Actor John Saxon, whose character bravely tackled Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon and who appeared in three Nightmare on Elm Street movies, died on Saturday at the age of 83.
The veteran movie star died of pneumonia in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
Raised in Brooklyn, New York, Saxon was born Carmine Orrico on August 5, 1936, the eldest of three children of an Italian immigrant house painter.
He portrayed a tough Mexican bandit facing Marlon Brando in The Appaloosa (1966) for which he won a Golden Globe. Between 1969 and 1972, he played the surgeon Theodore Stuart in The New Doctors series.
Irish TV viewers of a certain age will particularly recall him as Rashid Ahmed, a Middle East tycoon who was stepping out at one point with Alexis Colby, played by Joan Collins, in the glitzy TV soap Dynasty. He played the father of Lorenzo Lamas' character in the comparably luxurious Falcon Crest series in the 1980s.
Saxon's first role to gain him widespread notice was his performance as a troubled high school football star in the movie The Unguarded Moment (1956). He shone in Vincente Minnelli's comedy The Reluctant Debutante in 1958. The actor played an ill-fated police chief in the Canadian cult classic Black Christmas (1974) and he starred in two horror films for director Roger Corman, Queen of Blood (1966) and Battle Beyond the Stars, which appeared in 1980.
In Enter the Dragon (1973), Bruce Lee's first mainstream American movie and the final one before his death at the age of 32, Saxon played Roper, a gambler who participates in a martial arts tournament.
Saxon played the policeman Donald Thompson in the first and third films in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, killed in the end by Freddy Krueger's skeleton. He subsequently starred in New Nightmare (1994).
He was married three times, firstly to the Hollywood screenwriter Mary Ann Murphy, then to airline attendant turned actress Elizabeth Saxon. He was married to cosmetician Gloria Martel since 2008. He is survived by his wife and by his son, Antonio and his sister, Dolores.
