Tony Sirico, star of ‘The Sopranos’, dies

Tony Siricothe renowned actor who played the emblematic and paranoid Paulie Walnuts in ‘The Sopranos’always at the head of the best series on HBO Max, has died. She was 79 years old.

The actor’s brother, the Reverend Robert Sirico, was in charge of announcing the news on Facebook:

“It is with great sadness, but with incredible pride, love and loads of fond memories, the family of Gennaro Anthony ‘Tony’ Sirico would like to inform you of his passing on the morning of July 8, 2022,” Robert wrote. “Tony is survived by his two beloved children, Joanne Sirico Bello and Richard Sirico, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews and many other relatives…The family is deeply grateful for the many expressions of love, prayer and condolences and asks that the public respect their privacy at this time of mourning,” Robert Sirico said.

Born in 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, one of Sirico’s first films was ‘Back to Justice’, a film directed by Charles Martin in 1978. From then on, he would become a usual face in many television series, movies and telefilms for the next decade and a half, but his Most prominent role to date would come in 1990, when he was chosen to play Tony Stacks in ‘One of Us’one of the masterpieces of Martin Scorsese (here you can find the 20 best Martin Scorsese movies, ordered).

Sirico was one of the actors who most worked with Woody Allenwhose first collaboration took place in 1994 with ‘Bullets on Broadway’and continued with ‘Powerful Aphrodite’, ‘Everyone Says I Love You’, ‘Disassembling Harry’‘Celebrity’, ‘Cafe Society’ and ‘Wonder Wheel’, his latest work for the diminutive New York genius (by the way, it seems that the desire that Woody Allen plans to shoot a film in French in Paris is beginning to take shape). Nevertheless, his best known role it came from the hand of David Chase nine years later, when he played Peter Paul “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri in the legendary mobster series ‘The Sopranos’.

The reason for this nickname, “nuts”, had to do with the fact that Paulie, who at the age of 17 became the bodyguard of “Johnny Boy” Soprano, Tony’s father, he undertook the robbery of a truck that in theory was transporting televisions. When they opened it they discovered that it had those nuts.

Tony Sirico joins in this way the sad death of Ray Liotta at the age of 67 last May, an interpreter with whom he shared the screen in the aforementioned ‘One of Ours’, one of the best films about the world of mafia, a genre, gangster movies, in which Sirico and his particular face always fit perfectly.