Billy Drago

The White-Suited Killer

Billy Drago never needed to shout to be frightening. In 1987, he slipped into an immaculate white suit to play Frank Nitti in The Untouchables. That image of a icy killer with a fixed stare haunted him for the rest of his life.

He was born in Hugoton, Kansas, in 1945. His real name was William Eugene Burrows. However, he chose to use his grandmother's maiden name so that no one would confuse him with other actors of the era. Before arriving in Hollywood, he worked as a journalist for the Associated Press and was a model in New York.

He never sought out the hero role.

His physique was his greatest working tool. He had sharp cheekbones and a thinness that felt unsettling on camera. In 1985, Clint Eastwood cast him in Pale Rider. He played one of the sheriff's deputies and began refining that persona of a man who seems not to have slept in weeks.

Drago quickly understood that in genre films, physical presence is worth more than a thousand lines of dialogue. So he specialized in characters who inhabited the nightmares of the average viewer.

A Haven in B-Movies

By the late eighties, his face was a guarantee for action directors. He appeared in more than a hundred productions over four decades. Many of them were low-budget films shot in deserts or dark studios in Eastern Europe.

In 1988, he worked under Andrew Davis on Hero and the Terror alongside Chuck Norris. But his true passion was offbeat cinema. That's why he collaborated with filmmakers like Gregg Araki and Albert Pyun on projects that are now cult favorites among VHS collectors.

And audiences always wanted to see him die on screen.

In 1991, he appeared in the music video for You Rock My World by Michael Jackson. He played a gangster who faced off against the King of Pop in a nightclub. It was one of the few times his image reached households around the world on a large scale, beyond the video rental circuit.

In 2006, he shot Imprint. It was an episode of the series Masters of Horror directed by Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. The episode turned out to be so violent and disturbing that the Showtime network decided not to air it in its regular schedule. Drago was proud of that work because he believed horror should be uncomfortable.

A Quiet End in Los Angeles

His work pace didn't slow down with the turn of the century. In 2004, he worked on The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, and in 2006 he joined the cast of the remake of The Hills Have Eyes. He earned 500 dollars a day on some of his early contracts in New York, but he went on to become a reliable actor respected within the independent film industry.

The death of his wife, Silvana Gallardo, in 2012 gradually pulled him away from the spotlight. She was also an actress and an acting teacher. They had shared their lives and projects since the late seventies.

Billy Drago died in Los Angeles on June 24, 2019. He was 73 years old. A stroke took his life after a period of fragile health. His last credited film was Low Down, released in 2014.