Vincent Pastore, Big Pussy on The Sopranos, dies at 80
The actor was found dead at his home in the Bronx on Saturday after three days without contact. An investigation into the circumstances is open, and he turned 80 less than three weeks ago.
American actor Vincent Pastore, Big Pussy from The Sopranos, was found dead at his home in the Bronx on Saturday, August 1. He was 80. A neighbor found him after three days in which he had not answered his phone or stepped outside.
An investigation into the circumstances of the death is underway. No cause has been released and no date has been given for the findings, so the confirmed record still comes down to the place and the day the body was found.
Pastore was born on July 14, 1946 in the Bronx and grew up in New Rochelle. He turned 80 eighteen days before he was found dead, in the borough where he was born.
Who was Big Pussy on The Sopranos?
Salvatore Big Pussy Bonpensiero was a member of Tony Soprano’s crew who was secretly working as an FBI informant. Pastore played him from the show’s launch in 1999, through the early seasons that turned the series into a reference point. The character was killed off in the episode Funhouse in 2000, in a scene still cited among the most memorable in the whole run.
The role left the show early. The nickname stayed with the actor for the rest of his life, and it leads every headline written about him this weekend.
From Goodfellas to Gotti
Pastore started working on camera in the late 1980s, already a grown man with another life behind him. His first notable screen appearance came in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas in 1990. What followed until The Sopranos stayed inside a narrow lane:
- Goodfellas (1990)
- Men of Respect, early 1990s
- Carlito’s Way (1993)
- The Jerky Boys (1995)
- the HBO film Gotti (1996), where he played mobster Angelo Ruggiero
That last title carries more weight than it usually gets. Gotti was an HBO mob picture made three years before the same network launched the first season of The Sopranos. Pastore was inside the building, in a small way, before the part that defined him ever existed.
Navy, drama school and a nightclub
Before acting he served in the U.S. Navy, then took a degree at Pace University in New York. For years he ran a nightclub, and he only moved into acting seriously after 40. That biography explains the ease he brought to those early parts, where he read less like a hired actor than like someone the camera happened to find.
He kept working after The Sopranos. He voiced the character Luca in the animated film Shark Tale in 2004, appeared in Revolver in 2005, and took parts in the series Hawaii Five-0 and Gravesend. He left behind well over a hundred film and television credits across nearly four decades.
What is known and what is not
Confirmed so far: the date, the place, and an open investigation. There is no word on whether the death was natural, and no precise time, since three days passed between his last contact with anyone and the moment he was found. The family has not issued a statement.
Thirty six years separate his first role in 1990 from Saturday in the Bronx, most of them spent in crime films and crime series. Out of all of it, the headlines announcing his death lead with one character from a show he left in 2000. Vincent Pastore spent the last twenty six years working under a name a single part hung on him, and every new project he joined carried the same tag in the announcement.
