BURT YOUNG

(30 April 1940 – 8 October 2023)

The character actor Burt Young, who has died aged 83, will be best known for playing Paulie Pennino, the brother-in-law of Rocky Balboa. Burt Young was the acting name he gave himself, but he was born Gerald Tommaso DeLouise in New York. His father Michael, a teacher, and he and his wife Josephine sent young Gerald to a good high school where he got expelled, so he joined the Marines instead.

Not having much success at his various jobs of printer, baker, barman or carpet cleaner, he thought of something else he could do, such as acting. He wrote to Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio, and he and his girlfriend auditioned for places at the school. Burt did well but she didn’t and left. It didn’t take Burt Young long, from 1969 onwards, to start an acting career that lasted for the next fifty years. His first role was as a bartender in The Doctors TV soap, and he went on to appear in many TV series such as The Rockford Files, Serpico, Miami Vice, Columbo, The Sopranos and Law and Order.

His first feature appearance was in the controversial horror film Carnival of Blood, in 1970, about a serial killer in a fairground, and he made a career out of playing rough and ready Italian-American types. He was in Across 110th Street with Anthony Quinn, Cinderella Liberty and The Gambler, both with James Caan, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite, and Mark Rydell’s Harry and Walter Go To New York, the last two of which also star James Caan.

And then came Rocky... For his first time playing Paulie in the first Rocky film in 1976, Burt Young was nominated for a best supporting actor Academy Award. He went on to appear in the five sequels and a TV documentary The Rocky Saga: Going the Distance in 2011. Although nothing could eclipse Young’s Rocky appearances, he went on to work on many more films such as The Choirboys, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Convoy, Amityville II, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, The Pope of Greenwich Village with Mickey Rourke, and Mickey Blue Eyes with Hugh Grant, and appeared in over 160 films and television shows.

Burt Young was also a painter with exhibitions in galleries around the world. Some of his work was featured in Rocky Balboa. He also wrote some screenplays and a couple of stage plays, as well as an epic historical novel called Endings. He married his wife Gloria in 1961 but she died in 1974. They have a daughter, Anne, who survives him.

MICHAEL DARVELL