Paul Sorvino, a commanding actor who specialized in playing crooks and cops like Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas” and New York police sergeant Phil Cerreta in “Law & Order,” has died. He was 83 years old.
His publicist Roger Neal said he died Monday morning of natural causes at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. Sorvino had dealt with health problems in recent years.
Mira Sorvino, his daughter, wrote a tribute on Twitter: “My father, the great Paul Sorvino, has passed away. My heart is torn: a life of love, joy and wisdom with him is over. He was the most wonderful father. I love him so much. Sending you love in the stars, Dad, as you ascend.”
Many responded to Mira Sorvino’s tweet with condolences and solidarity. Jane Lynch wrote: “Your father sang ‘Danny Boy’ for my Aunt Marge at the Chicago Film Critics Awards in 2012. We all cried.” Rob Reiner, who appeared in one of her father’s movies with Sorvino, said he was sending love. Lorraine Bracco tweeted two broken heart emojis.
In his more than 50 years in the entertainment business, Sorvino was a mainstay in film and television, playing an Italian-American communist in Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” and the mob boss Eddie Valentine in “The Rocketeer.” He used to say that while he was best known for playing gangsters (and for his very good garlic chopping system), his true passions were poetry, painting, and opera.
Born in Brooklyn in 1939 to a mother who taught piano and a father who was a foreman in a gown factory, Sorvino was musically inclined from a young age and attended the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, where he fell in love with the theater. He made his Broadway debut in 1964 in “Bajour” and his film debut in “Where’s Daddy?” by Carl Reiner. in 1970.
At 6-foot-4, Sorvino made a striking presence no matter the medium. In the 1970s, he starred opposite Al Pacino in “The Panic in Needle Park” and James Caan in “The Gambler,” and he reteamed with Reiner in “Oh, God!” and was part of the cast of William Friedkin’s bank robbery comedy “The Brink’s Job.” In the follow-up to John G. Avildsen’s “Rocky,” “Slow Dancing in the Big City,” Sorvino played a romantic role and used her dance training alongside professional dancer Anne Ditchburn.
He was especially prolific in the 1990s, beginning the decade playing Lips in Beatty’s “Dick Tracy” and Paul Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” which was based on real-life mobster Paul Vario, and 31 episodes in “Law Law” by Dick Wolf. & Sort.” He followed those with roles in “The Rocketeer,” “The Firm,” “Nixon,” which earned him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, and Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” as Juliet’s father, Fulgencio Capuleto Beatty would return to Sorvino often, recruiting him again for his political satire “Bulworth,” which came out in 1998, and his 2016 Hollywood love letter “Rules Don’t Apply.”
Sorvino had three children from his first marriage, including Academy Award-winning actor Mira Sorvino. He also directed and starred in a film written by her daughter Amanda Sorvino and starring his son Michael Sorvino.
When he learned that Mira Sorvino had been among the women allegedly sexually harassed and blacklisted by Harvey Weinstein amid the #MeToo reckoning, he told TMZ that if he had known, Weinstein, “wouldn’t be walking around. She would be in a wheelchair.”
He was proud of his daughter and cried when she won the Oscar for best supporting actress for “Mighty Aphrodite” in 1996. That night he told the Los Angeles Times that he had no words to express how he felt.
“They don’t exist in any language that I’ve heard, well, maybe Italian,” he said.
But he wanted to be seen for more than he was on screen and took particular pride in his singing. In 1996, “Paul Sorvino: An Evening of Song” was broadcast on television as part of a PBS fundraising campaign. Songs performed included “Torna A Sorriento”, “Guaglione”, “O Sole Mio”, “The Impossible Dream” and “Mama”.
“I’m a pop singer in the sense that Mario Lanza was,” Sorvino said in an interview with the Tampa Tribune. “It amazes me that no American male singer sings with a full voice. Where have all the tenors gone?
The weight of his voice, he thought, made training difficult.
“It’s like trying to park a bus in a VW parking space,” he said.
He also ran a horse rescue in Pennsylvania, had a line of pasta sauce in a grocery store based on his mother’s recipe, and sculpted a bronze statue of the late playwright Jason Miller who resides in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Sorvino had starred in Miller’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play “That Championship Season” on Broadway in 1972, which also earned him a Tony nomination and its film adaptation.
In 2014, he married political pundit Dee Dee Benkie and said a later life goal was to “disabuse people of the notion that I’m a slow, heavy-lidded thug.”
“Our hearts are broken, there will never be another Paul Sorvino, he was the love of my life and one of the greatest artists to ever grace the screen and stage,” his wife said in a statement. She was by his side when he died.
As with most of those who starred in “Goodfellas”, the image would follow him for the rest of his life so he had complex feelings.
“Most people think I’m a gangster or a cop or something,” he said. “The reality is that I am a sculptor, a painter, a best-selling author, many, many things: a poet, an opera singer, but none of them are gangsters… It would be nice to have my legacy rather than that of a tough guy” .