Paul Sorvino, a towering actor who specialized in playing crooks and cops like Pauly Cicero on “Goodfellas” and NYPD Sergeant Phil Cheretta on “Law & Order,” has died. He was 83.
His publicist, Roger Neal, said he died Monday morning in Indiana of natural causes.
“Our hearts are broken, there will never be another Paul Sorvino, he was the love of my life and one of the greatest performers to ever grace the screen and stage,” his wife, Dee Dee Sorvino, said in a statement.
During his more than 50 years in the entertainment business, Sorvino was a mainstay in film and television, playing an Italian American communist in Warren Beatty’s The Reds, Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s Nixon and mob boss Eddie Valentine in Rockettera. He often said that although he was best known for playing gangsters, his real passions were poetry, painting and opera.
Born in Brooklyn in 1939 to a mother who taught piano and a father who was a foreman in a bathrobe factory, Sorvino was musically inclined from an early age and attended the American Academy of Music and Drama in New York, where he became interested in theater. Made his Broadway debut in 1964 in Bajour and made his film debut in Carl Reiner’s Where’s Poppa? in 1970
At 6 feet 4 inches tall, Sorvino made an impactful presence regardless of the environment. In the 1970s he co-starred with Al Pacino in The Panic in Needle Park and James Caan in The Gambler, again with Reiner in Oh God!, and was among the ensemble in the bank heist comedy William Friedkin “The Brink’s Job”. In John G. Avildsen’s Rocky sequel, Slow Dancing in the Big City, Sorvino is set to play the romantic lead and use his dance training opposite professional ballerina Ann Ditchburn.
He was particularly prolific in the 1990s, kicking off the decade with the role of Lipps in Beatty’s Dick Tracy and Paul Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s Good Guys, based on the real-life mobster Paul Wario, and 31 episode of Dick Wolf’s “Law & Order.” He followed these with roles in “The Rocketeer,” “The Firm,” “Nixon,” which earned him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, and “Romeo + Juliet” on Baz Luhrmann as Juliet’s father, Fulgencio Capulet Beatty frequently turned to Sorvino, bringing him back for his 1998 political satire Bulworth and his 2016 Hollywood love letter Rules Don’t Apply He also appears in James Gray’s The Immigrant.
Sorvino has three children from his first marriage, including Oscar-winning actor Mira Sorvino. He also directed and starred in a film written by his daughter Amanda Sorvino and featuring his son Michael Sorvino.
When he learned that Mira Sorvino was among the women allegedly sexually harassed and blacklisted by Harvey Weinstein in the midst of the #MeToo backlash, he told TMZ that if he had known Weinstein “wouldn’t have walk He would be in a wheelchair.
He was proud of his daughter and cried when she won the Oscar for best supporting actress for “Aphrodite the Mighty” in 1996. He told the Los Angeles Times that night that he was at a loss for words.
“They don’t exist in any language I’ve ever heard – well, maybe Italian,” he said.
Add Comment