NEW YORK – Paul Sorvino, an imposing actor who specialized in playing crooks and cops like Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas” and New York police sergeant Phil Cerretta in “Law & Order,” died Monday at the age of 83.
His publicist Roger Neal said he died Monday morning in Indiana of natural causes.
“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,” his wife, Dee Dee Sorvino, said in a statement.
In his more than 50 years in the entertainment business, Sorvino was a mainstay in film and television, playing an Italian-American communist in Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” and the mob boss Eddie Valentine in “The Rocketeer.” He often said that while he was best known for playing gangsters, his true passions were poetry, painting, and opera.
Born in Brooklyn in 1939 to a mother who taught piano and a father who was a foreman in a gown factory, Sorvino was musically inclined from a young age and attended the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, where he fell in love with the theater. He made his Broadway debut in 1964 in “Bajour” and his film debut in “Where’s Daddy?” by Carl Reiner, in 1970.
Sorvino had three children from his first marriage, including Academy Award-winning actor Mira Sorvino. When she learned that her daughter had been among the women allegedly sexually harassed and blacklisted by Harvey Weinstein amid the #MeToo movement, she told TMZ that if she had known, Weinstein “wouldn’t be walking around.” . She would be in a wheelchair.”
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