PAUL SORVINO

(13 April 1939 – 25 July 2022)

The American actor Paul Sorvino, who has died of natural causes aged 83, often appeared in character roles as both men of authority and members of the criminal fraternity. His fifty-year career saw him in such films as Carl Reiner’s comedies Where’s Poppa?, his first in 1970, and Oh, God!, Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park, Mel Frank’s A Touch of Class and Lost and Found, Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin, Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, Robert Mulligan’s Bloodbrothers, and William Friedkin’s The Brink's Job, films that saw him through the 1970s. He was at times a budding opera singer, a writer and a sculptor, but he really made his mark as a good actor.

Paul Anthony Sorvino was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, to an Italian family. His father, Ford, was an immigrant factory foreman and his mother Angela a piano teacher. Paul was educated at Lafayette High School and the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. With ambitions to be an opera singer, he took voice lessons but gave them up because of an asthma condition. His first job was as an advertising copywriter.

Among other films he made was Friedkin’s controversial Cruising (1980) with Al Pacino and Karen Allen, and, as he had appeared in the play of That Championship Season (1982), he repeated his role as Phil Romano in Jason Miller’s film version of the basketball drama. Having worked with Warren Beatty on Reds in 1981, Sorvino also played ‘Lips’ Manlis in Dick Tracy (1990) and was also in Beatty’s Bulworth and Rules Don’t Apply. After Martin Scorsese’s gangster biopic GoodFellas, which Sorvino personally did not like, as he found it boring and over violent, he was in Sydney Pollack’s The Firm with Tom Cruise.

Sorvino was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award for his role as Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s Nixon biopic. He was Fulgencio Capulet in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet in 1996 and later played the fashion designer Lorenzo Mancini in Perfume. He continued making films until The Birthday Cake, his last in 2021. He was also on TV in The Streets of San Francisco, Murder, She Wrote, Law and Order, Perry Mason, Star Trek: The Next Generation, That’s Life and Godfather of Harlem.

Paul Sorvino married Lorraine Davis in 1966 and they have three children, Michael, Amanda and Mira, all actors and producers. After his first divorce, he married Vanessa Arico in 1991 but they divorced, too, in 1996. He then married the actress-producer Dee Dee Sorvino in 2014. Having asthma himself, he launched the Sorvino Asthma Foundation and wrote a book, How to Become a Former Asthmatic. Altogether he was really one of the good guys, a fine actor and a concerned member of the community .

MICHAEL DARVELL