The 80 year-old Vincent Pastore was found dead in his Bronx residence by a neighbor on August 1. Deadline reports, “The death is believed to be from natural causes and is not being investigated by the medical examiner.”
The first time I remember seeing him was on a Law and Order episode in 1995, before he hit The Sopranos. He appeared in four L&O episodes total.
The AV Club:
Born in New York in the 1940s, Pastore held a variety of jobs over the first four decades of his life, before eventually gravitating toward acting. Despite appearing in small parts in well-known films like Goodfellas and Carlito’s Way in the early ’90s, Pastore was apparently working as a chauffeur when he met brothers Matt and Kevin Dillon, and told them of his dreams of acting; the pair attended a community theater production Pastore was working in, and he later credited Kevin Dillon for giving him his first serious break. Pastore worked steadily from then on—albeit typically in small parts that tended to pigeonhole his heavyset appearance, natural accent, and stern looks as those of a Mafioso, including popping up in The Jerky Boys, TV movie Gotti, and Jim Abrahams’ parody flick Mafia!
In 1999, Pastore landed the job that would grant him national recognition and, ultimately, define the vast majority of his career: David Chase’s The Sopranos. Taking on the role of Big Pussy, a veteran soldier working under James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, Pastore was able to tap into multiple elements of his talents, far beyond his mere ability to deliver hard-ass looks. As an eventually revealed traitor to the DiMeo crime family, Big Pussy was an endless balancing act, at times funny, charming, pathetic, vulnerable, daring, miserable, and, above-all-else, convincing as a guy whose betrayal would haunt Tony Soprano for the rest of his days. Pastore tackled the assignment with aplomb, creating a character who transcended his status as a “rat,” becoming one of the show’s defining tragic figures.
Open thread.
