James Gandolfini, Sopranos Star, dead at 51...

[Midswat]

James Gandolfini, the Emmy Award-winning actor who shot to fame on the HBO drama “The Sopranos” as Tony Soprano, a tough-talking, hard-living crime boss with a stolid exterior but a rich interior life, died on Wednesday. He was 51 years old.

Mr. Gandolfini’s death was confirmed by HBO. He was traveling in Rome, where he was on vacation and was scheduled to attend the Taormina Film Festival. A cause of death was not immediately announced; a press representative for HBO said that Mr. Gandolfini may have died from a heart attack, though other news reports said he died from a stroke.

Mr. Gandolfini, who grew up in Park Ridge, in Bergen County, N.J., came to embody the resilience of the Garden State on “The Sopranos,” a television drama that made its debut in 1999 and ran for six seasons on HBO.

In its pilot episode, viewers were introduced to the richly complicated life of Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mob kingpin who is suffering from panic attacks and begins seeing a therapist. Over 86 episodes, audiences followed Mr. Gandolfini in the role as he was tormented by his mother (played by Nancy Marchand), his wife (Edie Falco), rival mobsters, the occasional surreal dream sequence and, in 2007, a famously ambiguous series finale which left millions of viewers wondering whether or not Tony Soprano had met his fate at the table of a diner.

The success of “The Sopranos” helped make HBO a dominant player in the competitive field of scripted television programming, and transformed Mr. Gandolfini from a character actor into a star. The series, created by David Chase, won two Emmy Awards for outstanding drama series, and Mr. Gandolfini won three Emmys for outstanding lead actor in a drama, having been nominated six times for the award.

HBO said of Mr. Gandolfini in a statement on Wednesday, “He was special man, a great talent, but more importantly a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect.”

James Joseph Gandolfini Jr. was born in Westwood, N.J., on Sept. 18, 1961. His father was an Italian immigrant who held a number of jobs, including janitor, bricklayer and cement mason. His mother, Santa, was a high school lunch lady.

He attended Park Ridge High School in New Jersey and Rutgers University, graduating in 1983 with a degree in communications. He drove a delivery truck, managed nightclubs and tended bar in Manhattan before becoming interested in acting at age 25 when a friend brought him to an acting class.

He began his movie career in 1987 with a small role in the low-budget horror comedy “Shock! Shock! Shock!” In 1992 he had a small part in the Broadway revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” starring Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange.

By the mid-1990s Mr. Gandolfini had made gangster roles a specialty, playing burly but strangely charming tough guys in films like “True Romance” (1993) and “The Juror” (1996). He had an impressive list of character-acting credits but he was largely unknown to the general public when David Chase cast him in “The Sopranos” in 1999.

“I thought it was a wonderful script,” Mr. Gandolfini told Newsweek in 2001, recalling his audition. “I thought, ‘I can do this.’ But I thought they would hire someone a little more debonair, shall we say. A little more appealing to the eye.”

Survivors include his wife, Deborah Lin; a daughter, Liliana, born last year; and a teenage son, Michael, from his marriage to Marcella Wudarski, which ended in divorce.

 

[Midswat]

Wow. I actually feel a tinge of sadness over this. Like I lost a distant relative or something.

I fucking loved his character on the Sopranos.

 

[bbgun]

[video=youtube;CajJyuk3P_w]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CajJyuk3P_w[/video]

he will be missed

 

[Midswat]

Survivors include his wife, Deborah Lin; a daughter, Liliana, born last year;

Jeez. Even more depressing.

 

[bbgun]

yeah, even his two kids from a previous marriage are young

 

[lons]

It's not like he was ancient... He was 51, the kids look like they had them in their late 30's early 40's. This is a true shock to me. I wonder if his health was failing or if this was as much a shock to him when it happened? I mean I know he's a big guy. But he got around pretty well.

 

[Cowboysrule122]

Wow, depressing to say the least. 51 is still young. RIP

 

[marionbarberthe4th]

James Gandolfini, whose performance as Tony Soprano forever transformed the way we thought about the TV characters we invited into our living room, has died suddenly while on vacation in Rome. He was 51.

As the star of "The Sopranos," what was so amazing about Gandolfini wasn't so much the way he looked — TV had had overweight and/or balding leading men before (and at the start, Tony wasn't that big) — but the way that he acted. He was a mobster, and an unapologetic one. Tony Soprano took what he wanted, rarely cared about who was hurt in the process, and at times was more animal than man.

We had been told all our lives that we would not watch an ongoing series about such a man. A bruising, foul-mouthed giant with a dent in his forehead was the villain, not the protagonist. TV had always made compromises, always made sure that "flawed" heroes were ultimately redeemable and lovable.

