‘Heavy-lidded thug’ from Goodfellas was an aspiring poet and opera singer
Three days before he was supposed to start shooting Goodfellas, director Martin Scorsese’s 1990 account of friendship, betrayal, jealousy and addiction in the New York City mob, actor Paul Sorvino was ready to quit. ‘‘Get me out,’’ he told his manager in a desperate phone call. ‘‘I’m going to ruin this great man’s picture, and I’m going to ruin myself.’’
Sorvino, who has died aged 83, had been cast as the stately but menacing mob boss Paulie Cicero, a character based on convicted mobster Paul Vario, and he was having trouble with the role. Like Paulie, he was an Italian American from Brooklyn; he felt he understood the character’s speech and mannerisms, including the loving way he treated low-level gangsters like Henry Hill, the film’s protagonist (played by Ray Liotta). But he was struggling to find ‘‘that kernel of coldness and absolute hardness’’ that allowed Paulie to order a hit on a longtime friend or associate.
Then, soon after he called his manager, he went to adjust his tie. ‘‘I looked in the mirror and literally jumped back a foot,’’ he told the New York Times. ‘‘I saw a look I’d never seen, something in my eyes that alarmed me. A deadly soulless look in my eyes that scared me . . . And I looked to the heavens and said, ‘You’ve found it.’ ’’
Sorvino, a would-be opera singer who also sculpted and wrote poetry, went on to deliver one of the most gripping performances of his career, alongside Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco and Liotta, who died in May.
As Paulie, Sorvino never used a phone, stayed away from group conversations, instructed a philandering Henry to return to his wife and introduced millions to an unusual system for slicing garlic: using a razor blade to cut it so finely that it liquefies in the pan.
Goodfellas received six Academy Award nominations and launched Sorvino to a new level of fame, helping him land a starring role on Law & Order’s early seasons.
The burly, 6ft 3in Sorvino had long played characters on both sides of the law, including Al Pacino’s overworked police supervisor in Cruising (1980) and the villainous, widemouthed gangster Lips Manlis in Dick Tracy (1990). He later played heavies in Disney’s The Rocketeer (1991), Sydney Pollack’s The Firm (1993) and two recent seasons of crime drama Godfather of Harlem.
But those roles were just one aspect of a wide-ranging career that included more than 170 movies and TV credits. ‘‘It’s almost my later goal in life to disabuse people of the notion that I’m a slow-moving, heavy-lidded thug,’’ Sorvino told Orlando Weekly in 2014.
Interviewed by the Times in 2006, he remarked that while ‘‘everyone thinks I’m a mobster, I think of myself as a warrior-poet’’ – as well as a singer, a role that he further inhabited after making his New York City Opera debut later that year.
On screen, Sorvino showed his range while playing a sentimental newspaper columnist in Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978), a deaf lawyer in the TV movie Dummy (1979), a leftwing political activist in Reds (1981), Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) and Juliet’s father in Romeo + Juliet (1996).
H
e also served as a mentor for daughter Mira Sorvino, who followed him into acting and won an Oscar for her supporting role in Mighty Aphrodite (1995). ‘‘When you give me this award, you honour my father, who has taught me everything I know about acting,’’ she said at the ceremony, as the camera found Sorvino in the audience. Lifting his arms to his face, he burst into tears.
The youngest of three sons, Paul Anthony Sorvino was born in Brooklyn to a father who was a garment factory foreman, and a mother who was a piano teacher. From a young age, he was drawn to performing, dreaming of a career as a singer or actor.
While listening to recordings by operatic tenors like Mario Lanza and Enrico Caruso, he started to develop his voice, learning to overcome severe asthma. He sang at bingo games, nightclubs and summer resorts in the ‘‘minestrone belt’’ of the Catskills, waited tables, mixed cocktails at private parties and sold dictionaries door-to-door.
Even after winning a scholarship to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he found it difficult to get work. ‘‘I had confidence in my ability, and I was angry as hell when other people didn’t recognise it.’’
Therapy helped, he said, but for a time he simply gave up acting and joined a New York advertising agency. He rose from copywriter to vice-president but was miserable. With encouragement from wife Lorraine Davis, he returned to show business.
In 1971, he appeared in The Panic in Needle Park with Pacino and played Joseph Bologna’s father in the comedy Made for Each Other, which led to his audition for That Championship Season. The play won a Pulitzer Prize and ran for 700 performances on Broadway.
Sorvino’s marriages to Davis and Vanessa Arico ended in divorce. In 2014, he married Dee Dee Benkie, a Republican strategist whom he met in a Fox News green room when they were on the same talk show.
In addition to his wife, survivors include three children from his first marriage, and five grandchildren. – Washington Post