Corpulent actor/director, best known as a featured player in numerous Roger Corman-produced and directed features of the late '50s. VeSota's earliest appearances are in key supporting roles in such films as Hugo Haas' B-thriller Bait (1954), but he began appearing in Corman's movies very early, with Apache Woman (1955), where his large girth and scowling visage made him a natural villain in pictures like Daddy-O (1958). Apart from Corman's movies, VeSota also played in such odd low-budget films as John Parker's Dementia (1955, also known as Daughter of Horror) and directed the B-crime thriller classic The Female Jungle (1955), which plays like a Jim Thompson nightmare and marked the big-screen debut of Jayne Mansfield. He moved back into the director's chair for The Brain Eaters (1958), a suprisingly effective (though wholly unauthorized) adaptation of Robert Heinleins The Puppet Masters. During the '60s, VeSota was most visible as an actor in television, especially in westerns, and he continued to play small parts in exploitation pictures such as the surf-and-sand songfest The Girls on the Beach.
by Bruce Eder
biography
