Celebrity Biographies
Paul Sorvino
He participated in some 170 films, including “Goodfellas”, where he played the mob boss Paul Cicero, perhaps his most remembered character. Paul Sorvino, father of Mira Sorvino, passed away at the age of 83, on July 25, 2022, in Jacksonville, Florida.
Born on April 13, 1939 in Brooklyn, New York, into an Italian-American family, Paul Sorvino had the goal of becoming an opera singer. To that end, he studied at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, where he also took acting classes. In the early 1960s, Sorvino made a living singing at charity balls. The actor made his Broadway debut in the musical “Bajour” in 1964. The following year he appeared in the comedy “Mating Dance.”
Not knowing if he wanted to continue acting, Paul Sorvino worked as an executive for a time at an advertising company. After co-starring on Broadway in “That Championship Season” in 1974, he brought to life the central character of Murray Schisgal’s “An American Millionaire,” which was a resounding success. In 1976 he directed the play “Wheelbarrow Closers” on Broadway, but it had very little run.
Paul Sorvino made his screen debut with small roles in Where’s Daddy? , in 1970 and in Panic in Needle Park the following year. Warren Beatty cast the performer in four of his five directorial films, Reds , Dick Tracy , where he was one of the mobsters under many layers of makeup, the political satire Bulworth , in which he played the boss of a large insurance company who wants a political favor from the senator played by Beatty, and finally the ill-fated The Exception to the Rule .
In Oliver Stone ‘s Nixon , Paul Sorvino played Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and close confidant of the protagonist. He played Fulgentius Capulet, patriarch of the Capulet, in Baz Luhrmann ‘s Miami-set version of Romeo + Juliet . He also played a mob boss in 1991’s Rocketeer .
In Goodfellas the sequence in which his character gives Ray Liotta a fatherly slap is recalled . He was just as good at playing gangsters as he was as lawmen, having excelled as a sheriff in the long-running Law & Order series .
A family man, his image is remembered crying with joy at the 1995 Oscars ceremony, when his daughter Mira Sorvino won the Oscar for best supporting actress for Mighty Aphrodite . Years later, he publicly showed his indignation after learning that the actress had been harassed by producer Harvey Weinstein, who later boycotted her career. “If I find him on the street, he’ll end up lying on the ground,” he told TMZ . “It’s a good thing he went to jail, because I would have killed him. It’s that simple. If I’d known before, I wouldn’t be walking now. I would be in a wheelchair.”
In 2012, Paul Sorvino directed the independent film The Trouble With Cali, from a script by his daughter Amanda Sorvino. With his wife, DeeDee, he also had another son, Michael.