Robber-turned-actor was best known for playing Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos
In the early 1970s Tony Sirico was serving jail time for armed robbery when he saw a performance by the Theatre for the Forgotten, a troupe of former prisoners, and realised that acting was for him. ‘‘I knew I wasn’t bad looking. And I knew I had the guts to stand up and [entertain] people,’’ said the one-time armed robber, who had discovered the art of making convicted killers laugh.
More than two decades later he was 55 and camping on his mother’s sofa when he auditioned for the part of Junior in The Sopranos. ‘‘About an hour after I got home, I got a call from [the producer] David Chase,’’ he told Vanity Fair. ‘‘ ‘You want the good news or the bad news?’, I said,
‘Give me the bad news.’ He said,
‘You didn’t get
Uncle Junior.
But I have something in mind. Would you be willing to do a recurring role on the show? I have a character called Paulie Walnuts’.’’ The name Walnuts came from when Paulie Gualtieri had found a consignment of walnuts in a truck heist instead of the expected television sets. Sirico accepted, but insisted that his character ‘‘would not become a rat’’.
Paulie’s role as a charismatic yet eccentric consigliere and fiercely loyal friend to Tony Soprano was not dissimilar to the actor’s own life and he once described his character as ‘‘my Siamese twin’’.
Sirico, who has died aged 79 from complications of dementia, appeared in all six seasons of the show, which ran from 1999 to 2007 and was influential in encouraging other writers to look more sympathetically upon characters who might previously have been villains with little shading. Generally he was happy to go along with the scriptwriters’ proposals, though he was reluctant to be seen killing a woman. ‘‘I said, ‘‘David, I come from a tough neighbourhood. If I go home and they see I killed a woman, it’s going to make me look bad’. He smiled, and said, ‘No, you’ve got to do it’.’’ When Minn, a friend of Paulie’s mother, caught him attempting to steal her life savings, he smothered her with a cushion. ‘‘I went back to the neighbourhood, and nobody said a word,’’ he recalled. ‘‘They loved the show. They didn’t care what we did.’’
Gennaro Anthony Sirico, known as Junior, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942, the son of Jerry Sirico, a dock worker, and his wife Marie, who were of Sicilian descent. He was raised in East Flatbush and Bensonhurst, neighbourhoods known for their Italian populations and their isolated clannishness. ‘‘Where I grew up, every guy was trying to prove himself. You either had to have a tattoo or a bullet hole,’’ he said, adding with a grin: ‘‘I had both.’’ At age seven he had been caught stealing coins from a newspaper stand. Later he claimed to have been arrested at least 28 times. ‘‘The first time I went away to prison, they searched me to see if I had a gun – and I had three of ’em on me,’’ he said. ‘‘In our
Where I grew up, every guy was trying to prove himself. You either had to have a tattoo or a bullet hole, . . . I had both.’’
neighbourhood if you weren’t carrying a gun, it was like you were the rabbit during rabbithunting season.’’
Once he was outside a church kissing a woman when her angry boyfriend shot him in the leg. ‘‘When I saw the blood all over my new white suit, I just went crazy,’’ he told the Los Angeles Times. ‘‘I start running towards their car. All I could think of was how they ruined my suit . . . then they shot me again, this time in the back.’’
He married young and started to go straight, working in the construction industry. Three months later he fell for another woman, but he returned to a life of crime and she left him. He is survived by two children, Joanne and Richard.
After his final spell behind bars a friend helped him to find work as a model. ‘‘So I came in through the back window, the way I always did,’’ he laughed. Soon he graduated to small-time acting gigs, including as an extra in Crazy Joe (1974) about the murder of the mobster Joseph ‘‘Crazy Joe’’ Gallo in Little Italy in 1972. That meant he could obtain a Screen Actors Guild card, ‘‘which gave me a life instead of a life sentence’’.
He took acting lessons with a teacher called Michael Gazzo, who offered some advice. ‘‘Gazzo leant over to me after I did a scene and whispered, ‘Tony, leave the gun at home’. After so many years of packing a gun, I didn’t even realise I had it with me in acting class. But when he told me to leave the gun at home, he meant for me to also leave my former life behind, to be an actor.’’
He largely stuck to type. In Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) with Robert De Niro he played the gangster Tony Stacks, while in Gotti (1996), directed by Robert Harmon, he was Joe Dimiglia, the head of a crime family.
There were six appearances for Woody Allen, including in Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and Cafe Society (2016). He even played a mobster in A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa (2008), in which he and Steve Schirripa, another member of the mafia, are enlisted to try to get three Christmas letters to the North Pole.
Above all, Sirico made a specialism of suffering a brutal death, or at least being badly injured. He proudly kept a fuzzy videotape of his demise as Riccamonza in James Toback’s gruesome cult classic Fingers (1978), in which he tumbles down 40ft of stairs with Harvey Keitel as they stab and pulverise each other in a bloody fury. Although his mother walked out in disgust during the screening, he remained sanguine about the role. ‘‘I make a pretty good living because I die well,’’ he explained. ‘‘I get hired to get killed.’’ the Times