The career of actor Antonio Fargas has lasted over 40 years and has encompassed film, television, and live theater. He is most widely recognized, however, for a single role: that of Huggy Bear on the 1970s television series Starsky and Hutch.
That single role brought Fargas into millions of living rooms around the United States and the world. Decades after the show’s run ended in 1979, the image he created was strong enough to make him into a cult hero among artists in the hip-hop genre—which didn’t even exist at the time the show aired. Unlike other actors strongly identified with a single role, however, Fargas succeeded in branching out into new endeavors, gaining both steady work and, on occasion, critical acclaim.
Antonio Fargas was born in New York City, to a Puerto Rican father and a Trinidadian mother, probably on August 14, 1946 (dates from 1943 to 1947 appear in various sources). He and his ten siblings grew up in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower West Side. Fargas’s father was a garbage man who later worked in public relations, and his mother, Fargas told Boston Herald reporter Paul Sullivan, “was a great domestic engineer.… There was always bread on the table, not in abundance, but we always had what we needed.”
Dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles, Fargas began to break into movies. He had parts in some of the popular black-oriented films of the early 1970s, like Shaft (1971), Cleopatra Jones (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974). In 1974 he also played Quickfellow in Conrack, a film made from author Pat Conroy’s autobiographical novel about his experiences teaching in an African-American community on one of South Carolina’s coastal islands. Fargas also garnered roles in episodes of such hit television series as The Bill Cosby Show, Police Story, Kojak, and Sanford and Son.
Fargas continued to act in films, and in the 1990s he kept up a steady schedule of television guest star appearances in such series as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Martin, Living Single, and The Steve Harvey Show. Married and divorced twice, he moved in with his partner, real estate executive Sandi Reed, in the late 1980s, raising her two children and Fargas’s two from a previous marriage. One son, Justin Fargas, became a football star with the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League.