Danny Aiello
Actor best known as a Mafia hitman and Madonna’s father
DANNY AIELLO, who has died aged 86, was a stout, dependable character actor who came to prominence in middle age, lending doughy humanity to paternal or avuncular, typically Italian-american parts.
His enhanced visibility from the mid-1980s onwards was in part down to Madonna. In the promo for the singer’s 1986 charttopper Papa Don’t Preach, Aiello played the patriarch agonising over his daughter’s life choices. The video proved impossible to avoid that summer: casting agents were reminded of Aiello’s gifts, leading to roles in two very different productions.
In the romcom Moonstruck (1987), Aiello was cast as Johnny Cammameri, the devoted, albeit conservative, fiancé Cher’s Loretta Castorini leaves behind for a fling with Johnny’s younger brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage). Aiello brought a genuine poignancy to his role as a mama’s boy willing to sacrifice his own shot at happiness.
In Spike Lee’s more confrontational Do the Right Thing (1989), Aiello played Sal, owner of a Brooklyn pizzeria that becomes the locus for a vicious race riot. Aiello was Lee’s second choice after Robert de Niro, and he expressed reservations about playing a heavy-set, pizza-slinging Italian. Yet he gave an indelible performance, earning Best Supporting Actor nods at both the Golden Globes and Oscars.
He was born Daniel Louis Aiello on June 20 1933 in Manhattan, the fifth of six children raised almost single-handedly by their seamstress mother Frances Pietrocova after her husband had abandoned the family.
It was a rough upbringing. The young Danny was sent out to shine shoes at Grand Central Station after his mother lost her eyesight; according to the actor’s 2014 memoir I Only Know Who I Am When I’m Somebody Else, he drifted into “running numbers” in illegal betting games and robbing cigarette machines to help make ends meet.
Aiello found greater stability after military service, marrying his teenage sweetheart Sandy Cohen in 1955. He found employment with the Greyhound bus company – working his way up to local president of the Amalgamated Transit Union.
Aiello was working as a bouncer at the New York comedy club The Improv when he was asked to fill in for an MC who had been taken ill. It inspired him to try out for acting roles.
He made his screen debut at 40 in the baseball drama Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), and was the assassin Tony Rosato, ad-libbing the line “Michael Corleone says hello” as he garrottes Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather: Part II (1974). In the mid-1980s he was the police chief in Once Upon a Time in America, the useless husband Mia Farrow escapes in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo and the gangster Rocco in Allen’s Radio Days.
From the late 1980s Aiello was less prominent, though he continued to compile credits. He won a rare lead role as Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer in Ruby (1992) and had his own Brando moment as The Last Don in a 1997 Mario Puzo-derived miniseries, but was as happy in secondary roles, appearing in Robert Altman’s Prêt-àporter (1994) and alongside Rik Mayall in Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis (1997).
Increasingly, his creative energies were focused on a singing career. In 1987 he recorded a Papa Don’t Preach answer song called Papa Wants the Best for You, and he revealed a smooth facility with older standards in the romcom Once Around, and Hudson Hawk (both 1991), in which he duetted with Bruce Willis on Swinging on a Star.
In 2004 his album I Just Wanted to Hear the Words reached No 4 on the Billboard jazz chart; four LPS followed, including 2011’s Bridges, a collaboration with the rapper Hasan, on which he covered Lady in Red and Let It Be.
He is survived by his wife Sandy and three children. A fourth child died in 2010.
Danny Aiello, born June 20 1933, died December 12 2019