Tony Soprano was not. And we loved him, often despite ourselves.

Much of the credit for the show, and the character, comes from "Sopranos" creator David Chase, but Chase has said that Tony wasn't fully-formed until Gandolfini was cast in the role.

The Jersey-born Gandolfini was one of three finalists for the role, along with fellow character actor Michael Rispoli and E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt. Van Zandt was eliminated quickly, but as then-HBO president Chris Albrecht told me when I interviewed him for my book, the show could have gone in two different directions based on the final choice.

"Rispoli was great," Albrecht explained. "He was funnier than Jimmy, just because of the normal rhythms that he had. And we talked about it, and David said, ‘It’s a very different show if you put Rispoli in it or Jimmy in it, but the show I envisioned is the show that’s got Jimmy in it. It’s a much darker show with Jimmy in it.’ I think we sat with that for a moment. ‘Dark’ is not really a word you ever want to go for in television, but the other one was ‘more real.’ So we cast Jimmy.”

Gandolfini "just inhabited the tone of the script," Chase told me. "At one time, I had said that this thing could be like a live-action 'Simpsons.' Once I saw him do it, I thought, ‘No, that’s not right. It can be absurdist, it can have a lot of stupid s--t in it, but it should not be a live-action 'Simpsons.'"

While filming the series pilot episode, a bit of Gandolfini improvisation forever cemented the tone of the series. In one of the episode's final scenes, Tony discovers that his nephew Christopher (Michael Imperioli) has considered writing a screenplay about his life in the mob. The script directions said Tony would slap Christopher lightly across the face; Gandolfini instead picked up his smaller co-star to make abundantly clear how unhappy this development would make Tony.

"And I went, ‘All right, I got it. This is big s--t. This is serious,'" Chase recalled.

Chase, upon hearing the terrible news of Gandolfini's passing, said in a statement, "He was a genius. Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that. He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time. A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes. I remember telling him many times, 'You don't get it. You're like Mozart" There would be silence at the other end of the phone. For (wife) Deborah and (children) Michael and Lilliana this is crushing. And it's bad for the rest of the world. He wasn't easy sometimes. But he was my partner, he was my brother in ways I can't explain and never will be able to explain."

Gandolfini was an unknown when he took the part — if you'd noticed him at all before that, it was likely in a brief but memorable turn as a smiling gangster who fights with Patricia Arquette in "True Romance" — which meant we had no preconceptions about him or about Tony. Tony was who Chase (with that early unintentional prodding from Gandolfini) told us he was: a complicated, at times even empathetic, sociopath.

Tony Soprano was a monster, but an oddly relatable one. He struggled with his family, whether enduring the caustic disapproval of his mother or the misbehavior of his kids, and went to therapy to deal with panic attacks and a wide-ranging feeling of depression. But he also had no compunction about strangling a man to death while taking daughter Meadow on a college tour. He was vulnerable. He was charming. He was cruel and vindictive and angry and practically drowning in self-pity.

And Gandolfini played every facet of that character beautifully. When I heard the sudden, shocking news of his death, my mind immediately flooded with images of Tony Soprano at either his most horrible or human: Tony goading his sister Janice into rejecting the lessons of her anger management class because he can't stand to see her happier than he is; Tony brawling with Ralphie Cifaretto over the death of the horse Pie-O-My; Tony asking his senile, mean Uncle Junior, "Don't you love me?"; or Tony needling Janice and Bobby Bacala during the most violent Monopoly game ever played.

It was raw, astonishing work, year in and year out. It turned Gandolfini from an unknown into an icon, in a transformation he was never comfortable with. I've encountered many actors who are aloof about dealing with the press out of a sense of ego; Gandolfini's unease seemed to come from a more genuine place. This was new to him, and too much. Early in the run of the series, he sent Christmas cards to TV critics to thank them for the nice things they had written about the show, and even put his home address on the envelopes. Later, on a night when he was receiving an award from the Television Critics Association, I saw him surrounded by reporters who wanted to interview him; he looked like a cornered animal, and when he won again in later years, he sent a video message.

Because of that discomfort, I don't know that Gandolfini was that disappointed that the movie business never knew what to do with him, either during or after the run of "The Sopranos." He had small, often interesting parts — a gay hitman in "The Mexican," a moderate general in "In the Loop," the frustrated father in Chase's feature debut "Not Fade Away" — but always to the side of what the movie stars were doing. Some of this was typecasting — several times (most recently with "Zero Dark Thirty"), I heard moviegoers laugh in recognition at Tony Soprano popping up in the middle of somebody else's movie — but also the difficulty of finding anything close to the perfect alchemy of actor and role that Gandolfini found with Tony Soprano. He was, again, a character actor, and a great (if underused) one.

