R.I.P. Paul Sorvino

[Big Magilla]

I forgot he was in Law and Order, that's how good Jerry Orbach, who had the kind of career Sorvino might have had on stage, was as his replacement.

[dws1982]

He had a very good role opposite James Caan in The Gambler, but I think it's a decent encapsulation of his career that he was the older detective on Law & Order right before Jerry Orbach was cast. He supposedly didn't like the work schedule and didn't think that working outside so much was good for his singing voice, and then of course Law & Order became the iconic Law & Order that everyone knows as soon as Jerry Orbach came on, largely due to Orbach. Sorvino was a good actor but graduating beyond being a the "that guy" character actor was always just a little bit out of his reach.

[Mister Tee]

Man, what a brutal 24 hours.

Sorvino and Charles Durning were both part of the famed Public Theatre/Broadway production of That Championship Season. Both left for Hollywood within a year (they were gone by the time I saw the show), and both soon appeared in films that were nominated for best picture: Durning in The Sting, Sorvino in A Touch of Class.

The gap between those two films in terms of how well they're remembered (not to mention how many ever saw them) is somewhat representative of how the two men's careers went from there. Durning appeared prominently in a number of famous films (Dog Day Afternoon, Tootsie), got himself a pair of Oscar nominations, became a reliable character actor with hundreds of credits, even returned to Broadway with a Tony-winning performance in the revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Sorvino had an unfortunate string of duds in the 70s, culminating in a fiasco called Slow Dancing in the Big City, which attempted to make him a leading man as a Jimmy Breslin type. He soon retreated to smaller roles and, while he worked steadily, Goodfellas and Nixon are his only movies of real note, and he wasn't a dominant factor in either of them. I think most people, when they think of him, will first conjure up that flood of tears when his daughter won her Oscar, not anything he did as an actor.

It's interesting Magilla cites his singing aspect. I seem to recall him really wishing he were an opera singer -- it seemed he didn't require much encouragement to burst into arias. And his early Broadway credits include several musicals. Maybe the lure of Hollywood lucre pulled him away from a life he'd have loved more.

[Sabin]

I know he's had a remarkable career but I honestly feel like I mainly know him from two public performances more than his film career: weeping while his daughter won an Academy Award (which she says she now regrets) and his strong words about Harvey Weinstein ("I will kill that motherfucker"). Beyond that, there's his work in Goodfellas, which is more of a presence/casting feat than a great piece of acting, his work in Nixon, a busy film which could have yielded him an Academy Award nomination if it gave him more to do, and his work in The Cooler, a pretty lame movie made memorable for which he was the sole bright spot. Also, as the ultimately patriotic gangster who takes sides against the Nazis satisfyingly in The Rocketeer, a movie treasured by old Millennials like me who were the right age when it came out.

[Big Magilla]

Too bad he never got the opportunity to sing on screen. The 1976 recording of Stephen Schwartz's The Baker's Wife with Sorvino as the cuckhold baker and Patti LuPone as his straying wife is one of the great cast recordings, far and away the greatest for a show that closed out of town.

[Sonic Youth]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235185779/

Paul Sorvino, the burly character actor who made a career out of playing forceful types, most notably the coldhearted mobster Paulie Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, has died. He was 83.

Sorvino, the father of Oscar-winning actress Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite), died Monday of natural causes, his wife, Dee Dee, announced.

“Our hearts are broken, there will never be another Paul Sorvino, he was the love of my life and one of the greatest performers to ever grace the screen and stage,” she said.

Publicist Roger Neal said he died at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida.

During a solid career that spanned a half-century, Sorvino portrayed James Caan’s bookie inThe Gambler (1974), Claire Danes’ pushy father in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996), Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) and a strung-out heroin addict in The Cooler (2003).