Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
Burt Young, a former prizefighter from Queens who has played versatile tough guys in dozens of films and television shows and became a staple of the Rocky franchise with his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Paulie Pennino, Rocky Balboa’s best friend and cornerman died. He was 83.
His manager, Lynda Bensky, confirmed the death but did not provide details. The New York Times, citing his daughter Anne Morea Steingieser, reported that he died on October 8 in Los Angeles.
A prolific actor with a rapid physique, Mr. Young made more than 160 film appearances, playing charming gangsters, sleazy street thugs and aging gangsters who carried a menacing aura long after their hair had turned gray. He appeared in acclaimed films such as “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), starring Robert De Niro and James Woods, and long-running series such as HBO’s “The Sopranos,” in which he guest-starred as Bobby Baccalieri Sr., an ailing gangster who comes out of retirement for one final strike. (Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, compares him to the Terminator.)
Mr. Young’s performances were memorable, even if they were brief. In “Chinatown” (1974), filmmaker Roman Polanski’s gritty portrait of Los Angeles corruption, he appeared in the opening scene as a disheveled fisherman, moaning and whimpering and crying into the blinds after a private detective (Jack Nicholson) gives him evidence The reason for this was his wife’s infidelity. In the comedy Back to School (1986), he played Rodney Dangerfield’s limo driver and bodyguard, who crushed a metal napkin holder with one hand and punched football players less than half his age.
While he often played thugs and brutes, Mr. Young had a flair for making subtle, unexpected choices – down to the way his characters walked, talked or ate pastrami – that impressed his colleagues. “He has the guts that very few people have,” actor James Caan, his co-star in films such as “Cinderella Liberty” (1973) and “The Killer Elite” (1975), said in a 2002 interview with the New York Observer. Mr. Young’s acting teacher, Lee Strasberg, reportedly called him “an emotional library.”
“Burt was an actor of tremendous emotional range,” his manager said in a statement. “He could make you cry and he could scare you to death. But the real pathos I felt was the emotion of his soul. That’s where it came from.”
Mr. Young had been acting for less than a decade when he was cast in “Rocky” (1976), the Sylvester Stallone boxing film that became the top-grossing film of the year and turned the stone steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art into a tourist spot Target and spawned eight sequels and spin-offs, including the “Creed” films.
As Paulie, Mr. Young was “down and resentful, loyal and bitter, and cared enough about people to hurt them just to draw attention to his grief,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert. His character is a hard-drinking, violent and almost psychopathic butcher as he throws away a Thanksgiving turkey while pressuring his sister Adrian (Talia Shire) to go on a date with Rocky (Stallone). He could also be loving and supportive, introducing Rocky to the meat locker where the boxer is training for a championship fight against Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers).
“You’re breaking my ribs,” he says as Rocky taps a side of beef in the cold. “If you do this to Apollo Creed, they’ll put us in prison for murder.”
Directed by John G. Avildsen from a screenplay by Stallone, “Rocky” received 10 Academy Award nominations and won three, including Best Picture. Mr. Young and co-star Burgess Meredith, who played Rocky’s trainer, were nominated for best supporting actor but lost to Jason Robards for “All the President’s Men.”
Mr. Young played Paulie in five more Rocky films, with the character alternating between kindness and cruelty, generosity and incompetence, finding company with a robot butler in “Rocky IV” (1985) and accidentally becoming Rocky’s family in “Rocky V.” into bankruptcy” (1990).
He wanted to portray Paulie as “burly on the outside and full of quicksand on the inside,” he told the Observer, explaining that “the excitement obscured him, the way he walked.” I made him wide. I put on three pairs of clothes. I made sure he didn’t have a neck.
“Of course I noticed his insecurity.”
Mr. Young was born in Queens on April 30, 1940, and grew up in the Corona section. Reports vary as to his birth name, which is often given as Gerald Tommaso DeLouise. His father was a sheet metal mechanic and ice cream man and later became a high school workshop teacher.
By the time Mr. Young was 16, he had been kicked out of two high schools. With his father’s help, he joined the Marine Corps around his age and took up boxing. According to Mr. Young, he fought in more than a dozen bouts and remained undefeated as a professional fighter, and once had a three-round contest with Muhammad Ali. But he never earned more than $400 from a fight, he said, and found more reliable work, including laying carpet.
“I’ve been in every company in the world that didn’t have inventory,” he told Newsday. “Anything that requires sweat and a lot of courage.”
When he was in his late 20s, he accidentally turned to acting while trying to impress a waitress named Norma. “She said she always wanted to study with Lee Strasberg but couldn’t get in,” he told Bright Lights Film Journal. “I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was. I thought it was a girl. But I thought if I could help her, maybe I could shake her hand.”
Mr. Young sent a letter to Strasberg, one of the country’s most renowned acting teachers, suggesting that if he could get into one of Strasberg’s classes, he could also help Norma. She had no luck, but the teacher was taken with Mr. Young, who studied with Strasberg for two years.
“Acting had everything I was looking for,” he said. “In my life so far, I have used tension to keep myself upright. Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”
Mr. Young made one of his first film appearances in “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971) and went on to work with filmmakers such as Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in “Convoy” (1978). He later appeared in the drama “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1989) and acted on stage, making his Broadway debut in a 1986 production of “Cuba & His Teddy Bear” as an affable drug dealer opposite De Niro .
His wife Gloria died in 1974, according to the reference book Contemporary Theater, Film and Television. According to the biography, he was also preceded in death by a son, Richard. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
When he wasn’t acting, Mr. Young wrote plays and screenplays, including the 1978 drama film “Uncle Joe Shannon,” in which he played a trumpeter who loses his wife and son in a fire. He also painted with oil and acrylic paints and created colorful pictures of friends, acquaintances, the forest and the sea.
“I always painted, just like I always wrote,” he told Bright Lights in 2006, “but then livelihood took over. But it takes me away in a good way. Whether it’s laying a carpet or learning a roll, I try to lighten the load in everything I do.”