A former bouncer, baggage handler and trade unionist, the American actor Danny Aiello had years of playing pugnacious supporting characters before, already in his mid-50s, he gained the part of Sal, a pizzeria owner caught up in a riot, in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). For his performance in the role he received an Oscar nomination. But, improbably, he had gained his greatest exposure on MTV just three years before, in a dialogue-free part as a concerned single parent in Madonna’s video for Papa Don’t Preach.
Following Do the Right Thing, Aiello, who has died aged 86, hit his stride as a leading actor in the 1990s and became – along with Paul Sorvino and Joe Pesci – one of the go-to guys for directors casting volatile Italian-American mobsters. This line of casting reached its apotheosis in Mario Puzo’s fearsome Don Domenico Clericuzio, whom he played in two TV miniseries.
He was born into a large family in New York. His father, Daniel Aiello, was a labourer; his mother, Frances (nee Pietrocova, was a seamstress from Naples who raised the children largely on her own. Young Danny displayed a gift for grafting, by working as a shoeshine boy. At the cinema he rooted for villains played by Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, then, when the lights came up, supplemented his income with bouts of petty crime.
He briefly attended James Monroe high school, in the Bronx, and lied about his age to join the US army. After serving in Germany, he returned to New York and married, in 1955, Sandy Cohen, with whom he had three sons, Rick, Jaime and Danny, and a daughter, Stacey.
After a line of factory jobs, he spent 10 years working for Greyhound buses in various roles, including baggage handler and route announcer. He became president of his union branch and harboured political ambitions, but lost his position after supporting a wildcat strike. He returned to crime, while also working as a doorman. “I fought all the time,” he recalled. “I could always punch like a son of a gun.” When working as a bouncer at a comedy club, he cracked jokes and sang on stage, and considered a career in theatre and film. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he eschewed the Method and formal acting training.
“People call me an instinctive actor,” he told the New York Times in 2011. “I used to consider that an insult early on, only because I had never studied. Now, when people call me instinctive, I love it.”
His first screen credit came in the baseball drama Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), but his murderous stare was put to better use in The Godfather: Part II (1974). Aiello’s blue-collar background was reflected in Bloodbrothers (1978), an adaptation of Richard Price’s novel, and he was at home in other profane, rough-and-ready New York dramas including Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), set in Aiello’s childhood neighbourhood, and the plays Lamppost Reunion (1975) and Knockout (1979). He won awards for his stage performances, but was still limited to supporting roles in films such as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), which covered Aiello’s customary territory: the mafia, the unions and New York.
He co-starred with Woody Allen in the film comedy The Front (1976) and appeared on Broadway in Allen’s Brooklyn-set play The Floating Light Bulb in 1981. Allen cast him in two films that paid tribute to the golden ages of cinema and radio, respectively. In The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), he was Monk, the whisky-soaked violent husband of Mia Farrow’s movie-mad waitress. “I never just hit you,” he says. “I always warn you first.” In Radio Days (1987), he was a Brooklyn mobster who kidnaps a hatcheck girl (Farrow again) after she witnesses a murder. He takes her home, where his mother serves her dinner – Aiello’s characters are often mummy’s boys – and they discuss where he will dump her body.
In between films with Allen, Aiello appeared on Broadway in Hurlyburly and played the shady Mr Vickers, who has helped develop a sinister gloopy substance, in the cult movie The Stuff (1985), as well as playing Madonna’s Papa. The bittersweet comedy movie Moonstruck (1987) gave him an overdue opportunity to show some heart and soul. As the nervous, softly spoken Johnny Cammareri, he haplessly proposes marriage to his girlfriend, Loretta (Cher), over dinner. When she insists that he kneel on the floor, he protests (“This is a good suit!”), and when it transpires he hasn’t even bought a ring, she suggests he uses one of his own (“I like this ring!” he grumbles).
Aiello sank his teeth into the complex role of Sal in Do the Right Thing, a part previously offered to Robert De Niro. A photo of De Niro hangs alongside other Italian Americans on the “wall of fame” in Sal’s Brooklyn pizzeria, and this shrine enrages one of the African-American locals, who demands he “put some brothers on the wall” – not least since Sal’s customers are predominantly black. The argument leads to a riot, which impacts on the whole neighbourhood. Sal is a more textured character than his outright racist son Pino (John Turturro), and Aiello plays him as a hardworking, essentially decent but short-fused businessman struggling to bridge both a culture and a generation gap. Aiello’s portrayal was partially inspired by a sweetshop owner he had known in the Bronx.
Buoyant, Aiello began to pick up leading roles – as a businessman in The Closer (1990) and as the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald in Ruby (1992) – and there was a mixed bag of supporting turns, too, in Jacob’s Ladder (1990), Hudson Hawk (1991) and Prêt-à-Porter (1994), in which he popped up as a transvestite. By the time of Leon (1994), his face was familiar enough for Aiello to be immediately recognisable from the extreme close-ups of his eyes and mouth in the opening scenes, in which he assigns a job to the titular hitman.
By then, film-making had become a family business. His son Rick often acted alongside him and his son Danny regularly performed stunts. The movies, too, were mostly set on home turf in New York, such as Prince of Central Park (2000) and Brooklyn Lobster (2005). Many of them were independent productions and if the budgets were smaller, so too were the audiences. But he was looking more at ease than ever, and in his 70s, with evident relish, he concentrated on a singing career, releasing albums of jazz standards, including a Christmas record in 2010. He published his autobiography, I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else: My Life on the Street, on the Stage, and in the Movies, in 2014.
His final films included two tough crime dramas, The Neighborhood (2017) and Making a Deal With the Devil (2019). There was also Little Italy (2018), a romantic comedy about feuding families who run rival pizza businesses. It had shades of one of Aiello’s greatest late roles, in Dinner Rush (2000), which won him some of his best reviews. Set in a trendy eaterie that was once a traditional trattoria, the film had the authentic aroma of a working kitchen; Aiello was in his element as an embattled restaurateur, presiding over it all with weathered elegance at his corner table.
His son Danny died in 2010. He is survived by Sandy and his three other children.
• Danny Aiello, actor, born 20 May 1933; died 12 December 2019
