‘Convincing brute’
Dennis Farina, actor: b Chicago, February 29, 1944; m Patricia (diss), 3s; d Scottsdale, Arizona, July 22, 2013, aged 69.
DENNIS FARINA was a Chicago policeman who initially moonlighted as a movie actor for the comparatively easy money but quickly became an acclaimed staple of crime dramas and comedies, playing characters on both sides of the law.
With his silvery locks, craggy face, and flattened Chicago vowels, Farina became one of the most readily identified supporting performers of the past 30 years. He appeared in dozens of movies, from big-budget productions to independent fare.
Farina had little formal training and relied on a raw, Rat Pack charisma that could be as smooth as Chivas Regal one minute and explosive the next. He could play dumb, wily, dapper and intimidating with equal ease. Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed Farina as a heavily bandaged mob boss in the 1995 gangster caper Get Shorty, regarded him as a master of the expletive.
‘‘No-one can say the F-word like Dennis,’’ Sonnenfeld once told USA Today.
As a ruthless mob boss in the 1988 chase comedy Midnight Run, Farina more than kept up with far more experienced actors such as Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, film critic Michael Wilmington singled out Farina for his ‘‘frighteningly convincing brutality’’.
But like most of Farina’s characters, the mob boss had a sarcastic streak. Phoning one of his less-than-effective henchmen, he barks: ‘‘Is this Moron No 1? Put Moron No 2 on the phone.’’
As Jennifer Lopez’s concerned father in Out of Sight (1998), Farina was an easy-going retired cop with old-school habits and a wiseguy wit. He asks his daughter’s clueless boyfriend, who is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the initials FBI, ‘‘Do you ever wear one that says ‘Undercover?’’’
Farina was in his late 30s and working in the burglary division of the Chicago police force when a chance encounter with director Michael Mann launched his acting career. Mann cast him as a thug in the 1981 film Thief and he remained part of Mann’s unofficial repertory company of actors.
They worked together on the 1986 serial-killer thriller Manhunter, with Farina playing an FBI agent. He won a rare leading role on Mann’s TV series Crime Story, a moody police drama that aired from 1986 to 1988 and starred Farina as a Chicago cop chasing a gangster in the 1960s. More recently, Mann cast Farina in the horse-racing drama Luck as a bodyguard and adviser to an ex-con played by Dustin Hoffman.
From 2004 to 2006, Farina starred in Law & Order, one of the most successful franchises in TV history, as a New York City police detective who slips past suspicious landlords with the officious-sounding line, ‘‘Don’t worry – we’re authorised’’.
He credited his convincing delivery to his 18 years as a policeman. ‘‘I got to meet all kinds of people in that job,’’ he told the Boston Herald. ‘‘I’d see maybe 10 to 20 personalities a day, so I learned how to read people and handle them.’’
Farina was the youngest of seven children of Italian immigrants.
Growing up in Chicago, Farina professed no great interest in the arts. ‘‘I think my high-school acting career lasted a day,’’ he said. ‘‘Myself and this other guy, we’d signed on for the play because there were some cute girls in it. But we started fooling around and were asked to leave during the quote-unquote rehearsals.’’
After high school graduation, he served in the army for three years before joining the Chicago police.
A retired Chicago policeman, Charlie Adamson, was serving as
Michael [Mann] was looking for a couple of rough, ugly guys to play henchmen and I was like, ‘I got just the guy.’ Retired Chicago policeman Charlie Adamson
a technical adviser for Mann on Thief when he called Farina. ‘‘Michael was looking for a couple of rough, ugly guys to play henchmen,’’ Adamson told the Chicago Tribune, ‘‘and I was like, ‘I got just the guy.’ I called Dennis and said, ‘you gotta get down here’.’’
Farina, who was only recently divorced, said it was ‘‘a fun sideline, a good chance to pick up a few bucks’’.
Farina was often typecast in crime and detective films, including the Bruce Willis film Striking Distance (1993) and the Guy Ritchie gangster story Snatch (2000). But he also had a small role as a military officer in Steven Spielberg’s World War II drama Saving Private Ryan (1998) and starred with Bette Midler as exspouses at their daughter’s wedding in Carl Reiner’s 1997 comedy That Old Feeling.
Farina received strong reviews in a small-budget 2011 drama, The Last Rites of Joe May, playing a low-level street hustler.
‘‘Acting, sometimes I think the whole thing’s a little overthought, overworked,’’ he said in 2011. ‘‘I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m just not that deep.
‘‘But before you actually become an actor, you know, maybe there’s something to be said for having lived a life.’’