Burt Young, a burly actor from Queens who, with weary dignity and naked demeanor, forged a productive career as a tough guy in Hollywood in films like “Chinatown,” “Once Upon a Time in America” and, most notably, “Rocky,” for which he Nominated for an Oscar, died on October 8th in Los Angeles. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Anne Morea Steingieser, who said the cause was not yet known.
With his bulldog physique and sad expression, Mr. Young amassed more than 160 film and television appearances. He often played a mafia boss, a clever detective or a down-and-out worker.
But even when he played a villain, he wasn’t all heavy-handed. Despite his bloody background as a Marine and professional boxer, Mr. Young brought layered complexity to his work. The acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who once trained him, called Mr. Young a “library of emotions.”
With his no-nonsense approach, he found a soul mate in another Hollywood tough guy, filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in The Killer Elite (1975), starring James Caan, and Convoy (1978), starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw.
“Both were loners and outlaws with great respect for art,” his daughter said in a telephone interview. “They got along because of the intensity and honesty that Peckinpah demanded. He didn’t tolerate a lack of authenticity.”
In the early 1970s, Mr. Young made memorable appearances on television shows such as “M*A*S*H” and in films such as the mob comedy “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971) and “Cinderella Liberty” ( 1973), a drama about a sailor (James Caan) who falls in love with a prostitute (Marsha Mason).
He also proved to be a scene-stealer in a powerful if brief appearance in “Chinatown” (1974), Roman Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece, as a deceived Los Angeles fisherman who becomes embroiled in a tale of incest and murder.
His real breakthrough came two years later with “Rocky”, the story of a simple boxer and club boxer (Sylvester Stallone) who gets an unusual fight with heavyweight champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Mr. Young played the combustible Paulie, a butcher friend of Rocky’s and the brother of Adrian (Talia Shire), the introverted woman who becomes Rocky’s girlfriend.
Although “Rocky” would propel Mr. Stallone, who also wrote the screenplay, to stardom, Mr. Young often said that he was the bigger name in Hollywood before the project began. “I was the only actor who didn’t audition in the first ‘Rocky,'” he said in a 2017 interview with The Rumpus, a culture website. “And I got the most money for it.”
Mr. Young recalled his first meeting with Mr. Stallone in a studio. “He kneels down next to me,” he remembers. “He says, ‘Mr. Young, I’m Sylvester Stallone. I wrote Rocky’” — and then, Mr. Young said, he added, “You have to do it, please.”
“He’s trying to twist my arm,” Mr. Young said.
The film, a gritty and often gritty human drama directed by John G. Avildsen, was a far cry from its sometimes cartoonish sequels, all but one of which were directed by Mr. Stallone and also starred Mr. Young. “It really wasn’t a fight story, it was a love story about someone standing up,” he said of the first film in a 2006 interview with Bright Lights Film Journal. “Not even winning, just standing up.”
“Rocky” became a landmark of the 1970s. The film received ten Academy Award nominations, including Mr. Young’s for best supporting actor, and won three Oscars, including best picture.
“I made him a tough guy with sensitivity,” Mr. Young later said of Paulie. “He really is a marshmallow, even though he screams a lot.”
Burt Young – he took that name as an actor; There are different sources about his birth name – he was born on April 30, 1940 in Queens. His father was a sheet metal worker, an ice cream man, and eventually a shop teacher and high school dean.
Mr. Young grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the Corona section of Queens and got a taste of the streets from an early age. “To make me a gentler child, my father sent me to Bryant High School in Astoria, away from my Corona friends,” he wrote in the foreword to “Corona: The Early Years” (2015) by Jason D. Antos and Constantine E. Theodosiou.
“However, I was soon expelled and went on to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, where I was expelled after one semester,” he continued. “It ended up being the Marines when I was 16, my dad tricked my age to get me in.”
He began boxing in the Marine Corps and launched a successful, if relatively brief, professional career under Cus D’Amato, the boxing trainer and manager who guided the careers of Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. When he left the ring he had a win-loss record of about 17-1 – his own figures varied.
In his late 20s, he was laying carpets and doing other odd jobs when he fell in love with a woman who worked at the bar and told him that she dreamed of studying acting with Mr. Strasberg. “I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was,” he told Bright Lights. “I thought it was a girl.”
Mr. Young arranged for the two of them to meet Mr. Strasberg, the father of method acting, and ended up studying with him for two years. “Acting had everything I was looking for,” he recalled. “In my life so far, I have used tension to keep myself upright. Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”
His numerous other film appearances ranged from “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1989), a harrowing adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s scandalous 1964 novel about lost souls from the underworld of mid-century Brooklyn, to the Rodney Dangerfield film 1986 comedy “Back to School.” Mr. Young also wrote the lead role in “Uncle Joe Shannon” (1978), the story of a jazz trumpeter whose life implodes before he finds redemption.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Young is survived by a brother, Robert, and a grandson. His wife Gloria died in 1974.
Mr. Young also had a long career in theater, including a role opposite Robert De Niro and Ralph Macchio in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” a play about a drug dealer and his son that premiered at the Off Broadway Public Theater in Manhattan opened in 1986 and later moved to Broadway.
Mel Gussow of The New York Times praised Mr. Young’s humorous performance as Mr. De Niro’s partner and lackey. He praised a scene in which, he wrote, Mr. Young “embarrassedly pulled up the wide waistband of his loud shorts, insisting that he was not fat but had ‘big bones.'”
Mr. Young was an enthusiastic painter who sold his work and whose atmospheric portraits showed the influence of Picasso and Matisse. “I don’t think you can put me in a bottle as an actor or an artist,” he said in a 2016 video interview. “Maybe the acting, I’m a little more structured.”
When acting, he added, he focused on precise emotional signals, such as expressing greed or anger – to make his characters more “masculine.”
So it’s no wonder that his Paulie in “Rocky” jumped off the screen with volcanic eruptions – throwing his sister’s Thanksgiving turkey into an alley in a fit of rage and smashing up her house with a baseball bat.
“Paulie was often a pretty ugly guy,” he said. But he added: “They miscast me.
“I’m a lovely guy. It’s just that I go astray here and there.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed to the research.