[These daily posts will cover little known actors or people that have appeared in more recent films and TV series. Various degrees of information that I was able to find will be given and anything that you can add would be appreciated.]
Thomas Clifford Arana was born in Auburn, California on April 3, 1955. As a young boy he never wanted to be an actor, he wanted to play professional football. He discovered acting at 19 years old. He never imagined that he would do more than 70 films and more than 50 Television productions, but he always wanted to have a different life and journey than what he had as a child, growing up poor in San Francisco. He knew he wanted to have adventures in life and he never had any fear of the unknown.....on the contrary, he was excited by not knowing what the future held.
Arana studied acting at the American Conservatory of Theatre (ACT). He was a football All-Star winner in his youth and found theater similar to football – a group of people who are together and work really hard for a month or six weeks and then perform or play in front of an audience. The camaraderie of a group and the adrenaline are the same. He played football in front of 2000 people when he was 13-14 years old. Then he moved to New York and worked in some off-Broadway shows, but he wasn't a very good actor then and didn't mentally adapt to the stress of " being rejected as an actor ". Any artist, especially actors or actresses, have to learn that maybe you'll do about 100 castings hopefully before you get a job. HE wasn't prepared to put up with it then. But New York was very exciting in the late 1970's – Studio 54 and other mega clubs, Theaters, Art, Sex and the exciting New York, the city that never sleeps.
He shot his first films in Italy. with directors such as Lina Wertmuller, Liliana Cavani and directors such as Sergio Corbucci, Carlo Verdone, Michele Soavi, etc. He made three films with Marcello Mastroianni and worked with Sophia Loren, Giancarlo Giannini, Ornella Muti, Michel Piccoli, Herbert Lom... Thomas learned to act in films in Italy and Mastroianni and Phillipe Leroy were two actors who gave him very good advice and how to act in films, which is very different from stage acting.
Arana made his small screen debut in a TV movie version of "The Taming of the Shrew" (1976) playing a clown. He worked steadily overseas before playing Lazarus in Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988). His next major movie was "The Hunt for Red October" (1991), where he played Loginov. Arana then played one of the best-known villain roles of the 1990s as the assassin in the Whitney Houston smash "The Bodyguard" (1992) and was part of an impressive ensemble cast in the updated western "Tombstone" (1993) where he played Frank Stilwell. Other prominent big screen appearances included playing Quintus in "Gladiator" (2000) and "The Dark Knight Rises" (2012), where he played Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) lawyer.
Arana played the main villain, Tomas in the new 2024 Spaghetti western “Django Undisputed”.
ARANA, Tomas (Thomas Clifford Arana) [4/3/1955,
Auburn, California, U.S.A. - ] –
producer, theater, film, TV actor, married to director Price L. Deratzian [1963- ] (198?-
) father of Yanez Jason Arana [1988-
], Dashiell Richard Arana [1990-
], actor, singer, model Joaquin Falco Arana [2001- ].
Django Undisputed – 2024 (Tomas)
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