Advertising icon Hector Boyardee

Note: Some temporary and one-shot celebrities came to be known to a widespread public due to one stellar role in a television commercial or series of commercials for the same company. Such a person was Hector Boiardi.


Older Americans know his face from cans of spaghetti and other Italian food products sold under his name.

Hector Boiardi was born in Italy in 1897 and emigrated to America as a youth. He worked at various kitchen jobs before moving to New York City in 1915 and finding work in the kitchen of the Plaza Hotel. He also cooked at the New York Ritz-Carlton, at West Virginia's posh resort the Greenbriar, and at the Hotel Winton in Cleveland,Ohio.

In the 1920s, he started his own Italian restaurant in Cleveland and also began selling spaghetti sauce to patrons who requested it. He began to mass produce his Italian sauces and other food products and helped Americans along with pronouncing the "foreign-sounding" name by placing it on the products as Boy-ar-dee.

Billed as Chef Boy-ar-dee, he was his own company's commercial spokesman throughout the 1950s and 1960s. For many Americans, his mustache, chef's hat and smile were the very face of Italian cuisine in that era when steak, roast beef and fried chicken still ruled. He died in his late 80s in 1985, a great American success story and a major commercial icon as well.