. This time she wrote about the motif: “The last words we said to each other were ‘I love you’.”

Ganios was her “heart, soul and best friend”. He became known to a wide audience through roles in comedies and action films of the 1980s. Tony Ganios repeatedly embodied tough, muscular characters, which he filled with life with physical presence and a certain gruffness.

In his 1963 film debut, The Wanderers, Ganios played Perry, an Italian-American highwayman from the Bronx. The lexicon of international film rated the film adaptation of Richard Price’s novel of the same name with the words: “A film immersed in nostalgia and sadness over the loss of innocent bygone times, which uses remarkable approaches to an attractive time-related (Kennedy assassination) differentiation of the themes of violence, Racism and youthful group behavior.”

Ganios also landed a role in “Die Hard 2” in 1990

However, his best-known role was as Meat in the 1982 comedy “Porky’s,” about a group of high school friends who seek revenge on a sleazy nightclub owner named Porky after they are humiliated at his establishment. Ganios also landed a role in “Die Hard 2” in 1990.

The actor retired from the film business in the mid-1990s. He later said that he “doesn’t miss the entertainment industry.” Now he is dead and leaves behind his partner Amanda.