Paul Sorvino, a towering actor who specialized in playing robbers and cops like Paulie Cicero on “Goodfellas” and NYPD Sergeant Phil Cerreta on “Law & Order,” has died. He was 83 years old.
His publicist Roger Neal said he died Monday morning of natural causes at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. Sorvino had dealt with health issues in recent years.
Mira Sorvino, his daughter, wrote a tribute on Twitter: “My father, the great Paul Sorvino, has passed away. My heart is torn: a lifetime of love, joy and wisdom with him is over. He was the most wonderful father. I love him so much. I send you love to the stars, Father, as you ascend.”
“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,” said his wife, Dee Dee Sorvino, in a statement. She was by his side when he died.
In 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 “Reds,” Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” and mob boss Eddie Valentine in “The Rocketeer.” He often said that although he was perhaps best known for playing gangsters, his true 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 gown factory, Sorvino was musically inclined at an early age and attended the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, where he fell in love with the theater. He made his Broadway debut in 1964 in “Bajour” and his film debut in “Where’s Poppa?” by Carl Reiner. in 1970.
At 6-foot-4, Sorvino had a commanding presence no matter the medium. In the 1970s, he starred opposite Al Pacino in “The Panic in Needle Park” and with James Caan in “The Gambler,” reteaming with Reiner in “Oh, God!” and was among the set of William Friedkin’s bank robbery comedy “The Brink’s Job.” In John G. Avildsen’s “Rocky” sequel “Slow Dancing in the Big City,” Sorvino had a romantic role and used his dance training alongside professional dancer Anne Ditchburn.
He was particularly prolific in the 1990s, beginning the decade playing Lips in Beatty’s “Dick Tracy” and Paul Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” which was based on real-life mobster Paul Vario, and 31 episodes in “Law” by Dick Wolf. & Command.” He followed those with roles in “The Rocketeer,” “The Firm,” “Nixon,” which earned him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, and Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” as Juliet’s father , Fulgencio Capulet. Beatty would often turn to Sorvino, enlisting him again for his 1998 political satire “Bulworth” and his 2016 Hollywood love letter “Rules Don’t Apply” .He also appeared in James Gray’s “The Immigrant”.
Sorvino had 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 with his son Michael Sorvino.
When she learned that Mira Sorvino had been among the women allegedly sexually harassed and blacklisted by Harvey Weinstein amid the #MeToo account, she told TMZ that if she had known, Weinstein “wouldn’t be walking. I’d be in a wheelchair.”
He was proud of his daughter and cried when she won the Oscar for best supporting actress for “Mighty Aphrodite” in 1996. He told the Los Angeles Times that night that he was at a loss for words to express how he felt.
“They don’t exist in any language I’ve ever heard, well, maybe Italian,” he said.
But he wanted to be seen for more than what he was on screen and was especially proud of his singing. In 1996, “Paul Sorvino: An Evening of Song” was televised as part of a PBS fundraiser. Songs performed include “Torna A Sorriento”, “Guaglione”, “O Sole Mio”, “The Impossible Dream” and “Mama”.
“I’m a pop singer in the sense that Mario Lanza was,” Sorvino said in an interview with the Tampa Tribune. “I’m surprised that no American singers sing with a full voice anymore. Where have all the tenors gone?
The weight of his voice, he thought, made training difficult.
“It’s like trying to park a bus in a VW parking space,” he said.
He also ran a horse rescue in Pennsylvania, had a line of supermarket pasta sauce based on his mother’s recipe, and sculpted a bronze statue of the late playwright Jason Miller who resides in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Sorvino had starred in Miller’s Tony and Pulitzer-winning play “That Championship Season” on Broadway in 1972 and its film adaptation.
In 2014, he married political pundit Dee Dee Benkie and said a goal in his later life was to “disabuse people of the idea that I’m a slow, heavy-lidded bully”.
As with most of those who starred in “Goodfellas,” the image would follow him for the rest of his life, about which he had complex feelings.
“Most people think I’m a gangster or a cop or something,” he said. “The reality is that I am a sculptor, a painter, a best-selling author, many, many things, a poet, an opera singer, but none of them are gangsters… It would be nice to have more of my legacy. than that of a tough guy.”