Five Somerville celebrities from the White House to the big screen and across the restaurant scene

Local celebrities? Cambridge is too simple, with its Matt and Bens, Supreme Court justices, and all the people who went through Harvard, from Rashida Jones to Tommy Lee Jones. However, Somerville also has its own celebrities, people who were born here, grew up here or chose to live here for a while and have made a name for themselves across the country and even the world, sometimes for the best reasons and sometimes for the silliest. From the President of the United States to the founder of a New England restaurant chain, here are five celebrities from The 'Ville.

Barack Obama

Barack Obama in Hawaii in September. 1, 2016. (Photo: Anthony Quintano via Flickr)

Years before he took up residence in the White House, the 44th President of the United States lived in Somerville. From 1988 to 1991, Barack Obama lived in Langmaid Terrace, a historic home, in the Winter Hill area while attending Harvard Law School. According to the post, Obama has racked up a lot of traffic tickets. “Of course, he paid them all off before assuming the presidency and still treated us pretty well over the next eight years,” the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission said in a Facebook post.

Obama lived in Somerville “because you got more housing for your money.” “He moved a little further away from Harvard because it was what he could afford,” landlord Jay Holmes said on a children's field trip in 2012, Boston reported .com. (Obama always paid his $950 monthly rent, Holmes assured the children.)

Sarma Blackcock

Sarma Melngailis in a podcast in May. (Image: Lex Fridman via YouTube)

After owning a famous vegan restaurant in Manhattan, getting arrested, spending time in prison, and having a Netflix documentary tell her story, Sarma Melngailis ended up in Somerville for about five years, leaving in early 2023, according to Allen Salkin in the New York Magazines. (She grew up in Newton and returned to Boston to work for a time at Bain Capital, Paper Magazine said.)

Melngailis owned and operated Pure Food and Wine since 2004. She and her husband and business partner Anthony Strangis were arrested in Tennessee in 2016 and accused of “bilking” the restaurant of approximately $2 million, as well as deceiving investors and failing to pay employees and go on the run, according to a 2016 Vanity Fair article.

Melngailis was under the control of Strangis, who “promised immortality” for hundreds of thousands of dollars and caused them to commit the crimes for which they were arrested. Both ultimately pleaded guilty to grand theft, tax fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. In 2022, Netflix released a four-part documentary about the couple titled “Bad Vegan.”

She left Somerville and began living back in New York City in February 2023 to reopen the restaurant with former investor Jeffrey Chodorow, a process to be filmed by Bad Vegan's Mark Emms, New York reports – but so far there is nothing to show for it.

Bobby Pickett

Bobby Pickett performs “Monster Mash” on “American Bandstand” on October 13, 1964.

Do you know the iconic “Monster Mash” song that pops up every Halloween? The artist behind it, Bobby Pickett, is from Somerville and was born here in 1938. 24 years later, in 1962, his novel song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (just before Halloween). “Monster Mash” has since made the Billboard Hot 100 many times (around Halloween), as noted by Billboard in 2018.

According to a New York Times obituary in 2007, when Pickett died at age 69, the song was “driven” by Pickett's impression of Boris Karloff, the British actor who played Frankenstein's monster. The impression was apparently inspired by the horror films Nine Years – Old Pickett was watching at the Somerville cinema, run by his father.

Alex Rocco

lex Rocco at the Governor's Ball after the Emmy Awards on September 16, 1990. (Photo: Alan Light via Flickr)

Alex Rocco, best known for his roles in The Godfather and The Wedding Planner but making more than 170 film and television appearances from 1965 to 2017, was born in Cambridge in 1936 and grew up in Somerville.

Before his acting career, he was arrested and charged with several crimes reflecting the city's troubled past. In 1959, it involved registering bets, then participating in a fight at a Somerville restaurant – for which he served a prison sentence, The Boston Globe reported in 2015. In 1961, he was accused of being a bystander to the local criminal Having murdered Bernard McLaughlin pointed to Rocco being the getaway driver. Rocco was not charged.

His first acting job was in “Motorpsycho!” by Schlockmeister Russ Meyer. Rocco died in 2015 at the age of 79 – so prolific that two films were released posthumously.

Joseph Crugnale

The original Bertucci's on Elm Street in Somerville in 1982, as seen in footage obtained by WGBH. (Image: WGBH via Twitter)

Bertucci's, the Italian restaurant chain with locations in New England and the East Coast, was founded in 1981 in Somerville and founded by Joseph “Joey” Crugnale – inspired by a visit to his grandmother's house in Italy, according to the Bertucci's website. (A story the company doesn't publish: That Crugnale allegedly opened the restaurant to prevent the business he bought four years earlier, Steve's Ice Cream, from facing competition on the same block.)

Crugnale opened the first Bertucci's Brick Oven Pizzeria at 197 Elm St. in Davis Square – now a revival cafe where it's doubtful whether patrons know they could once go down to the basement to play bocce ball. The second opened in Cambridge in 1985 in a space that is now Felipe's Taqueria at 21 Brattle St., Harvard Square. There is still a Medford Bertucci's, but the business has been owned by a Florida company since 2018.