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.
Paul Sorvino attends the premiere of Big Eyes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014. Credit: AP
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.”
Many have responded to Mira Sorvino’s tweet with condolences and sympathy. Jane Lynch wrote: “Your dad sang ‘Danny Boy’ for my Aunt Marge at the Chicago Film Critics Awards in 2012. We all cried.” Rob Reiner, who appeared in one of his father’s films with Sorvino, said he sends love. Lorraine Bracco tweeted two broken heart emojis.
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 while he might be best known for playing gangsters (and his very good garlic chopping system), 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 from 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 Carl Reiner’s Where’s Poppa? in 1970.
Paul Sorvino and his daughter Mira Sorvino attend the premiere of Reservation Road during the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007. Credit: AP
At 6-foot-4, Sorvino had a commanding presence no matter the medium. In the 1970s, she starred opposite Al Pacino in The Panic in Needle Park and with James Caan in The Gambler, again as 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 of Dick Wolf’s Law & Order. 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 love letter to Hollywood Rules Don’t Apply.