The role has involved Charles playing a variety of alternative characters, including a gangster, a cowboy, and angelic and evil versions of Lister, and in him carrying out a wide range of stunts, and acting involving special effects.

The only substantial leading role he got during this period was in Dead End ( 1937 ), while loaned to Samuel Goldwyn, where he portrayed a gangster modeled after Baby Face Nelson.

The film was Bogart's last major film playing a gangster ( his final gangster role was in The Big Shot in 1942 ).

To support himself, Gwynne worked as a copywriter for J. Walter Thompson, resigning in 1952 upon being cast in his first Broadway role, a gangster in a comedy called Mrs. McThing, which starred Helen Hayes.

After working on The Italian Job with Noël Coward, and a solid role as RAF fighter pilot Squadron Leader Canfield in the all-star cast of Battle of Britain ( both 1969 ), Caine played the lead in Get Carter ( 1971 ), a British gangster film.

That same year, he landed a role in Bugsy, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, then played another mobster, Deloris's gangster ex-boyfriend Vince LaRocca in Sister Act several months later.

) Gable made such an impression in the role of a gangster who pushes Shearer around that he was catapulted from supporting player to leading man, a position he held for the rest of his career.

Crawford followed this up with another important supporting actor role in the 1942 gangster spoof Larceny, Inc., a comedy with Edward G. Robinson, where Crawford played a dumb but lovable tough guy.

He appeared for director John Huston as gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo ( 1948 ), the last of five films he made with Humphrey Bogart and the only one in which Bogart did not play a supporting role.

Divine followed this production with a very different role, that of gay male gangster Hilly Blue in Trouble in Mind ( 1985 ).

Many of Kitano's routines involved him portraying a gangster or other harsh character, and his first major film role, in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence ( where he starred opposite Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie ), featured him cast as a tough ( but sympathetic ) POW camp sergeant during World War II.

Paul Ryder himself had a cameo role in the film as a gangster and Rowetta Satchell ( who sang for the band on Pills ' n ' Thrills and Bellyaches and Yes Please!

His other television roles include: Hagath in the episode " Business as Usual " in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ; Stilgar in the 2003 miniseries Children of Dune ; a gangster ( Mr Wiltshire ) in episode 8 of the BBC's Hotel Babylon series ; a lawyer ( Freddie Eccles ) in an episode of ITV's Marple entitled By the Pricking of My Thumbs ; and Adolf Hitler in the mini-series War and Remembrance, role he originally baulked at taking, primarily on moral grounds ; he later relented.

1991 would also see a starring role in the Mario Van Peebles-directed New Jack City, an urban gangster film with Wesley Snipes, Ice-T, Vanessa L. Williams, and Chris Rock ; the film was a commercial success.

Nelson wrapped up the 1990s with another urban gangster thriller, Light It Up ( film ) ( 1999 ), which featured an ensemble cast including R & B singer / actor Usher Raymond ( in his first leading role ), Rosario Dawson, Forest Whitaker, and Vanessa L. Williams ; he also played Alan Freed in the latter's life story, Mr. Rock ' N ' Roll: The Alan Freed Story ( 1999 ) opposite Mädchen Amick and Paula Abdul.

Calderon played the role of Choco, a Puerto Rican gangster whose character was written specifically for him by director Franc Reyes.

He sees himself as a gangster ready to win respect by killing a cop, manically practicing the role of Travis Bickle from the film Taxi Driver in the mirror secretly.

Imperioli acted in Scorsese's gangster film Goodfellas in a minor role, " Spider ".

He played the suave London gangster Mackelson in the 1968 drama series Spindoe, had a recurring role as a senior civil servant in the final series of The Power Game and did a camp turn as a gay antique dealer who takes a shine to Harold Steptoe in the comedy Steptoe and Son.

Bogart, who won the stage role in part because of his physical resemblance to Dillinger, studied film footage of the gangster and mimicked some of his mannerisms in his portrayal.

As an actor, Strasberg is probably best known for his role as gangster Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II ( 1974 ).

Television's Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore, played a rare villainous role in this serial as one of the Crimson Ghost's henchmen, a cold-hearted gangster named Ashe.

In this year he also had a leading role as a gangster in Brother, a movie by acclaimed Japanese actor / director Takeshi Kitano.

Francis did have a lead role in the Bogart gangster film King of the Underworld, released in 1939.

He played the ageing gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's Everybody Loves Sunshine ( 1999 ), and appeared in the TV horror serial of The Hunger.

Cagney played Martin " Moe the Gimp " Snyder, a lame Jewish-American gangster from Chicago, a part Spencer Tracy had turned down.

In 1957, Connery played Spike, a minor gangster with a speech impediment in Montgomery Tully's No Road Back alongside Skip Homeier, Paul Carpenter, Patricia Dainton and Norman Wooland.

Gable had played a similar character also named " Blackie " two years earlier in the smash hit gangster epic Manhattan Melodrama, with William Powell and Myrna Loy.

In 1946, he starred in a rare comic performance, Angel on My Shoulder, playing a gangster whose early death prompts the Devil ( played by Claude Rains ) to make mischief by putting his soul into the body of a judge, only to have his new identity turn the former criminal into a model citizen.

During the casting process, they had envisioned Trey Wilson ( who played Nathan Arizona in their previous film Raising Arizona ) as gangster boss Leo O ' Bannon, but two days before the first day of principal photography he died from a brain hemorrhage.

An enthusiastic performer, he returned to the Broadway stage in the original production of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1941, in which he played a homicidal gangster enraged to be frequently mistaken for Karloff.

Fasssbinder himself plays the lead part of Franz, a small time pimp who is torn between his mistress Joanna, a prostitute played by Hanna Schygulla, and his friend Bruno, a gangster sent after Franz by the syndicate that he has refused to join.

* Maximilian " Max " Bercovicz, the gangster played by James Woods in Sergio Leone's opus Once Upon A Time In America was inspired by Meyer Lansky.

In 2009, Hoskins made a return to British television in Jimmy McGovern's drama serial The Street, where he played a publican who stands up to a local gangster.

Gable had played a similar character also named " Blackie " two years earlier in the smash hit gangster epic Manhattan Melodrama, with William Powell and Myrna Loy.

He and a friend travel to Okinawa to purchase guns so they can get revenge, but along the way they are befriended by a psychotic gangster played by Kitano, who is plotting his own revenge.

Brother ( 2000 ), shot in Los Angeles, had Kitano as a deposed Tokyo yakuza setting up a drug empire in L. A. with the aid of a local gangster played by Omar Epps.

In 1976, Baio played the title character Bugsy Malone in the cult children ’ s gangster musical directed by Alan Parker, which also co-starred Jodie Foster.

In Hollywood films, Steven Berkoff has played villains such as the corrupt art dealer Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop ; gangster George Cornell in The Krays ; the sadistic Soviet officer Col. Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II and General Orlov in the James Bond film Octopussy.

He exhibited great adaptability with makeup in more conventional crime and adventure films, such as The Penalty, in which he played an amputee gangster.

Other regular characters in the series were the other urban guerrillas: Tucker, married to the ever pregnant, but never seen June, Speed, the TPF's Warlord, and his girlfriend Desiree, and local gangster Harry Fenning ( played by Stephen Greif ), who refers to Wolfie as " Trotsky ".

Steve has a gangster cousin from Detroit named Cornelius Eugene Urkel ( also played by White ) who went by the moniker " Original Gangsta Dawg ".

Rocco took his stage name from the character " Roch Siffredi " played by Alain Delon in the French gangster film Borsalino ( 1970 ).