And his work on the show made possible Vic Mackey, Al Swearengen, Walter White, Don Draper and every complicated, riveting anti-hero (or worse) who followed him. "The Sopranos" was an enormous hit, and told the business that the old rules need no longer apply.

Much has been written and argued about the last scene of "The Sopranos." Did Tony live? Was he shot in the back of the head by Members Only Guy? And, either way, why did David Chase construct that closing sequence and blackout that way? I've always been a believer in the "Tony lives" theory — that what Chase is showing us is the miserable, paranoid feeling that comes with life as Tony Soprano, and that his only punishment is a life that, like the Journey song playing on the jukebox at Holsten's says, goes on and on and on and on.

I don't know that I'm right about my theory, and Chase has made clear he's never going to explain it himself. But as horrible a human being as Tony was, it gives me a small bit of comfort on this surprising, terrible day, to imagine Tony still alive, waddling out of his SUV and into the pork store, or calling up Dr. Melfi for one more shot at therapy.

James Gandolfini is dead, robbing us of several decades of amazing performances. Whatever happened when the lights turned out at Holsten's, Gandolfini's performance means that Tony Soprano will live forever.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

 

[bkeavs]

awful

 

[Bluenoser]

I have never watched the show. I may have to torrent the series now though.

 

[bkeavs]

While the tragic news of James Gandolfini's unexpected passing has left his many fans shocked and saddened, new details have emerged about his death.

The 51-year-old was on a boys' trip to Italy with his son, Michael, according to his actor-friend Gilles Marini ("Brothers & Sisters," "Dancing With the Stars"). They were in Rome celebrating the 13-year-old's eighth-grade graduation, and then the "Sopranos" star was expected to attend the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily this weekend and receive the Taormina City Prize.

[Related: Why We Loved Tony Soprano]

The New Jersey-born actor was in his hotel room at the Boscolo Exedra Roma when he became ill at about 10 p.m. local time. Antonio D'Amore, a spokesperson for the five-star hotel, told the "Today" show that the star's son called the reception desk to summon help upon discovering his father in the bathroom after he had apparently suffered a heart attack.

When hotel personnel arrived, Gandolfini was on the bathroom floor with his son by his side, and he was still alive, D'Amore said. Efforts to resuscitate Gandolfini were made and continued as he was driven to the nearby Policlinico Umberto I Hospital.

[Related: James Gandolfini's 20 Best Roles]

Claudio Modini, the director of the Emergency Department of Policlinico, told ABC News that Gandolfini arrived at the hospital in cardiac arrest at 10:20 p.m. Resuscitation efforts continued for 40 minutes, at which point he was pronounced dead. His official time of death was 11 p.m.

The "Zero Dark Thirty" star's cause of death is still undetermined. An autopsy will take place Friday because Italian law stipulates that an autopsy be conducted at least 24 hours after the death occurred.

[Related: 'Sopranos' Co-Stars and More Celebs React to James Gandolfini's Death]

Also, before Italian authorities can release Gandolfini's remains for transport back to the United States, the U.S. Embassy in Rome must issue a death certificate.

TMZ reports that Gandolfini's first wife, Marcy Wudarski, immediately flew to Italy to be with their son.

The actor was married to Deborah Lin Gandolfini, who gave birth to the actor's second child, a daughter, last fall.
.. .


Poor Kid

.

 

[bbgun]

what a traumatizing experience for the poor kid.

 

[Irving Cowboy]

I have never watched the show.

You haven't lived.

 

[SixisBetter]

I loved this guy and his work.
Big Sopranos fan and thought he did pretty good work in "The Last Castle" and "True Romance".
Sad.

 

[Bob Sacamano]

I'll say one thing, even though he didn't think he was attractive, I thought he had a weirdly, beautiful smirk.

 

[Jon88]

I'll say one thing, even though he didn't think he was attractive, I thought he had a weirdly, beautiful smirk.

Fag!

 

[Jon88]

Supposedly the last picture taken of him in Italy. He looks a little sick.

 

[jnday]

I agree with Mid. It is kinda like a family member has passed. You spend years watching the show, and you feel like you really know these people. I still watch the reruns every night on HBOsg and I will continue to do so even though I have watched each episode twenty times or more. Easily the best TV drama ever. It paved the way for other series on HBO such as True blood, Game of Thrones etc. Sad, sad day.