Actor Tom Sizemore dies
ACTOR Tom Sizemore, known as much for his struggles with drug addiction and run-ins with the law as for his tough-guy roles in such films as Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, died on Friday at age 61, said his manager, Charles Lago.
Sizemore, who was hospitalised in critical condition after suffering a brain aneurysm on February 18, died in his sleep at a hospital in Burbank, California, Lago said in a statement on Friday.
A native of Detroit, where his mother worked for the city’s ombudsman and his father was an attorney and philosophy professor, Sizemore attended Wayne State University and earned a graduate degree in theatre from Temple University in Philadelphia.
As an aspiring actor in New York City waiting tables and performing in plays, Sizemore got his first break when director Oliver Stone cast him in a bit role as Vet #1 in the 1989 antiwar film Born on the Fourth of July.
Additional supporting parts followed in the early 1990s, leading to a string of higher-profile work playing hard-boiled detectives in such films as Stone’s 1994 mass murder drama Natural Born Killers, the 1995 noir mystery Devil in a Blue Dress and 1995 cyberpunk thriller Strange Days.
He also landed prominent supporting roles as frontier gunfighter Bat Masterson in Kevin Costner’s 1994 western Wyatt Earp, a violent sidekick to Robert De Niro’s career criminal in the 1995 ensemble heist movie Heat, and a paramedic with a messianic complex in Martin Scorsese’s 1999 psycho-drama Bringing Out the Dead.
Sizemore’s first major leading role came in the 1997 horror thriller The Relic, again playing a police detective. He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 2000 as best actor in a miniseries or made-for-television movie for his role as a mob snitch in Witness Protection.
But he is best remembered for playing battle-hardened soldiers in two films — Steven Spielberg’s 1998 World War II epic Saving Private Ryan
Ridley Scott’s 2001 portrayal of the U.S. military’s ill-fated 1993 raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, Black Hawk Down.