Actor known for ‘Sopranos,’ gangster roles
Tony Sirico, the actor best known for playing the eccentric gangster Paulie Walnuts on the hit HBO series “The Sopranos,” died Friday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 79.
His death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by Bob McGowan, his manager. No cause was given.
Paulie Walnuts — that was Paul Gualtieri’s nickname because he once hijacked a truck full of nuts (he was expecting television sets) — was one of mob boss Tony Soprano’s most loyal, oversensitive and reckless men. Paulie was the kind of guy who would participate in an intervention for a drug addict, and when it was his turn to speak, punch the guy in the face. He loved his mother (although he found out she was really his aunt), and she loved him because he wrote the checks to keep her in an expensive nursing home.
Sirico’s face was also familiar, in quick glimpses, to fans of Woody Allen films. He appeared in several of them, beginning with “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994), in which he played the right-hand man of a powerful gangster turned theater producer. He was a boxing trainer in “Mighty Aphrodite”
(1995), an escaped convict in “Everyone Says I Love You” (1996), a matter-offact jailhouse cop in “Deconstructing Harry”
(1997) and a gun-toting gangster on Coney Island in “Wonder Wheel”
(2017).
Gennaro Anthony Sirico Jr. was born in New York’s Brooklyn borough July 29, 1942, the son of Jerry Sirico, a stevedore, and Marie (Cappelluzzo) Sirico. Junior, as he was called, remembered that he first got into trouble when he stole nickels from a newsstand. He attended Midwood High School but did not graduate, his brother Robert Sirico said.
He worked in construction for a while but soon yielded to temptation. “I started running with the wrong type of guys, and I found myself doing a lot of bad things,” he said in James Toback’s 1989 documentary
“The Big Bang.” Bad things like armed robbery, extortion, coercion and felony weapons possession.
While serving 20 months of a four-year sentence at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison in Ossining, N.Y., he saw a troupe of actors, all ex-convicts, who had made a stop there to perform for the inmates. “When I watched them, I said to myself, ‘I can do that,’ ” he told the Daily News of New York in
1999.
He was an uncredited extra in “The Godfather: Part II” (1974) and made his official film debut in “Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell” (1977), directed by the self-proclaimed “cinema schlockmeister” Larry Buchanan. Sirico followed that with more than a decade of small television and movie roles, capped by his part as the flashy mobster Tony Stacks in “Goodfellas” (1990).
Once “The Sopranos” hit the air in 1999, it became enormously and widely popular. Sirico soon knew he was very famous. “If I’m with five other Paulies,” he told the New York Times in 2007, imagining a fairly unlikely situation, “and somebody yells, ‘Hey, Paulie,’ I know it’s for me.”
He also voiced a streetsmart dog named Vinny in the animated series “Family Guy.”
Sirico married and divorced early. In addition to his brother Robert, he is survived by two children, Joanne Sirico Bello and Richard Sirico; a sister, Carol Pannunzio; another brother, Carmine; and several grandchildren.