American actor Paul Sorvino, known for his work on “Goodfellas”, “Nixon” or the television series “Law & Order”, died this Monday at the age of 83, he told media his agent, Roger Neal.
Sorvino, father of also actress Mira Sorvino, died in Indiana of natural causes.
In his half-century career, he had specialized in roles of cops and robbers, such as mobster Paul Cicero in “Goodfellas,” directed by Martin Scorsese, and Sergeant Phil Cerretta in “Law & Order.”
He was born in Brooklyn on April 13, 1939 and his first job was in an advertising agency. She made her Broadway debut in 1964 with the musical “Bajour” and six years later made her big screen debut in Carl Reiner’s “Where’s Poppa.”
He put himself in the shoes of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon”, and used to say that although he was known above all for playing gangsters, his true passions, according to The Washington Post, were poetry, painting and the opera.
As a director he signed the comedy “The trouble with Cali”, starring himself and written by another of his daughters, Amanda, as well as “That championship season” and a couple of episodes of the television series “That’s Life”.
Deadline magazine recalled this Monday on its website that he founded the Paul Sorvino Foundation against Asthma and that he wrote with his wife, Dee Dee, whom he married in 2014, the book “Pinot, Pasta and Parties.”
Sorvino had three children from his first marriage. When Mira won the Oscar in 1996 for best supporting actress in Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite,” the interpreter said she had no words to express what she felt.
“There are not in any language that I have ever heard. Well, maybe in Italian,” he joked in statements to the Los Angeles Times and collected again this Monday by The Washington Post.