Jerry Haleva (born May 26, 1946) is an American actor and political lobbyist. He gained fame as an actor as a doppelgänger of Saddam Hussein due to his physical resemblance to the late Iraqi leader, with all of his film roles having him portraying Hussein.
Jerry Haleva, a Sephardic Jew, is a member of the Republican Party and has worked as a lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, among others. In 1973, he was an adviser to a legislative committee investigating prison conditions in California. He served in the California Senate in 1977 as chief of staff for William Campbell.
In 1989, a colleague of Haleva distributed a photo of the then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein among his co-workers with the text “Now we know what Haleva does on his weekends”. A few years later, Haleva contacted Ron Smith, who represented doppelgängers in the film industry, and Smith had a small role for Haleva in the feature film Hot Shots! (1991), followed by a more prominent role in its sequel, Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993). Haleva played Hussein in half a dozen films. Besides the Hot Shots! movies and The Big Lebowski, he appeared in a few other films and also appeared in commercials (including for Nintendo).
In the spring of 2003, when Iraq was invaded, he decided to stop working as Hussein’s doppelgänger. In January 2004 he came back to this decision and said in an interview that he was interested in continuing his acting career.
As of 2016, he was a contract lobbyist (Sergeant Major Associates) and lived in Sacramento, California.
Jerry Haleva Biography / Wiki
| Name | Jerry Haleva |
| Also Know | |
| Gender | Male |
| Known For | Acting |
| Place of Birth | |
| Date of Birth | |
| Age(as in 2023 Feb) | 0 |
| Deathday |
Jerry Haleva Acting Movies
| Movie Name | Character | Release Date | Overview |
| Hot Shots! Part Deux | Saddam Hussein | 1993-05-21 | Topper Harley is found to be working as an odd-job-man in a monastery. The CIA want him to lead a rescue mission into Iraq, to rescue the last rescue … |
| The Big Lebowski | Saddam | 1998-03-06 | Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski, a Los Angeles slacker who only wants to bowl and drink White Russians, is mistaken for another Jeffrey Lebowski, a wheelc… |
| Live from Baghdad | Saddam Hussein | 2002-12-07 | A group of CNN reporters wrestle with journalistic ethics and the life-and-death perils of reporting during the Gulf War.A Directors Guild Award-winni… |
| Hot Shots! | Saddam Hussein | 1991-07-31 | The gang that created Airplane and The Naked Gun sets its sights on Top Gun in this often hilarious spoof starring Charlie Sheen, who previously only … |
| Superhero Movie | Saddam Hussein | 2008-03-28 | The team behind Scary Movie takes on the comic book genre in this tale of Rick Riker, a nerdy teen imbued with superpowers by a radioactive dragonfly…. |
| Jane Austen’s Mafia! | Saddam Hussein | 1998-07-24 | Takeoff on the Godfather with the son of a mafia king taking over for his dying father…. |
Credit: TMDB
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