Burt Young, the actor who built a prolific career as a Hollywood tough guy in films such as “Chinatown”, “Once Upon a Time in America” and “Rocky”, which earned him an Oscar nomination, has died at the age of 83 in Los Angeles. The death occurred on October 8, but was only confirmed by his daughter, Anne Morea Steingieser, this week.
With his bulldog physique and sad countenance, Young amassed more than 160 film and television credits. He often played a mob boss, smart detective or hard worker. But even when he played a villain, he wasn’t just evil. Despite his background as a marine and professional boxer, he brought layers of complexity to the roles. Acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who once trained him, called Young a “library of emotions”.
With his direct approach, he found a soul mate in another Hollywood tough guy – filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in “The Killer Elite” (1975), starring James Caan, and “Convoy” (1978), starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw.
– They were both rebels and outlaws, with a deep respect for art – said his daughter in a telephone interview. – They understood each other because of the intensity and honesty that Peckinpah demanded. He couldn’t tolerate a lack of authenticity.
‘Mr. Young, I’m Sylvester Stallone’
In the early 1970s, Young made memorable appearances on television shows such as “M*A*S*H” and in films, including the comedy “Almost, Almost a Mafia” (1971) and “License to Love at Midnight” (1973), a drama about a sailor (James Caan) who falls in love with a prostitute (Marsha Mason).
He showed he could steal the show with a brief but powerful appearance in “Chinatown” (1974), Roman Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece. But his big break came two years later in “Rocky”, the story of a boxer (Sylvester Stallone) who has an unlikely fight with heavyweight champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Young played Paulie, a butcher who befriends Rocky and is the brother of Adrian (Talia Shire), the introverted woman who becomes Rocky’s girlfriend.
Although “Rocky” propelled Stallone, who also wrote the screenplay, to stardom, Young used to say that he was the biggest name in Hollywood before the project began. “I was the only actor who didn’t audition for the first ‘Rocky’,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Rumpus, a culture website. “And I got the biggest paycheck.”
Young recalled his first meeting with Stallone, in a studio. “He kneels down next to me,” he recalls. “And he says, ‘Mr. Young, I’m Sylvester Stallone. I wrote Rocky’. You have to take part, please.
“Rocky” became a landmark in the 1970s. It received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Young for Best Supporting Actor, and won three statuettes, including Best Picture.
Colleges, marines, boxing and Strasberg
Burt Young adopted this name as an actor and sources differ as to his birth name. He was born on April 30, 1940, in Queens, New York. His father was a laborer and eventually a high school teacher and dean.
Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Queens, Young got a taste of the streets at an early age. “My father, trying to make me a gentler boy, sent me to Bryant High School in Astoria, away from my friends,” he wrote in the foreword to “Corona: The Early Years” (2015), by Jason D. Antos and Constantine E. Theodosiou. “Soon, however, I was expelled and went to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, being expelled after one term. Finally, it was the Marines at 16, my father lying about my age to get me in.”
He started boxing in the Marine Corps and had a successful, albeit relatively brief, professional career under Cus D’Amato, a boxing trainer and manager who led the careers of Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. He had a win-loss record of around 17-1 – his own accounts varied – when he left the ring.
At almost 20, he was laying carpets and doing other odd jobs when he fell in love with a woman who worked in a bar and who told him she dreamed of studying acting with Strasberg. “I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was,” he told Bright Lights. “I thought it was a girl.”
Young arranged for the two of them to meet Strasberg, the father of method acting, and ended up studying with him for two years. “Acting had everything I was looking for,” he recalled. “In my life up until then, I’d used tension to keep me on my feet. Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”
Young also had a long career in theater, including a role alongside Robert De Niro and Ralph Macchio in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear”, a play about a drug dealer and his son that premiered at the Off-Broadway Public Theatre in Manhattan in 1986 and later moved to Broadway.
Young was an avid painter who sold his work and whose dark portraits showed the influence of Picasso and Matisse. “I don’t think you can put me in a bottle as an actor or an artist,” he said in a video interview in 2016. “Maybe acting I’m a bit more structured.”
In addition to his daughter, Young leaves a brother, Robert, and a grandson. His wife, Gloria, died in 1974.