Raul Julia's father dreamed of bringing pizza to Puerto Rico. In fact, his father made that dream a reality when he added pizza to the menu at "La Cueva del Chicken Inn," his oddly named restaurant in San Juan. His son later hailed that pizza as "the best you've ever eaten."

The success of La Cueva del Chicken ("The Chicken's Cave") provided Raul Julia with more than good pizza. It paved the way for him to follow his own dreams, and to become one of the finest American actors of his generation. For 30 years, working in theater, film, and television, he would challenge and delight audiences with his complex, often enthralling performances.

Raul Rafael Carlos Julia y Arcelay was born in San Juan on March 9, 1940. Throughout his youth his father's business was particularly successful.

This economic security ensured excellent schooling for young Raul. He studied at Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola and attended the University of Puerto Rico.

Raul Julia discovered acting early in his academic career, beginning with a role in first grade. "From then on, that was it," he told Cigar Aficianado magazine in 1993. "I knew there was something special about the theater for me something beyond the regular reality, something that I could get into and transcend and become something other than myself."

Upon graduation from college, Julia was faced with a difficult choice between his parents' wishes and his own. They wanted him to continue to law school. He wanted to pursue an acting career. Finally, like so many Puerto Ricans, and so many aspiring actors, he left for New York. Juliá moved to New York City in 1964 and began studying drama with Wynn Handman. He soon found work in off-Broadway theater.

In 1966, Juliá hooked up with theater impresario Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival. His Shakespearean roles included Edmund in King Lear in 1973 and the title role of Othello in 1979. Juliá went on to enjoy great success on the musical stage, receiving four Tony Award nominations for his roles in Two Gentlemen of Verona (1972), Where's Charley? (1975), as Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera (1977), and in the Fellini-inspired Nine (1982).

The stage successes led to his film debut in The Organization (1971), in which he starred opposite Sidney Poitier. In the early 1980s, Juliá was invited to join Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios company and appeared in One From the Heart (1982).

Although he never became a major film star, Juliá had notable dramatic and comic roles in a number of films and made-for-TV movies. In 1983, he starred in a spectacularly disastrous made-for-TV movie Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, an adaptation of a John Varley short story which would later be mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000. In Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), he played a passionate political prisoner, and in Romero (1989) he played the Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero. In the first two popular Addams Family movies, Juliá played Gomez Addams.

In 1993, he was diagnosed with cancer, but Juliá kept on acting, creating one of his most memorable roles as Brazilian rainforest activist Chico Mendes in The Burning Season (1994), for which he posthumously won a Golden Globe and an Emmy Award. He also starred in the videogame-inspired film Street Fighter as the villainous M. Bison, for whom he used a British accent.

On October 16, 1994, it was announced that Julia had suffered a stroke in his New York City apartment and fell into a coma. However, with his marked weight loss towards the end of his life, which was very much evident in his last films The Burning Season, Street Fighter (that starred Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue), and the political drama Down Came a Blackbird, underlying HIV/AIDS infection was seen as a strong possibility - but never confirmed or proven. Julia died eight days later, at the age of 54. His body was flown back to Puerto Rico, where he was given a state funeral attended by thousands.

Film critic Leonard Maltin said of him: "Droopy-eyed, dark, and suavely handsome, this extremely versatile actor was one of the most respected stage performers of his generation."