The path from successful character actor to becoming a star is difficult. It’s even harder when you’re self-destructive. Tom Sizemore, who has died aged 61 after a brain aneurysm, will be best remembered for his roles in Saving Private Ryan, as Tom Hanks’s wise sergeant, and in Heat, as the muscle in Robert De Niro’s bank-robbing crew.
His characters were often informed by their volatility: affable nihilism could explode into violence, which made him a natural player of bent cops and detectives, as believable in straight roles as in over-the-top variations, such as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. But his own personality bore many of those same traits. His career was sidelined repeatedly by addictions to heroin and methamphetamines, and his peripatetic drug-fuelled sex life led to repeated cases of domestic violence.
