Ángel Salazar, a dynamic stand-up comedian who became well known for his wild routines and an actor best known for his role in the hit 1983 film “Scarface,” died on Sunday at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. He was 68.
His death was confirmed by a representative, Roger Paul, who said Mr. Salazar had an enlarged heart and was found unresponsive.
Mr. Salazar built his career in New York City comedy clubs after fleeing Cuba when he was young.
As an actor, he was seen onstage, on television and in films including “Carlito’s Way” in 1993. But none of these roles would surpass the renown he achieved in “Scarface” as Chi Chi, a henchman of the drug lord Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino. In that film, directed by Brian De Palma and loosely based on the 1932 movie of the same name, Chi Chi backs Montana, a fellow Cuban refugee, on his violent campaign to reach the top of Miami’s cocaine trade.
More than 30 years later, in 2017, after the film had secured generations of fans, Mr. Salazar told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., that he still answered to “Chi Chi” and didn’t mind when people brought copies of the “Scarface” DVD to his comedy shows to be signed.
Ángel Salazar was born on March 2, 1956, in Cuba. He acted in plays there before fleeing the country in the early 1970s, swimming across Guantánamo Bay to reach the U.S. naval base there, he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996. From there, he was flown to Miami and then moved to New York, where he was placed in a foster home in the Bronx.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
In New York, he had trouble finding acting jobs, but he could make people laugh and at age 18 decided to test how far that could get him by performing at a comedy club’s open mic night.
“I had 10 minutes,” Mr. Salazar told The Inquirer. “And I think I had one joke. The rest of the time I said, ‘Check it out,’ over and over again.”
He eventually became a comedy club regular, and “Check it out” was a staple of his high-energy routines, which included costumes, props and impersonations of celebrities like Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Tina Turner.
Mr. Salazar lived between New York and Florida. Earlier this month he performed at the Laugh Factory in Reno, Nev., and Mr. Paul, his representative, said that they had talked last week about a possible show in Chicago.
In Vanity Fair’s 2016 oral history of the famed New York City club the Comedy Cellar, the comedian Jim Norton said: “Auditions were typically done during the Friday late show, which meant you could get stuck following Ángel Salazar or some other guy who killed so hard the walls would shake.”
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