Rocco died on Saturday afternoon of cancer at his home in Studio City, his son, Sean, said.
Rocco, who studied acting with the late Leonard Nimoy, a fellow Boston-area transplant, also was the voice of Roger Meyers Jr., the cigar-smoking chairman of the studio behind “Itchy and Scratchy” on “The Simpsons”; and he played Arthur Evans, the father of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character, on the stylish Starz series “Magic City”.
Rocco starred as a white Detroit detective who is reluctantly paired with a black detective (Hari Rhodes) in Arthur Marks’ “Detroit 9000” (1973) and voiced an ant in “A Bug’s Life” (1998).
“That was my greatest prize ever in life, because I did about eight lines as an ant, and I think I made over a million dollars,” he said in a 2012 interview.
Rocco won an Emmy Award in 1990 for best supporting actor in a comedy for playing sneaky Hollywood talent agent Al Floss on the short-lived CBS series “The Famous Teddy Z”, starring Jon Cryer.