Amid a near-unmatched
rogues’ gallery, this was a peach of a part, filled to tetchy perfection. A preening
peacock with a vicious wit, Paulie Walnuts brushed up well enough to be
companionable; there were endless, quotable retorts, and sly asides on his dyed
hair and salon-buffed nails. Yet as the New Yorker critic Nancy Franklin
observed, “[Paulie]’s angry comic flair is only one notch on the dial away from
his murderousness.”
That threat was central
to the Season 3 episode “Pine Barrens”, widely regarded as one of modern TV’s
finest hours, in which Paulie and Tony’s similarly irascible nephew Christopher
Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) become disoriented while trying to off a Russian
rival in snowy woodland. Peaking with a scene in which Paulie loses one of his
slip-ons, it was the show in a nutshell: gripping, stressful and wildly, blackly
funny, even away from its main narrative throughline.
The role drew on Sirico’s
own waywardness. He was arrested 28 times in his early life, the first time aged
seven for swiping loose change from a newsstand. After military service, he
left the mother of his two children for a new girlfriend and quit a steady
construction job to become a hired gun for the Colombo syndicate: “I was very
unstable. I wasn’t thinking right. So I hooked up with these guys and all of a
sudden I’m a stick-up artist. I stuck up every nightclub in New York.”
He was convicted twice,
once for weapons possession, the second time for extortion and coercion. A
psychiatric report assessed Sirico had a “character disorder”; the judge deemed
him “a danger to society”. He was sentenced to four years in Sing Sing,
eventually serving twenty months. These proved a pivotal experience.
After six months without
his girlfriend visiting, Sirico realised his relationship was over. Despairing,
he attended a performance by Theater of the Forgotten, a touring troupe
comprised of ex-convicts. Coupled with his ability to win over fellow inmates (“I
used to stand up in front of cold-blooded murderers… and make ‘em laugh”), it persuaded
Sirico to consider a new, legitimate career path.
Upon release, he gained a
mentor in playwright-turned-actor Michael V. Gazzo; during one early workshop, Gazzo
advised his pistol-packing charge to “leave the gun at home”. Thus disarmed,
Sirico landed extra work in two of Gazzo’s projects: B-picture Crazy Joe
(1974) and then, more propitiously, The Godfather Part II (1974), for
which Gazzo would be Oscar-nominated.
25 years later, Godfather
buff David Chase approached Sirico to read for the part of Tony’s Uncle Junior
in his Sopranos pilot: “An hour after I got home, I got a call from
Chase. He said, ‘You want the good news or the bad news?’ I said, ‘Give me the
bad news.’ He said, ‘You didn't get Uncle Junior. But… would you be willing to
do a recurring role? I have a character called Paulie Walnuts’.” Sirico agreed
on one condition: that Paulie would never become “a rat”.
Handed a single line in
the pilot, he proceeded over six seasons to shape a character who was both
representative of an entire criminal milieu and indelibly, idiosyncratically
singular. “When I look in the mirror in the morning, I don’t know if I’m looking
at Tony or Paulie,” Sirico reflected. “We got crosspollinated.”
He was born Gennaro
Anthony Sirico Jr. on July 29, 1942, the third of three sons to Gennaro and
Marie Sirico, Sicilian migrants who had settled in the Brooklyn neighbourhood
of East Flatbush. (His older brother is Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest who formed
the libertarian Acton Institute.)
The movies were an early influence,
for better or worse: “I learned how to walk and talk watching [James] Cagney.
It’s that, it’s the power, it’s the glamour.” His own roles, inevitably,
featured a high proportion of made men: his first onscreen credit came as Al
Capone associate Frankie Rio in Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell (1977).
He fell in with
writer-director James Toback, meeting a bloody end at Harvey Keitel’s hands in Fingers
(1978), before featuring in the filmmaker’s Love & Money (1981), Exposed
(1983), The Pick-Up Artist (1987) and the documentary The Big Bang
(1989), where Sirico denied killing anybody during his criminal years.
He could, however, be witnessed
pushing a postman into a pizza oven in Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990), and
he bulked out seven roles for Woody Allen, starting with Bullets Over
Broadway (1994). He was the boxing trainer in Mighty Aphrodite
(1995), the escaped convict in Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and later
appeared in Deconstructing Harry (1997), Celebrity (1998), Café
Society (2015) and Wagon Wheel (2017).
The Sopranos gave him renewed clout, two Screen Actors
Guild ensemble wins, and the opportunity to mock his screen persona. He played
a mobster in A Muppet Christmas: Letters to Santa (2008); reunited with Sopranos
co-star Steven Van Zandt for Scandie comedy-drama Lilyhammer
(2013-14); and he voiced the Griffins’ new attack dog Vinny on Family Guy
(2013-16).
Dementia slowed him, but his
final credits, on two long-shelved projects, reiterated his range: a hardnosed
pawnbroker in Respect the Jux (2022) and a high-school coach alongside
Christopher Lloyd in comic fantasy Super Athlete (set for release this
year).
Offscreen, he practiced
karate and did charity work; he also launched his own Sopranos-inspired
cologne, Paolo Per Uomo (Paulie for Men), in 2008. As he told one interviewer: “I’m proud of
what I do. I remember when I got that first part [in Godfather II], and
Coppola told me I was a real character, with a line of dialogue and everything.
Oh, let me tell you. I was strutting. I was thinking, ‘I got a name. I got a
name!’”
He is survived by two
children, Richard and Joanne.
Tony Sirico, born July 29, 1942, died July 8, 2022.
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