The Biggest Movies and TV Coming in September

"The Gentlemen" and "Slow Horses" return this fall, while the "Reacher" spin-off series "Neagley" makes its debut. See our guide of the biggest Fall TV and streaming releases.

2026 Fall TV and Streaming Watch Guide

&quot;The Gentlemen&quot; and &quot;Slow Horses&quot; return this fall, while the &quot;Reacher&quot; spin-off series &quot;Neagley&quot; makes its debut. See our guide of the biggest Fall TV and streaming releases.

Get a closer look at these actors from their many TV and streaming series roles.

Streaming Stars, Then and Now

Richard Conte was born Nicholas Richard Conte on March 24, 1910, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of an Italian-American barber. He held a variety of jobs before becoming a professional actor, including truck driver, Wall Street clerk and singing waiter at a Connecticut resort. The gig as a singing waiter led to theatrical work in New York, where in 1935, he was discovered by actors Elia Kazan and Julius "Julie" Garfinkle (later known as John Garfield).

Kazan helped Conte obtain a scholarship to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where he excelled. Conte made his Broadway debut late in "Moon Over Mulberry Street" in 1939, and went on to be featured in other plays, including "Walk Into My Parlor." His stage work lead to a movie job, and he made his film debut in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939), in which he was billed as "Nicholas Conte." His career started to thrive during the Second World War, when many Hollywood actors were away in the military.

Signing on as a contract player with 20th Century-Fox in 1942, Conte was promoted by the studio as, ironically, as "New John Garfield," the man who helped discover him. He made his debut at Fox, under the name "Richard Conte", in Guadalcanal Diary (1943). During World War II Conte appeared mostly as soldiers in war pictures, although after the war he became a fixture in the studio's "film noir" crime melodramas. His best role at Fox was as the wrongly imprisoned man exonerated by James Stewart's reporter in Call Northside 777 (1948) and he also shined as a trucker in Thieves' Highway (1949).

In the 1950s Conte essentially evolved into a B-movie actor, his best performances coming in The Blue Gardenia (1953) and Highway Dragnet (1954). After being set free of his Fox contract in the early 1950s, his career lost momentum as the film noir cycle exhausted itself, although he turned in a first-rate performance as a vicious but philosophical gangster in Joseph H. Lewis film-noir classic, The Big Combo (1955).

Conte appeared often on television, including a co-starring gig on the syndicated series The Four Just Men (1959), but by the 1960s his career was in turnaround. Frank Sinatra cast him in his two Tony Rome detective films, the eponymous Tony Rome (1967) and Lady in Cement (1968), but Conte eventually relocated to Europe. He directed and starred in Operation Cross Eagles (1968), a low-budget war picture shot in Yugoslavia. His last hurrah in Hollywood role was as Don Corleone's rival, Don Barzini, in The Godfather (1972), which many critics and filmmakers, including the late Stanley Kubrick, consider the greatest Hollywood film of all time. Ironically, Paramount - which produced "The Godfather" - had considered Conte for the title role before the casting list was whittled down to Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. After The Godfather (1972), Conte - whose character was assassinated in that picture, so does not appear in the equally classic sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974) - continued to appear in European films.

Richard Conte was married twice; first to Ruth Storey, with whom he fathered film editor Mark Conte, and then to Shirlee Garner. He died of a heart attack on April 15, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, aged 65.

Although he was a staunch conservative Republican, he was against the blacklist and joined liberals <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0000007/?ref_=nmtrv_trv">Humphrey Bogart</a> and <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0000002/?ref_=nmtrv_trv">Lauren Bacall</a> in their fight against it.

He intended a career in arts or music but it was only by accident of a summer job as a singing waiter that he got into acting. He was seen by <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0001415/?ref_=nmtrv_trv">Elia Kazan</a> and <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0002092/?ref_=nmtrv_trv">John Garfield</a> of the New York City&#39;s Group Theatre, who promptly offered him a scholarship at their school. After graduation he did some plays before moving to Hollywood.

Father of <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0176249/?ref_=nmtrv_trv">Mark Conte</a>.

Featured in &quot;Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir&quot; by Karen Burroughs Hannsberry (McFarland, 2003).

In &quot;Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence&quot;, a young Richard Conte was listed as Nicholas Conte in the short cast list at the beginning of the movie.

Trivia

Richard Conte

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