Albert Salmi(1927-1990)

On April 22, 1990, Albert and Roberta Salmi were found shot to death in their home in Spokane, Washington. The police surmised that Salmi, who was separated from Roberta at the time and was suffering from severe clinical depression, shot his wife and then himself.

[In 1990, regarding his early years at the Actor's Studio in New York] The actor wanted the audience to recognize an unsavory character as truthfully as he could, so that any audience seeing it would be repelled by that individual and vow never to be like him. If one person left a performance saying, "I will never be as bad as that character was", the actor felt fulfilled. If the person left the theater better than he entered it, we felt we were accomplishing something. The reverse was true, too. If one in the audience saw and believed the goodness in the human condition and sought to emulate this behavior, we, the actors, felt a warm sense of accomplishment. Sometimes, people would come backstage in these amateur school productions and state in an oblique way that they were better people for seeing the production. This was better than any award an actor could get, and still is!