Scarce and uncommonly early 8x10-inch black and white portrait, boldly inscribed in red-brown fountain pen somewhere between 1940 and 1942, at the very onset of his movie career. In good condition, with a sticker from the third-party authentication service Beckett affixed to the lower left-hand corner and an accompanying certificate. Tough-as-nails truck driver-turned-Wall Street clerk-turned waiter-turned actor Richard Conte had a brief stage career before entering films in 1939. After his auspicious debut, billed as Nicholas Conte, in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence, he built himself up an intense, brooding John Garfield type, with excellent roles in films like The Purple Heart (1944), A Walk in the Sun (1945), Call Northside 777 (1947), Thieves' Highway (1949), and Ocean's Eleven (1960). Over the years, he increasingly slipped into character roles, including a classic episode of "The Twilight Zone" (1959) and the titular cleric in the horror flick The Return of the Exorcist (1975). He is best remembered as rival Mafia chief Don Barzini in The Godfather in 1972. Conte died of a heart attack at the age of 65 and his autograph is highly elusive in any format.

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