Danny Aiello

Born June 20, 1933 in Manhattan, though he grew up in the Bronx, Daniel Louis Aiello, Jr. was the fifth of five children born to Frances Pietrocova, an Italian seamstress, and Daniel Louis Aiello, Sr., a construction worker. His childhood was marked by the fact that his mother abandoned them, which caused him to resent her for many years, since it took her a long time to reconcile with him. After lying about his age to get in, the young man served in the army for three years. When he graduated he worked as a bus driver for the Greyhond company, and became a very active member of the union of these professionals.

He discovered his acting vocation very late, as he made his debut when he turned forty in Death of a Player , followed by a masterpiece, The Godfather II , where the mobster Tony Rosato was, who said “Michael Corleone greets you!”, before attacking with a club to one of his rivals in a bar. “We were rehearsing the scene, Francis Ford Coppolahe was present and I felt very intimidated by him; he knew all of his work and there I was, a neophyte actor,” he recalled in an interview. “That phrase did not exist in the script. Coppola said: “We are going to rehearse. Action!” and I walked up to Gazzo, who was playing Pentangeli, and all of a sudden I said, “Michael Corleone salutes you.” I have no idea why I said it, but I did. Coppola was fine with it and asked him to repeat it when shooting the scene.”

He repeated in gangster films with Once Upon a Time in America , and became a regular at Woody Allen ‘s films , which cast him in  The Purple Rose of Cairo , Broadway Danny Rose and Radio Days . He co-starred with Paul Newman at Fort Apache , shared the screen with Cher  and  Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck , and was Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of John F. Kennedy, in The Dallas Conspiracy . For his role as a pizzeria owner in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, he received an Oscar nomination, though he snatched the statuette from him.Denzel Washington , for Glory Times .

Married to Sandy Cohen in 1955, the couple had four children. One of them, Danny Aiello III, works as a double in the cinema. In interviews he declared himself conservative and Catholic, and regularly criticized the use of foul language in movies.

Pop music fans will remember him as the father of Madonna , in the video clip “Papa Don’t Preach”, which had a lot of impact. Danny Aiello worked with Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba on Two Much , and was one of the leads in Manuel Gómez Pereira ‘s Desafinado , which led to the ruin of the production company Lolafilms.

A prolific Broadway stage actor, in recent years he was relegated to low-budget films. At the time of his death, he left Frank D’Angelo ‘s Making a Deal with the Devil pending , which was his last work.