Biography
Joe Sirola was a prolific television, commercial and voiceover actor whose show business career spanned seven decades. Born in Carteret, New Jersey, Sirola grew up in Manhattan. His parents emigrated from Croatia, and held blue collar jobs (his father was a carpenter while his mother ran a boarding house). Sirola had grand ambitions as a young man, but acting never figured into his long-term dreams. He received a business degree from Columbia in 1951, and soon after, after serving in the Korean War for 15-months, took a job as a sales promotion manager at the corporation Kimberly-Clark. Sirola quickly learned, however, that white collar world of corporate America was not for him. He began taking acting classes at Hunter College and quickly got the bug. From there on out, he would put all of his energy into making it as an actor. Sirola began appearing in Off-Broadway plays in the late 1950s, and by the early 60s he was appearing in bit parts on TV. Some of the more notable shows he appeared on during this period included "The Andy Griffith Show" (CBS, 1960-68), "Gunsmoke" (CBS, 1955-1975), and "Perry Mason" (CBS, 1957-1966). The 1960s was also the decade that Sirola took his first job as a voiceover actor. His work in this field proved so successful that by the 1970s Sirola was arguably one of the most in-demand voiceover actors in the country, pitching everything from Boar's Head meats to Hertz rental cars. Sirola's acting output never slowed in the decades that followed. In addition to his voiceover work, commercial appearances and television roles, he also made it a point to return to one of his first loves later in life, the stage, albeit this time as a producer. Sirola was a producer on the Broadway musical "A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder," which took home a 2014 Tony Award for Best Musical. In 2016 also produced the Off Broadway biographical musical "Cagney," about the Hollywood icon James Cagney. Sirola actually appeared alongside Cagney in 1986's "Terrible Joe Moran," which would prove to be Cagney's final film role. After a long and prolific career in show business, Sirola passed away on February 10, 2019 from respiratory failure. He was 89.
