Anthony Guidera, an actor and model who played pilots for Michael Bay in The Rock and Armageddon and shared a memorable kiss with Natasha Henstridge in Species, has died. He was 65.
Guidera died Saturday in a Los Angeles-area hospital, his wife, Valarie, told TMZ. He was taken off life support after he had suffered a heart issue at their home on May 11, she said.
The hunky Guidera also appeared in Scott Winant’s ’Til There Was You (1997) and Kevin Costner’s The Postman (1997) and portrayed a gun seller in Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish (1999).
And on television, he showed up on everything from Renegade, Baywatch, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Red Shoe Diaries and Hope & Gloria to Nash Bridges, Acapulco H.E.A.T., Angel, ER and, on a 2005 episode for his last credit, L.A. Dicks.
In the sci-fi horror film Species (1995), directed by Roger Donaldson, Guidera’s character doesn’t know Henstridge’s Sil is an alien/human hybrid organism when he forces her to kiss him — to disastrous results.
The moment was recognized as the year’s best kiss at the 1996 MTV Movie Awards.
“This kiss between alien man-eater Natasha Henstridge and Anthony Guidera in Species is scary-good — emphasis on the scary,” Michelle Darrisaw wrote in a post for Oprah Daily. “It’s not every day that puckering up results in an exploding head.”
Born in San Francisco on Oct. 18, 1960, Guidera moved to Paris and traveled around the world for about a decade while making commercials and modeling under the name James Guidera.
He performed in plays in Paris, studied with Robert Lewis at The Actors Studio in New York and landed his first onscreen role as a bodyguard in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III (1990), working on that film for five months.
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