Appearances

Title	Role	Year	Approx. Age
Tonka	White Bull	1958	19
The Young Don't Cry	Leslie 'Les' Henderson	1957	18
Crime in the Streets	Angelo Gioia	1956	17
Rebel Without a Cause	John 'Plato' Crawford	1955	16
The Private War of Major Benson	Cadet Col. Sylvester Dusik	1955	16

Salvatore (Sal) Mineo Jr. was born to Josephine and Sal Sr. (a casket maker), who emigrated to the U.S. from Sicily. His siblings were Michael (also an actor), Victor and Sarina. Sal was thrown out of parochial school and, by age eight, was a member of a street gang in a tough Bronx neighborhood. His mother enrolled him in dancing school and, after being arrested for robbery at age ten, he was given a choice of juvenile confinement or professional acting school.

He soon appeared in the theatrical production The Rose Tattoo with Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach and as the young prince in the Broadway production of The King and I with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner.

1955 was Sal Mineo's breakout year. The Private War of Major Benson (1955). He played a much younger boy in Six Bridges to Cross (1955) with Tony Curtis and later that same year played Plato in James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Quote: "If I'd understood back then that a guy could be in love with another one, it would have happened. But I didn't come to that realization for a few more years and then it was too late for Jimmy [James Dean] and me."

He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Rebel Without a Cause" and again for his role as Dov Landau in Exodus (1960).

In 1957, at the height of his fame, Bob Hope announced on a TV special that all public schools in Brooklyn would be closed the following day in honor of Sal Mineo's birthday. Hope meant this as a joke, but many youngsters in Brooklyn took it seriously, and there was record absenteeism in the borough's public schools the following day. Hope ultimately issued a public retraction and urged kids to stay in school.

Also in 1957 Mineo tried to start a career as a rock-and-roll singer. He released two singles. The first was "Start Movin' (In My Direction)", which stayed in the US top 40 for 13 weeks and reached the #9 position. The second was "Lasting Love", which stayed on the charts for three weeks and reached #27. The singles were followed up by an album on the Epic label.

Mineo bought his protégé Bobby Sherman a set of drums when he helped him break into the music industry in 1963-1964. (Mineo had learned to play the drums for his role of Gene Krupa in The Gene Krupa Story (1959).) In 1970, when Mineo was broke and Sherman was riding high after appearing in the TV series Here Come the Brides (1968) and scoring big as a pop star, Mineo's lover Courtney Burr contacted Sherman and requested that he reimburse his former mentor for the drums. Sherman's manager sent Mineo $3,000.

Mineo donated the drum he used in The Gene Krupa Story (1959) to another teen idol, David Cassidy, the day after a dinner with David and his father, Jack Cassidy. David was 13 at the time.

In early 1962, he posed nude in several sessions for Harold Stevenson, known for his large-scale homoerotic painting and drawings. Stevenson gave one of them to Mineo for his own. A huge painting of Sal was eventually exhibited at the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York and Chicago in 1964.

He suffered from a chronic right eye infection that was usually brought about by severe emotional stress. He often had to wear an eye patch or dark sunglasses in public until it healed.

Expanding his repertoire, Mineo returned to the theatre to direct and star in the play Fortune and Men's Eyes with successful runs in both New York and Los Angeles. In the late 1960s and 1970s he continued to work steadily in supporting roles on TV and in film, including Dr. Milo in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) and Harry O (1973).

In 1975 he returned to the stage in the San Francisco hit production of "P.S. Your Cat Is Dead". Preparing to open the play in Los Angeles in 1976 with Keir Dullea, he returned home from rehearsal the evening of February 12th when he was attacked and stabbed to death by a stranger. A drifter named Lionel Ray Williams was arrested for the crime and, after trial in 1979, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder. John Lennon once put up the reward money to find Mineo's killer.

Sal Mineo still holds the record as the youngest person to receive two competitive Oscar nominations, which he accomplished by age 22.