CULT HERO: Hi-Ho, hi-ho, and off to work Angelo Rossitto would go - for an astonishing 61 years as Hollywood's busiest dwarf actor.
In the 1920s, he appeared in silent films with John Barrymore and Lon Chaney, and in 1985 he was still at it, co-starring with Mel Gibson and Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
In between, he was a stuntman for Shirley Temple, acted in Tod Browning's notorious 1932 film, Freaks - which was banned in Britain until 1962 - and was unofficially "adopted" by Hungarian horror legend Bela Lugosi. Even so, there wasn't a constant demand for the services of a 33-inch-tall actor, so Little Angelo, as he was often billed, supplemented his movie income for decades by running a news-stand on Hollywood and Vine, becoming one of Tinseltown's most conspicuous characters.
A number of Hollywood's prominent dwarf performers were troubled - David Rappaport (Time Bandits), Michael Dunn (Ship of Fools) and Herve Villechaise (TV's Fantasy Island) all ended their own lives. Rossitto was comfortable with his size and the little pigeonhole into which he so neatly slotted. "I was never a star," he said, "just a ham and egg actor. But I made a living."
He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1908, and made his Hollywood debut in The Beloved Rogue (1926). Although he reckoned he'd appeared in more than 200 films and TV shows, the part Rossitto is probably best remembered for came late in his career, when he was 77 years old and almost totally blind. In the big-budget Mad Max movie he was compelling as The Master, a malevolent scientist transported around on the shoulders of a giant. As one of the star turns in Freaks, he appeared with genuine "human oddities" from US sideshows such as Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, Prince Randion (The Living Torso) and Schlitze the Pinhead. An interviewer once asked him how he got along with his unusual colleagues. "We were one big family," he said.
From 1930s through to the 1950s, Little Angelo appeared in many cheap horror movies. Lugosi took a shine to the little guy when they appeared together in Spooks Run Wild (1941) and insisted that Rossitto be used in more of his lurid melodramas, such as The Corpse Vanishes (1942) and Scared to Death (1946).
His non-horror movies included Carousel (1956), Pocketful of Miracles (1961) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1963). After Mad Max he made one more film, The Offspring (1987) with Vincent Price, and then retired because movie companies could no longer get insurance on him because of his age and blindness.
Little Angelo, who had two children and three grandchildren, moved into a rest home for elderly movie people in 1989 and died there two years later.