Danny Aiello: The Star’s Rise To Fame
American actor Danny Aiello (Daniel Louis Aiello Jr.) died on December 12, 2019. He broke into films in the early 1970s. One of his earliest roles came as a ballplayer in the baseball drama, Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) with Robert De Niro. Aiello had a walk-on role as small-time hood Tony Rosato in The Godfather Part II (1974), ad-libbing the line “Michael Corleone says hello!” during a hit on rival gangster Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo).
Aiello had a co-lead role with Jan Michael Vincent in Defiance (1980), about some Manhattan residents who fight back against the thugs terrorizing the neighborhood. He received considerable acclaim for playing a racist New York City cop in Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981) with Paul Newman. In 1981, Aiello won a Daytime Emmy Award for his appearance in an ABC Afterschool Special called A Family of Strangers.
He was paired with De Niro again for the Sergio Leone gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), as a police chief whose name was also “Aiello.” His many film appearances included two for director Woody Allen, who cast him in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Radio Days (1987). He played a main role in the 1985–86 television series Lady Blue.
Aiello played the pizzeria owner Sal in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). At the time of the film’s release, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, he called the role his “first focal part”. He further identified the film as a very collaborative effort, during which Spike Lee at one point told him “Whatever you wanna do, you do.” Aiello went on to write a crucial scene he shared with John Turturro ten minutes prior to its production. The role earned him nominations for a Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, as well as film critic awards from Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Aiello also portrayed more sympathetic characters. He gained recognition as the befuddled fiancé of Cher opposite her Oscar-winning performance in the romantic comedy Moonstruck (1987), and made a comic appearance in drag for the Robert Altman fashion-industry film Prêt-à-Porter (1994). He also had sympathetic roles in the horror thriller Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and the comedy-drama 29th Street (1991).
Aiello played nightclub owner and Lee Harvey Oswald assassin Jack Ruby in the biopic Ruby (1992), the lead role in Paul Mazursky’s film business satire The Pickle (1993), and a political big shot with mob ties in City Hall (1996), starring Al Pacino. He later starred in the independent feature film Dolly Baby (2012), written and directed by Kevin Jordan; Aiello also starred in Jordan’s Brooklyn Lobster, which premiered at The Toronto Film Festival in 2005. Danny Aiello, 86, is dead. He will surely be missed by Hollywood and his fans.
