RIP: PAUL SORVINO

Paul Sorvino, the tough-guy actor — and operatic tenor and figurative sculptor — known for his roles as calm and often courteously quiet but dangerous men in films like “Goodfellas” and television shows like “Law & Order,” died on Monday. He was 83.

His publicist, Roger Neal, confirmed the death, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. No specific cause was given, but Mr. Neal said that Mr. Sorvino “had dealt with health issues over the past few years.”

Mr. Sorvino was the father of Mira Sorvino, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995). In her acceptance speech, she said her father had “taught me everything I know about acting.”

“Goodfellas” (1990), Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed Mafia epic, came along when Mr. Sorvino was 50 and decades into his film career. His character, Paulie Cicero, was a local mob boss — lumbering, soft-spoken and ice-cold.

“Paulie might have moved slow,” says Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, his neighborhood protégé in the film, “but it was only because he didn’t have to move for nobody.” (Mr. Liotta died in May at 67.)

Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role because he couldn’t fully connect emotionally, he told the comedian Jon Stewart, who interviewed a panel of “Goodfellas” alumni at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. When you “find the spine” of a character, Mr. Sorvino said, “it makes all the decisions for you.”

Paul Anthony Sorvino was born on April 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, the youngest of three sons of Fortunato Sorvino, known as Ford, and Marietta (Renzi) Sorvino, a homemaker and piano teacher. The elder Mr. Sorvino, a robe-factory foreman, was born in Naples, Italy, and emigrated to New York with his parents in 1907.

Paul grew up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and attended Lafayette High School. His original career dream was to sing — he idolized the Italian American tenor and actor Mario Lanza — and he began taking voice lessons when he was 8 years old or so.

In the late 1950s, he began performing at Catskills resorts and charity events. In 1963, he received his Actors Equity card as a chorus member in “South Pacific” and “The Student Prince” at the Theater at Westbury on Long Island. That same year, he began studying drama at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York.

Acting jobs were elusive. Mr. Sorvino’s Broadway debut, in the chorus of the musical “Bajour” (1964), lasted almost seven months, but his next show, the comedy “Mating Dance” (1965), starring Van Johnson, closed on opening night.

Mr. Sorvino worked as a waiter and a bartender, sold cars, taught acting to children and appeared in commercials for deodorant and tomato sauce. After his first child, Mira, was born, he wrote advertising copy for nine months, but the office job gave him an ulcer.

Then his luck changed. He made his film debut in “Where’s Poppa?” (1970), a dark comedy directed by Carl Reiner, in a small role as a retirement-home owner. Then “That Championship Season” came along, starting with the Off Broadway production at the Public Theater.

The film role that first won him major attention was as Joseph Bologna’s grouchy Italian American father in “Made for Each Other” (1971). Mr. Sorvino, almost five years younger than Mr. Bologna, wore old-age makeup for the role.

He appeared next as a New Yorker robbed by a prostitute in “The Panic in Needle Park” (1972) but did not fall victim to the cops-and-gangsters stereotype right away. In 1973. he was George Segal’s movie-producer friend in “A Touch of Class” and a mysterious government agent in “The Day of the Dolphin.”

Mr. Sorvino later played an egotistic, money-hungry evangelist with a Southern accent in the comedy “Oh, God!” (1977) and God Himself in “The Devil’s Carnival” (2012) and its 2015 sequel. He was a down-to-earth newspaper reporter in love with a ballerina in “Slow Dancing in the Big City” (1978). In “Reds” (1981), he was a passionate Russian American Communist leader just before the Bolshevik Revolution.

Mr. Sorvino continued to sing professionally, making his City Opera debut in Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella” in 2006.

Mr. Sorvino’s final screen roles were in 2019. He played a corrupt senator in “Welcome to Acapulco,” a spy-comedy film, and the crime boss Frank Costello in the Epix series “Godfather of Harlem.”...