Ricardo Montalban

Ricardo Montalbán, one of Hollywood’s first Latino leading men, who had a long career as a television and movie actor but whose lingering fame perhaps owes most to a less august role as the debonair concierge of “Fantasy Island,” died on Wednesday [January 14] in Los Angeles. He was 88.

Like other minority actors of the time, Mr. Montalbán, with his dark good looks and his Spanish accent, seemed to be a kind of racial utility player. This was the era of the western, and he repeatedly played American Indians, including a Blackfoot war chief in “Across the Wide Missouri.” He appeared as an ancient Babylonian in “The Queen of Babylon” and as a Japanese Kabuki actor in “Sayonara.” In the Broadway musical “Jamaica,” set on a mythical Caribbean island, he starred opposite Lena Horne in a cast that was, aside from himself, entirely African-American. For his performance he was nominated for a Tony in 1958.

In 1967, during the first season of “Star Trek,” he was a guest star as Khan Noonien Singh, a tyrannical superhuman villain; he reprised the role in the 1982 “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” giving a performance that was gleefully and confidently weird.

In recent years Mr. Montalbán found work in children’s entertainment, appearing in “Spy Kids” movies, and providing the voice of characters on the television series “Dora the Explorer” and in the 2006 film “The Ant Bully,” in which he plays the leader of an ant colony’s ant council.

“I always had Ricardo Montalbán in my head,” John A. Davis, the director and writer of “The Ant Bully,” said in an interview. “I don’t know why, but I just always heard that voice because he’s so noble and powerful and strong.”