Vincent Pastore has died at 80. He was found at his home in the Bronx on Saturday by a neighbour who had not heard from him in about three days. A cause has not been determined.
He played Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero, and if you have seen The Sopranos you do not need the rest of that sentence.
Twenty years behind a bar
Here is the fact that explains the performance.
Pastore did not act until he was 42. Before that he spent roughly two decades running and owning bars and nightclubs.
That is not a quirky detail for the third paragraph of an obituary. It is the whole thing. A man who has spent twenty years in rooms where people talk, drink, lie, borrow money and complain about each other does not need to be taught how a certain kind of guy sits in a chair, or how he laughs at something that isn't funny, or how his face changes when a conversation stops being friendly.
He came to a set already fluent. Over the rest of his life he appeared in more than 180 screen projects — Goodfellas, Awakenings, Law & Order, Corky Romano, voice work in Shark Tale — and shared in the SAG Award-winning ensemble recognition for The Sopranos.
Why the character mattered
Big Pussy was not the show's most frightening character or its funniest. He was its saddest, and its most structurally important.
He was Tony Soprano's oldest friend — the one from childhood, the one at every table — and he was informing to the FBI. The show made the audience sit with both facts at once for an entire season, which meant every warm scene between them carried a second, unbearable meaning.
That only works if the actor can hold affection and dread in the same face. Pastore could. His scenes with James Gandolfini in the second season are the reason people still argue about that finale.
The character was killed in season two. Pastore kept appearing anyway — in dreams, in hallucinations, in flashbacks — across the show's run from 1999 to 2007, which is a fairly rare thing for television to do with a dead man, and a measure of how much the series still needed him after it had used him up.
The kind of career this was
He was, in the industry's terminology, a character actor, which usually means someone whose name the audience does not know.
That was not quite true of Pastore. People knew him. He turned up on reality shows and in commercials and at conventions and in a hundred small parts, and audiences greeted him with the specific warmth reserved for someone who feels like he might actually be from the neighbourhood — because he was.
He was from the Bronx. He died there.
