LOS ANGELES -- Movie star George Raft, who played tight-lipped tough guys on the screen and had gangster friends and brushes with the law in real life, died of emphysema Monday. He was 85.
Raft died two days after Mae West, whose film career he launched when he suggested her for her first movie role in 1932, a walk-on in 'Night after Night.'
Raft appeared in 120 films, mostly in the 1930s and 1940s heyday of gangster movies. His trademarks were his slicked back hair, tough-guy sneer and mobster vocabulary, which he acquired growing up in the Hell's Kitchen slum of New York City.
One of his most famous scenes made him a star. Cast with Paul Muni in 'Scarface' in 1932, he casually flipped a half dollar as Muni shot him to death with a .45, a bit of business he thought up himself.
Raft had been hospitalized for two weeks last spring for pneumonia and emphysema and was in and out of hospitals for the last several months. He was 'a respiratory cripple for years,' said Dr. Rexford Kennamer, his physician. 'He died of emphysema, not leukemia as has been reported.'
Raft's movies included 'Each Dawn I Die,' 'The Bowery,' 'Limehouse Blues,' 'Johnny Angel,' 'Race Street,' 'Knob Hill,' 'Outpost to Morocco,' 'Intrigue,' 'A Bullet for Joey,' 'They Drive By Night' and 'Johnny Allegro.'
Raft made, and squandered, about $10 million in his movie career, later joking: 'Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.'
He was frequently cast with other screen 'tough guys' popular in the '30s and '40s, such as Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.
Unlike the others, Raft was a genuine hard case who liked to gamble and chase women. His troubles with the law ranged from tax evasion to crooked gambling charges to questioning in the gangland 'hit' that killed his friend 'Bugsy' Siegel in 1947.
A former boxer, he was quick with his fists. When angered he would take a swing at his co-stars, including Robinson, star of 'Little Caesar' but a cultured, mild-mannered man off screen.
Although he often protested that his real-life gangland connections were exaggerated, Raft knew and had business dealings with many real mobsters, some of them, like Siegel, childhood pals. Others owned the speakeasies where he was a charleston and tango dancer during prohibition.
'If there's a mob guy being investigated, you can bet the cops were trying to question me,' he once said.
'I don't know where they get that stuff. Sure, I knew some guys who had trouble with the law. Benny Siegel? We grew up in the same part of New York. Owney Madden and Frenchy Demange? I worked as a dancer in joints they owned.'
His gangster film image and his real life overlapped to such a degree they haunted his later years, provoking investigations in the United States and England when Raft became associated with legal gambling.
After his movie career declined in the 1950s, Raft ran a casino in Havana. He lost it when Castro took over, and in 1966 became part owner and host of the Colony Club, a private casino favored by the jet set in London.
A year later, Britain barred him from the country on grounds 'his continued presence would not be conducive to the public good,' when his co-owners were discovered to include such notorious underworld figures as Meyer Lansky, Charley 'The Blade' Tourino and Raymond Patriarca.
When he tried to return in 1974 to promote his autobiography, British authorities banished him again.
In recent years, Raft was employed by the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas as 'good will ambassador' and manager of the Los Angeles reservation office. His main acting work was a series of television commercials for a chain of auto tune-up shops. As usual, he played a gangster.
His last starring role was in 'A Bullet for Joey' in 1955 and his last major part was the gang leader in 'Some Like It Hot' in 1959. But he had small or cameo roles in films, including 'Casino Royale' in the James Bond series, up until the year of his death, last appearing in 'The Man With Bogart's Face.'
Denied a license to work for the Flamingo Hotel by the Nevada Gaming Commission in 1955, Raft complained that his prohibition-era 'connections' were only natural, considering his background as a dancer in New York.
'I could hardly have gone around asking who was the real owner of every speakeasy I worked in.'
Raft later said he took off for Hollywood because there was an angry husband after him with a gun.
'I didn't mind an occasional guy with fists, or even brass knucks, but this guy was crazy. He wanted me to marry his wife or something.'
He figured as a correspondent in divorce suits by angry husbands, was sued for battery after punching a lawyer in a starlet's apartment, and was questioned in the 'hit' slaying of Siegel in 1947.
In 1944, an aircraft executive accused him of winning $18,500 in a crooked dice game in the apartment of baseball manager Leo Durocher. 'I never played with loaded ivories in my life,' Raft fumed.
Indicted by a federal grand jury in 1965 for income tax evasion, he pleaded guilty to one of six counts. When a federal judge declined to sentence him to prison, limiting the sentence to a $2,500 fine, Raft broke into tears.
The same year he was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Washington investigating organized gambling. He testified briefly and was excused.
Miss West, who died Saturday at 88, was a Broadway hit when Raft became a star in movies. He suggested her for herfirst movie role, in 'Night After Night' in 1932.
Though brief, the role gave her an opportunity to deliver one of her most famous lines, launching her film career.
To a hat check girl who admired her jewelry by exclaiming 'Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,' she replied: 'Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.'
With only two years of grade school, Raft was nearly illiterate and sometimes misunderstood the innocent joshing of his costars.
At one time or another he threw punches at Robinson, Wallace Beery, Peter Lorre, Pat O'Brien and many others.
'For years and years,' he once told an interviewer, 'I was the loneliest man in Hollywood.' He said his friends at parties would talk about people like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Huxley, Thomas Wolfe.
'I didn't know who the hell those guys were. It got so embarrassing I became a loner. 'Then after a while I began spending more and more of my time with girls, gamblers and horses. Them I could understand, especially the girls. They spoke my language.'
