Poor Sal Mineo.
After a couple of film roles (including one for which he beat out another up-and-coming actor named Clint Eastwood), Sal Mineo was cast as “John ‘Plato’ Crawford” in Rebel Without a Cause alongside James Dean and Natalie Wood. The film earned Sal an Academy Award nomination and made him a household name, cementing his stardom as the quintessential “troubled teen.”
Sal soon found he was being typecast, something he wanted no parts of. He purposely sought out roles that went against the iconic role for which he gained his initial fame. He portrayed a Native American boy in the Disney film Tonka and later embodied drummer Gene Krupa in a biopic. In the epic Exodus, Sal played a Jewish holocaust survivor and earned his second Oscar nomination. He also recorded a couple of albums and released several singles, one of which hit the Top Ten on the Billboard Pop chart.
In the early 60s, rumors of homosexuality were attached to Sal. He blamed this on being turned down for several high-profile film roles. Actually, he was aging out of the “angry youth” roles that were once his bread-and-butter. He appeared briefly in the war drama The Longest Day, but missed out on a part in Lawrence of Arabia. He soon turned to television and appeared on episodes of Combat! and The Patty Duke Show. As the 60s came to a close, he directed the gripping drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a play about prison life with a focus on homosexuality.
In 1971, Sal took a small part in the second sequel in the lucrative Planet of the Apes franchise, Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Under heavy, constricting make-up, Sal reluctantly played “Dr. Milo,” a role he admitted doing purely for the money. The character was killed off early in the film, much to Sal’s delight. This would prove to be Sal’s final big-screen role. He continued to take parts in episodic television, including a powerful turn as a Manson-like cult leader in a 1975 episode of S.W.A.T.
Sal’s career began to show signs of a resurgence. He was appearing in Los Angeles in the comedic play P.S. Your Cat is Dead to positive reviews. On February 12, 1976, Sal was returning to his West Hollywood apartment after play rehearsal. After parking his car in the building garage, he was attacked and stabbed to death by a mugger who quickly fled. Sal Mineo was just 37 years old. The second act of his career ended abruptly.
There were rumors of “sexual motivation” regarding the attack, but after career criminal Lionel Ray Williams was arrested and later confessed, it was revealed that Williams didn’t know who Sal was.