Burt Young
Actor and former boxer who found fame as Sylvester Stallone’s closest friend in the Rocky film series
BURT YOUNG, who has died aged 83, received an Oscar nomination for his role as Paulie Pennino, Sylvester Stallone’s cigar-chomping alcoholic butcher friend, in Rocky (1976); as a kind of amiable moral compass to Stallone’s mumbling pugilist, Young made himself an indispensable part of the package, returning in all five Rocky sequels.
His combination of unflinching naturalism, frame-filling bulk and a wrongside-of-the-tracks face proved catnip for directors of American gangster films. His credits include Sergio Leone’s weighty Once Upon a Time in America (1984), with Robert De Niro, the black comedy The Pope of Greenwich Village (also 1984), starring Mickey Rourke and Daryl Hannah, and the sordid sex-and-violence-laden Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989). He also appeared in a terrifyingly memorable episode of
The Sopranos in 2001, playing an elderly mobster dying of cancer but determined to carry out one final deadly assignment.
By his own account Young was the only actor who did not have to audition for Rocky, having once been a boxer himself. His manager was Mike Tyson’s former trainer Cus D’amato, and he was friends with Muhammad Ali, who declared that “Baldy Paulie will go down in two” when the pair fought a charity match in the 1990s. “It was three rounds,” Young insisted.
He claimed that Stallone begged him to appear in Rocky: “You gotta.” Young proved a natural, even if the saga’s sequels grew increasingly indulgent.
In Rocky II Paulie’s sister Adrian (Talia Shire) marries Rocky but gives birth prematurely when Paulie shouts at her. Rocky III opens with Rocky rescuing Paulie from a police cell after he has smashed up an amusement arcade machine. In Rocky IV Paulie accompanies his brother-in-law to a remote Soviet training base, but in Rocky V he causes his friend’s bankruptcy.
“There’s a part of Paulie in all of us,” Young told Newsday in 2007. “Cowardice, bravado, false bravado. And I knew how to beat the drum to make the guy interesting and ugly and pathetic.”
He was born Gerald Tommaso Delouise into an Italian family in Queens, New York, on April 30 1940 to Michael Delouise, a high-school metalwork teacher, and his wife Josephine. He changed his name to Richard Morea and later adopted the stage name Burt Young.
At 15 he dated a woman who was married with two children but fought with her husband. To escape he enlisted in the Marines – “my pop fibbing my age to get me in” – but was detained after starting a mini-riot among anti-american protesters outside the US base at Okinawa.
He took up boxing with the Marines, winning 32 of his 34 fights. After a dishonourable discharge he turned professional. There was little money in boxing, his biggest payday being $400. He started a silkscreen business that went bankrupt, tried carpet cleaning and ran a gambling outfit.
Although married, Young became infatuated with a barmaid called Norma who wanted to act, and wrote on her behalf to Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio. But when they met, Strasberg suggested that it was Young who had potential; Norma suffered from stage fright.
His first role was as a monsignor in an off-off-broadway play. The launchpad for his big-screen career was an uncredited part in the army prison drama The Hill (1965) with Sean Connery. “He didn’t have to give me the time of day but … I learnt a lot from him and that film,” he recalled. Other early roles included Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), in which he played a cuckolded fisherman in the opening scene, the crime drama The Gambler (also 1974), with James Caan, and Sam Peckinpah’s martial artsinfluenced thriller The Killer Elite (1975).
During the Rocky years he appeared as a truck driver in Peckinpah’s interminable car-stunt film Convoy (1978), and as a corrupt match-rigger in Robert Aldrich’s femalewrestling movie All the Marbles (1981).
At the age of 12 Young won a painting competition in New York, and he returned to the easel throughout his life. Some of his paintings appear in Rocky Balboa (2006). In
Mickey Blue Eyes (1990), he plays a gangster laundering money through paintings at Sotheby’s in New York.
A compact, bull-like figure with a taxi driver’s paunch and Popeye-like forearms, for his daily routine Young would hit a punchbag at the gym and swing a sledgehammer around his backyard. That done, he tackled a glass of whisky and three packs of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. At one time he bought a restaurant in the Bronx and named it Burt Young’s Il Boschetto. Latterly he lived quietly on the north shore of Long Island with his paints.
Acting, he said, was nothing compared to boxing. “The guy in the other corner always looked twice as big,” he recalled. “Walking up those steps was like going to the electric chair.”
Young was not much into conversation but big on family ties. His wife Gloria, whom he married in 1961, died in 1974. He dated his Rocky co-star, Talia Shire, “for the blink of an eye”, and by the 1990s was involved with a blonde dermatologist.
“I adore women,” he once said. “I’m pliable, like a piece of clay, a Labrador. I’m not smooth, I just drool.”
He is survived by a daughter from his marriage, the actress Anne Morea; they appeared together in a 1995 Los Angeles staging of Arthur Miller’s tragedy A View from the Bridge.
Burt Young, born April 30 1940, died October 8 2023