Shelly Desai, the Bombay-born character actor familiar to TV audiences for his recurring roles on the FX series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia comedy and TNT’s Men of A Certain Age, died Tuesday, February 10, in Los Angeles. He was 90.
His death was announced by family. A cause of death was not disclosed.
Born December 3, 1935, in Bombay, British India, Desai came to the United States in the 1960s to pursue a master’s degree in engineering, but instead chose to pursue the stage. He lived in Chicago, then New York and eventually Los Angeles.
By the early 1970s his career included appearances Off Broadway and on Broadway (he was among the cast members of Gurney Campbell’s very short-lived play Gandhi, directed by José Quintero, a production that opened and closed on the same night in October, 1970). He would return to Broadway in 1981’s A Talent For Murder, starring Claudette Colbert and Ryan’s Hope‘s Nancy Addison.
Screen credits from the era include a small role in Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock and roll cult musical Phantom of the Paradise.
Over the next five decades, Desai would build a consistent, prolific character-acting career with dozens of appearances – many of them single episodes – in such series as St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, The A-Team, Sledge Hammer!, Moonlighting, thirtysomething, ER, Friends, NYPD Blue, Ugly Betty, Baskets and History of the World: Part II.
He lent his voice to 10 episodes of the 1990s kids show Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? and played a couple characters on three episodes Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation titled “Data’s Day,” Desai played a blue-skinned Bolian barber named V’Sal.
Perhaps his best known roles were Carlos, a recurring character on 14 episodes in 2009-11 of Men of a Certain Age starring Ray Romano, Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula, and in several episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as Hwang, the menacing landlord forever demanding rent money from the hovel-dwelling roomies Charlie (Charlie Day) and Frank (Danny DeVito).
In films, Desai had roles in Thelma & Louise (1991), Toys (1992), Clifford (1994), Midnight Clear (2006) and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 (2015), among others. A month before his passing, Desai was still on set, filming three AT&T commercial.
Desai is survived by wife Phyllis, stepdaughters April and Dawn and grandchildren Sean, Sofia and Dylan.