Young hustler and thief made a movie career out of playing blue-collar heavies

Danny Aiello, who has died aged 86, was a late-blooming actor who memorably portrayed blue-collar heavies and hotheads in films such as The Godfather: Part II, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Do the Right Thing, and who played against type as a middle-aged mama’s boy in Moonstruck.

Raised in poverty during the Depression, Aiello grew up in the South Bronx with six siblings. His father, he said, ‘‘took a hike’’. Learning to hustle for work at age 6, he became a high school dropout, a gang member, a thief and safecracker, a pool shark, a Greyhound bus bag handler and a troublemaking transport union president.

Burly, huskyvoiced and gregarious, Aiello was also a natural showman whose work as a bouncer at an improv comedy club provided his entree into acting. Some nights, he took a chance at emceeing and singing. ‘‘I was terrified,’’ he said. ‘‘But then, no-one’s shooting bullets at you, and you do it. It gave me my first ounce of strength in that direction.’’

Encouraged by the club owner, he began attending casting calls and landed stage roles that he described as ‘‘off off off off’’ Broadway. He got his breakthrough playing a hitman in The Godfather: Part II (1974). As his character garroted a mobster, he improvised a message to his victim that director Francis Ford Coppola kept in the film: ‘‘Michael Corleone says hello.’’

It was the start of a nearly five-decade career spanning more than 100 roles, with Aiello often cast as boisterous toughs on both sides of the law. In Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), he had a supporting role as a psychopathic police officer who throws a young man off a rooftop, and he was the abusive husband of Mia Farrow in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).

He won a Daytime Emmy Award for Family of Strangers (1980), playing a widower with two children. He also was Madonna’s worried, disapproving father in the 1986 music video of Papa Don’t Preach.

Aiello became one of the busiest character actors in movies, notably as a contract killer with a soft streak in Allen’s Radio Days (1987) and as a man torn between his engagement to Cher and his devotion to his dying mother in Moonstruck (1987). In casting Do the Right Thing (1989), Spike Lee tried to persuade De Niro to play Sal, a pizzeria owner, but the actor steered him to Aiello.

‘‘I think it makes a big difference that Danny has lived a real life,’’ Lee told the Los Angeles Times. ‘‘With most actors, they’ve been to acting school, they’ve been to Juilliard. That’s all they know. But Danny’s been out here. He’s lived a little.’’

Daniel Louis Aiello Jr was born in Manhattan, sixth of seven children of a womanising truck driver and a mother who worked as a seamstress and eventually went blind. Before he was 10, he was shining shoes and hawking papers at Grand Central station.

He quit high school after two weeks and, as a gang member, stole from the grocery stores and bowling alley where he worked. ‘‘I was getting into a lot of trouble,’’ he told Parade magazine. ‘‘I never held anyone up, but I once got hit in the thigh with a zip gun. It was only a matter of time before things got really bad.’’

After three years of army service, he returned to the Bronx and married Sandy Cohen in 1955. They had four children, one of whom, a stuntman, died in 2010. He spent several years working for Greyhound bus lines. He was elected president of his local union and, in 1967, was blamed for leading an unauthorised strike. The international union sided with management and fired him.

He spent the next two years working at after-hours saloons, occasionally resorting to burglary. ‘‘The only thing I knew was that the rent was due, and I had to find a way to pay it,’’ he told Parade. ‘‘Do I regret stealing? Absolutely. But I still think it was the right decision if it kept us from being out on the street.’’

In Hollywood, his background gave him the right look and temperament to play a range of malefactors, including Dallas strip club owner Jack Ruby, who killed alleged presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, in Ruby (1992). ‘‘Because of everything I went through, I really appreciated it when the good life happened,’’ he said. ‘‘I think of the hard labour done by postal workers, construction workers, sanitation workers, police – all honourable jobs – and then I look to heaven and say, ‘Thank you.’

‘‘To wake up and know that the next thing you have to do is remember lines and say them as realistically as possible and create someone outside yourself – there’s nothing better. Young actors who become famous quickly don’t always understand that.’’

He is survived by his wife, three children, and several grandchildren. – Washington Post

‘‘Because of everything I went through, I really appreciated it when the good life happened.’’