‘Goodfellas,’ ‘Law & Order’ actor a mainstay in films, TV
Paul Sorvino, an imposing actor who specialized in playing crooks and cops like Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas” and the NYPD Sgt. Phil Cerreta on “Law & Order,” died Monday in Jacksonville, Florida. He was 83.
His publicist Roger Neal said Sorvino died of natural causes. Sorvino had dealt with health issues over the past few years.
“Our hearts are broken, there will never be another Paul Sorvino, he was the love of my life, and one of the greatest performers to ever grace the screen and stage,” his wife, Dee Dee Sorvino, said.
In more than 50 years in the entertainment business, Sorvino was a mainstay in films and television, playing an Italian American communist in Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” and mob boss Eddie Valentine in “The Rocketeer.”
He would often say that while he might be best known for playing gangsters, his real passions were poetry, painting and opera.
Born on April 13, 1939, in the Brooklyn borough of New York to a mother who taught piano and father who was a foreman in a robe factory, Sorvino was musically inclined from a young age and attended the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York where he fell for the theater.
He made his Broadway debut in 1964 in “Bajour” and his film debut in Carl Reiner’s “Where’s Poppa?” in 1970.
With his 6-foot-4-inch stature, Sorvino made an impactful presence no matter the medium.
In the 1970s, he acted alongside Al Pacino in “The Panic in Needle Park” and with James Caan in “The Gambler,” reteamed with
Reiner in “Oh, God!” and was among the ensemble in William Friedkin’s bank robbery comedy “The Brink’s Job.”
He was especially prolific in the 1990s, kicking off the decade playing Lips in Beatty’s “Dick Tracy” and Paul Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” who was based on the real-life mobster Paul Vario, and 31 episodes on Dick Wolf’s “Law & Order.”
He followed those with roles in “The Rocketeer,” “The Firm,” “Nixon,” which got him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, and Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” as Juliet’s father, Fulgencio Capulet.
Sorvino had three children from his first marriage, including Academy Award-winning actor Mira Sorvino.
Mira Sorvino wrote a tribute on Twitter: “My father the great Paul Sorvino has passed. My heart is rent asunder — a life of love and joy and wisdom with him is over. He was the most wonderful father. I love him so much. I’m sending you love in the stars, Dad, as you ascend.”
He also directed and starred in a film written
by his daughter Amanda Sorvino and featuring his son Michael Sorvino.
He also ran a horse rescue in Pennsylvania, had a grocery store pasta sauce line based on his mother’s recipe, and sculpted a bronze statue of the late playwright Jason Miller that resides in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Sorvino had starred in Miller’s Tony and Pulitzer-winning play “That Championship Season” on Broadway in 1972 and its film adaptation.
In 2014, he married political pundit Dee Dee Benkie and said that a goal of his later life was to “disabuse people of the notion that I’m a slow-moving, heavy-lidded thug.”
As with most who starred in “Goodfellas,” the image would follow him for the rest of his life which he had complex feelings about.
‘Most people think I’m either a gangster or a cop or something,” he said. “The reality is I’m a sculptor, a painter, a best-selling author, many, many things — a poet, an opera singer, but none of them is gangster . ... It would be nice to have my legacy more than that of just tough guy.”