Michael Dante
American actor
Michael Dante (born Ralph Vitti, September 2, 1931) is an American actor and former professional minor league baseball player.
Early life
Dante was born Ralph Vitti in Stamford, Connecticut on September 2, 1931. Growing up, he would sneak into a local movie theater with his friends to watch Westerns. "I grew up wanting to be the sidekick of The Lone Ranger and wanting to follow my heroes", Dante told a reporter in 2006.
He was a shortstop on the Stamford High School baseball team, then played for "The Advocate All-Stars" team which won a 1949 New England baseball championship. After graduating from high school, as Ralph Vitti signed a bonus contract with the Boston Braves. He used his $6,000 bonus to buy his family a four-door Buick with whitewalls.
Career
During spring training with the former Washington Senators, Dante took drama classes at the University of Miami. Bandleader Tommy Dorsey arranged a screen test for him at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His first film, Somebody Up There Likes Me, was released in 1956.
“Michael Dante” enters the record as american actor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Michael, Dante and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Michael Dante” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Michael, Dante and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6829704. VIAF identifies the subject as 34666907. The Library of Congress control number is no95015353. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 2006, 1949 and 1956.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Dante” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.