(20 June 1933 - 12 December 2019)
The Italian-American actor Danny Aiello, who has died aged 86 after a brief illness, was a brilliant performer who, for many years, was usually cast as a typically thuggish gangster in many Hollywood films. Born into a New York family, his father was a labourer and his mother a seamstress who mostly raised her large family on her own. Danny worked early on as a shoeshine boy, a newspaper seller and a bus driver. Encouraged by his movie heroes Bogart and Cagney, he also went in for petty crime. On leaving the US Army, he married and settled back in New York in a slew of menial jobs including work as a bouncer in a comedy club where he first took to performing but without any training. At the age of 40 he got his first film role in Bang the Drum Slowly, a baseball drama with Robert De Niro. This led to a part in Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, and then Martin Ritt’s The Front, with Woody Allen playing a blacklisted writer in the 1950s. After some TV and stage work he was in Fingers with Harvey Keitel, Robert Mulligan’s Bloodbrothers with Paul Sorvino and Richard Gere, James Caan’s Hide in Plain Sight and Fort Apache, The Bronx with Paul Newman. By 1984 he was appearing with those other great heavies Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, James Russo, Burt Young and William Forsythe in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. Woody Allen put him in The Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days, but he may be better remembered for playing the Father in Madonna’s 'Papa Don’t Preach' video, although appearing opposite Cher in the triple Oscar-winning Moonstruck also helped his public profile. The January Man was Pat O’Connor’s take on the NYPD with Kevin Kline, but it was Spike Lee who gave Aiello his first top-billed film part as Sal the pizzeria owner in Do the Right Thing (1989) for which Aiello was Oscar-nominated. Then there was Eddie Murphy’s Harlem Nights, Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, Hudson Hawk with Bruce Willis, he was Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin, in John Mackenzie’s Ruby, Tony in Luc Besson’s Leon, and Major Hamilton in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter as well as many more films and TV series. He never stopped working and there are several of his latest films still to be released. Other work that Aiello engaged in was singing jazz and standard songs on tour and also recording them. He was a prolific donor to charities including the Salvation Army, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the Frances Aiello Day Treatment Centre for the blind and deaf, and Covenant House, a mobile food and shelter unit for the homeless. Aiello was married to film producer Sandy Cohen from 1955 until his death. They have four children, Danny (a stuntman who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010), Rick, Jamie and Stacy. The title of Danny Aiello’s autobiography (2014) is I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else....
MICHAEL DARVELL
