Amid the carnage of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), the actor Paul Sorvino, who has died aged 83, was a soothing presence. A reassuring, panda-like figure with a pillowy face, Sorvino played the avuncular mob kingpin Paulie Cicero, who gives the green light to most of the blood-soaked horrors on display. Yet his placatory voice and plodding, unhurried movements seem to disavow any part in the mayhem.
During a pampered spell in prison, Paulie wields a razor blade not to wound his foes but to cut garlic into tissue-thin slices that will liquefy in the pan when cooked with oil. Serving wine with dinner in his quarters, he pads around in dressing-gown and socks. “Paulie might have moved slow,” observes Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) admiringly. “But it was only because Paulie didn’t have to move for anybody.”
Sorvino’s first impressions of the picture were far from positive. “I thought it was excessively violent, boring, and I was boring in it,” he said in 2014. Eventually, he came to his senses, telling himself: “Wait a minute, I think I’ve just seen a great movie, and I think [I’m] good in it.”
The role defined him to such an extent that he made it his goal in life “to disabuse people of the notion that I’m a slow-moving, heavy-lidded thug”. Evidence included his performances as Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) and as Juliet’s father in Baz Luhrmann’s frenzied, modern-dress Romeo + Juliet (1996).
Though he was cherished for his role as an NYPD sergeant, Phil Cerreta, in the second and third series of Law & Order (1991-92), Sorvino did not exactly cross the street to avoid playing crooks and thugs. Men with Guns (1996), Kill the Irishman (2011), in which he was the real-life mobster Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, and Once Upon a Time in Queens (2013) represent a small sample of his portraits of the criminal life.
Born in New York, Paul was the son of Marietta (nee Renzi), a piano teacher, and Fortunato Sorvino, a factory foreman. He was educated at Lafayette high school and took singing lessons from a young age. He performed at venues in the Catskills mountains, a popular holiday destination for New Yorkers, and at charity balls where he was billed as Val Sorvino or Paul de Vere. “The names sounded more romantic than mine,” he said.
Once his aspirations to act became clear to him, he won a scholarship to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, where he studied under Sanford Meisner. Stage work was hard to come by, though he spent almost seven months in the chorus of the Broadway musical Bajour in 1964. He worked as a waiter, acting teacher and door-to-door dictionary salesman before writing copy at an advertising agency, where his colleagues included Barbra Streisand’s brother Sheldon.
At the age of 30, Sorvino quit to devote his life to acting. He quickly made an impression in a clutch of small film roles including the black comedy Where’s Poppa? (1970). He appeared with that picture’s star, George Segal, in A Touch of Class (1973), which also featured an Oscar-winning Glenda Jackson, and later reteamed with both actors in another romantic comedy, Lost and Found (1979).
Rave reviews came his way for the 1972 off-Broadway premiere of Jason Miller’s Pulitzer-winning That Championship Season, about former high school basketball team-mates who meet every year to reminisce. He maintained a connection with the play, co-starring with Robert Mitchum and Martin Sheen in the 1982 film adaptation, and alongside Gary Sinise and Vincent D’Onofrio in a 1999 TV version that Sorvino directed.
His other films include Mike Nichols’s The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Karel Reisz’s The Gambler (1974), in which he was memorable as Hips, a sympathetic mob bookie. He starred in William Friedkin’s rebarbative thriller Cruising (1980) as the police captain who sends an undercover officer (Al Pacino) into New York’s gay sado-masochistic sub-culture to catch a killer.
In Reds (1981), Warren Beatty’s film about the journalist John Reed, Sorvino played Louis C Fraina, one of the founding members of the American Communist party. It was the first of his collaborations with that actor-writer-director, who went on to cast him in the stylish comic-book adventure Dick Tracy (1990), the political satire Bulworth (1998) and the comedy-drama Rules Don’t Apply (2016), featuring Beatty as Howard Hughes.
He was in the superhero adventure The Rocketeer (1991) and the Chris Tucker/Charlie Sheen comedy Money Talks (1997), and was achingly poignant as a heroin-addicted lounge singer in The Cooler (2003). One of his last roles was as the crime boss Frank Costello in the television series Godfather of Harlem (2019-21).
Acting was only part of Sorvino’s story. He was a poet, tenor and sculptor, as well as an author whose published works include How to Become a Former Asthmatic (1985), which detailed his use of breathing exercises to help manage his asthma, and the cookbook Pinot, Pasta and Parties (2017). He also sold his own range of pasta sauces.
When his daughter Mira won an Oscar for her performance in Mighty Aphrodite (1995), she credited him with teaching her “everything I know about acting”. After she alleged in 2017 that she had been sexually harassed and then blacklisted by Harvey Weinstein, Sorvino angrily expressed the hope that the disgraced producer would be jailed, “because if not, he has to meet me”.
Sorvino is survived by his third wife, Dee Dee Benkie, whom he married in 2014, as well as by Mira and two other children, Amanda and Michael, all from his first marriage, to Lorraine Davis, which ended in divorce in 1988. His second marriage, to Vanessa Arico, also ended in divorce, in 1996.
• Paul Anthony Sorvino, actor, born 13 April 1939; died 25 July 2022
