{"id":113664,"date":"2026-02-14T04:32:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T04:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/113664\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T04:32:20","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T04:32:20","slug":"its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-actor-was-90","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/113664\/","title":{"rendered":"‘It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’ Actor Was 90"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tShelly Desai<\/a>, the Bombay-born character actor familiar to TV audiences for his recurring roles on the FX series It\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia comedy and TNT\u2019s Men of A Certain Age<\/a>, died Tuesday, February 10, in Los Angeles. He was 90.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis death was announced by family. A cause of death was not disclosed.<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn December 3,\u00a01935, in Bombay, British India, Desai came to the United States in the 1960s to pursue a master\u2019s degree in engineering, but instead chose to pursue the stage. He lived in Chicago, then New York and eventually Los Angeles. <\/p>\n

\n\tBy the early 1970s his career included appearances Off Broadway and on Broadway (he was among the cast members of Gurney Campbell\u2019s very short-lived play Gandhi, directed by Jos\u00e9 Quintero, a production that opened and closed on the same night in October, 1970). He would return to Broadway in 1981\u2019s A Talent For Murder, starring Claudette Colbert and Ryan\u2019s Hope\u2018s Nancy Addison.<\/p>\n

\n\tScreen credits from the era include a small role in Brian De Palma\u2019s 1974 rock and roll cult musical Phantom of the Paradise. <\/p>\n

\n\tOver the next five decades, Desai would build a consistent, prolific character-acting career with dozens of appearances \u2013 many of them single episodes \u2013 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tHe 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 \u201cData\u2019s Day,\u201d Desai played a blue-skinned Bolian barber named V\u2019Sal.<\/p>\n

\n\tRELATED: Andr\u00e9 Braugher Dies: Star Of \u2018Homicide: Life On The Street\u2019, \u2018Brooklyn Nine-Nine\u2019 & Other Series And Films Was 61<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tPerhaps his best known roles were Carlos, a recurring character on 14 episodes in 2009-11 of Men of a Certain Age starring Ray Romano,\u00a0Andre Braugher and\u00a0Scott Bakula, and in several episodes of It\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tDesai is survived by wife Phyllis, stepdaughters April and Dawn and grandchildren\u00a0Sean, Sofia and Dylan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shelly Desai, the Bombay-born character actor familiar to TV audiences for his recurring roles on the FX series…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[54276,54277,2252,69,71,70,54278],"class_list":["post-113664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia","tag-men-of-a-certain-age","tag-obituary","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-shelly-desai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}