James Victor, Cassavetes Protege and 'Zorro' Actor, Dies at 76
He was not on the list.
He played Sgt. Jaime Mendoza on the Family Channel series
after working with the independent-film pioneer on 'Shadows,' 'Too Late Blues'
and 'Faces.'
James Victor, the actor best known for portraying the
buffoonish Sgt. Jaime Mendoza on the popular 1990s Family Channel
action-adventure series Zorro, has died. He was 76.
Victor, a protege of famed independent auteur John
Cassavetes, had heart disease and died June 20 in his apartment in Hollywood,
his longtime friend Joe Perez told The Hollywood Reporter.
Duncan Regehr starred as Don Diego de la Vega/Zorro on the
Family Channel adaptation of Zorro, which aired in several countries and for
three seasons (1990-93) in the U.S. At first, Victor's Mendoza, who always
enjoyed a good meal, tried to capture the masked man before realizing that he's
not a criminal, and they became pals.
Victor also had regular roles on three short-lived ABC
series.
On Viva Valdez, a pioneering 1976 summer replacement show
about a Mexican-American family in East Los Angeles, his character ran a
plumbing business with his father (Rodolfo Hoyos Jr.). On 1983's Condo,
starring McLean Stevenson, Victor played the grandfather of a Latino clan that
lived next door to a white family. And on the 1987-88 series I Married Dora, he
appeared as Elizabeth Pena's dad.
Victor played the angry father of one of the students in
Stand and Deliver (1988), which starred Edward James Olmos in an
Oscar-nominated turn as an East L.A. high school math teacher.
Victor also portrayed a barroom brawler who battled William
Devane in Rolling Thunder (1977), a shady lawyer in Curtis Hanson's Losin' It
(1983) and a smuggling truck driver in Borderline (1980), starring Charles
Bronson.
The youngest of six children, he was born Lincoln Peralta
(he took the name James Victor in honor of his oldest brother) on July 27,
1939, in Santiago, Dominican Republic. He and his family came to New York when
he was four.
He graduated from Haaren High School in the Hell's Kitchen
neighborhood of Manhattan in 1958, worked in the mailroom at a Disney office in
New York and joined a bilingual theater company, El Nuevo Circulo Dramatico.
A chance meeting with Cassavetes led Victor to study with
the actor at a workshop he had co-founded with theater director Burt Lane
(actress Diane Lane's father). That earned Victor screen time in Cassavetes'
directorial debut, Shadows (1959), and in Too Late Blues (1961), and he served
as an assistant director on Faces (1968).
He developed a lifelong friendship with Cassavetes, who died
in 1989, and referred to him as his "godfather."
Victor appeared on a 1962 episode of The Lloyd Bridges Show,
in which he and Cassavetes guest-starred, and went on to work on such series as
My Three Sons, I Spy, Family Affair, Adam-12, Kung Fu, The White Shadow, Falcon
Crest, Remington Steele and Murder, She Wrote.
On the big screen, Victor, a member of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, also was in The President’s Analyst (1967), Little
Fauss and Big Halsey (1970), Fuzz (1972), Defiance (1980), Will Ferrell's Casa
de mi Padre (2012) and Bless Me, Ultima (2013), directed by Carl Franklin.
Victor starred in the acclaimed Luis Valdez satirical comedy
I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!, which premiered and played for
many weeks at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1986.
Survivors include his nephews and nieces — Franklin,
Luperon, Jaime, Rafael, Ariosto, Ibelka, Mercedes and Elsa — and several aunts
and cousins.
Filmography
Year Title Role Notes
1968 Girl in Gold
Boots Joey
1972 Fuzz Patrolman Gomez
1977 Rolling
Thunder Lopez
1979 Boulevard
Nights Gil Moreno
1980 Defiance Father Rivera
1980 Borderline Mirandez
1983 Losin' It Lawyer
1988 The Telephone
Big Ray on Answering Machine Voice
1988 Stand and
Deliver Ana's Father
1995 Gunfighter's
Moon Juan Acosta
2006 Ray of
Sunshine
2012 Casa de mi
padre Old Friend #3
2012 Bless Me,
Ultima Antonio's Grandfather (final film role)
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