He managed the impossible feat of playing Henry Kissinger (in Oliver Stone’s Nixon) in a way that gave audiences everything they could have wanted from a Kissinger impression while constructing a layered, psychologically plausible person whose addiction to power was the subtext of every interaction. Fraina in Beatty’s historical epic Reds, and insurance-company agent Graham Crockett in Beatty’s political satire Bulworth. Sorvino played Gloucester in a 1974 New York Shakespeare Festival production of King Lear (opposite James Earl Jones, Rosalind Cash, and Raul Julia), David Addison’s father on Moonlighting, a militia leader in Larry Cohen’s horror film The Stuff (with future Law & Order co-star Michael Moriarty), American Communist Party founding member Louis C. These included the short-lived network cop shows Bert D’Angelo/Superstar (a spinoff of The Streets of San Francisco, on which Sorvino had a guest role), the miniseries Chiefs (about three generations of police chiefs in a small southern town), and The Oldest Rookie (about a veteran cop who asks to be assigned to street patrol again after years of working a desk job). He started out in movies with small roles in Where’s Poppa? and The Panic in Needle Park and worked his way up to plum character roles and the occasional lead. He made his Broadway debut in Bajour in 1964 and played many stage roles over the next few years, appearing in the original productions of An American Millionaire and That Championship Season (almost thirty years later, Sorvino would direct a film version of the latter and play a different role).
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He sang them, quietly or boldly.īorn and raised in Brooklyn, Sorvino came into the business at a perfect time for someone with his look and sound. He radiated serene menace as gang boss Paul Cicero in Goodfellas, who moved slowly because, in the narrator’s words, he “didn’t have to move for anybody.” He channeled that iconic performance into another mob boss in The Firm three years later, as if answering a casting director’s question: “Who can we get who will be instantly believable as a man who’s spoken of with awe and fear for two hours before he’s finally revealed?” Sorvino played the grotesque Lips Manlis in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, Los Angeles crime boss Eddie Valentine in The Rocketeer, a corrupt hambone preacher in the 1977 religious satire Oh, God!, and an empathetic but volatile legbreaker in The Gambler. He was a warm and nurturing presence playing the suburban Italian American patriarch on the sitcom That’s Life. Barrel-chested with a piercing stare, Sorvino always found ways to bring specificity and surprise to roles that might’ve seemed vague on the page - even when his characters were better described as controlled, contained, repressed.Īs the even-keeled Sergeant Phil Cerreta on Law & Order, Sorvino stood out in a stacked cast of veteran character actors. Like a lot of East Coast Italian American actors of the Silent Generation, he often got typecast as cops and criminals, but he made the most of his assignments. He used to tell people that, in so many words, and you knew from his work that he carried an opera inside of him. Paul Sorvino was an opera singer who acted.
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The late actor, known for playing paragons of retrograde masculinity, drew from a well of tenderness unreachable to most.