Danny Aiello: Character actor who excelled as blue-collar heavies and hotheads

Best remembered for Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’, Aiello made his mark in a long list of movie credits from the early 1970s onwards

Burly, husky-voiced and gregarious, Aiello (pictured in ‘Do The Right Thing’) was a natural showman (Universal/Rex)

Danny Aiello was a late-blooming actor who made a big impression in films such as The Godfather: Part II, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Do the Right Thing, and who played against type as a middle-aged mama’s boy in Moonstruck.

Raised in poverty during the Depression, Aiello, who has died aged 86, grew up in the South Bronx with six siblings. His father, he said, “took a hike”. Learning to hustle for work at age six, he became a high school dropout, a gang member, a thief and safecracker, a pool shark, a Greyhound bus-line bag-handler and a troublemaking transit union president.

Burly, husky-voiced and gregarious, Aiello was also a natural showman whose work as a bouncer at an improv comedy club provided his entree into acting. On some nights he took a chance at MC-ing and singing.

Encouraged by the club owner, he began attending casting calls and landed minor stage roles. He had a small part as a ballplayer in the movie drama Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), starring Robert De Niro. But he got his breakthrough the next year in The Godfather: Part II, playing a hitman. As Aiello garrotted a mobster, he improvised a message to his victim that director Francis Ford Coppola kept in the film: “Michael Corleone says hello.”

It was the start of a nearly five-decade career spanning more than 100 roles, with Aiello often cast as boisterous toughs on both sides of the law. In the police drama Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), he had a supporting role as a psychopathic police officer who throws a young man off a rooftop, and he was the abusive husband of Mia Farrow in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).

Meanwhile, he showcased his broadening range in a series of acclaimed theatre performances, including an Obie-winning turn in 1977 as a macho working-class father of a sexually confused son in Albert Innaurato’s popular comedy Gemini and a thug in David Rabe’s Hurlyburly in 1985.

Amid a hectic career on TV, he won a Daytime Emmy award for the ABC after-school special Family of Strangers (1980), playing a widower with two children. He was also Madonna’s worried, disapproving father in the pop singer’s 1986 music video for the song “Papa Don’t Preach”.

Aiello became one of the busiest character actors in movies, notably as a contract killer with a soft streak in Allen’s Radio Days (1987) and as a man torn between his engagement to Cher and his devotion to his dying mother in Moonstruck (1987).

In casting Do the Right Thing (1989), Spike Lee tried to persuade De Niro to play Sal, a pizzeria owner, but the actor steered him to Aiello. “I think it makes a big difference that Danny has lived a real life,” Lee said. “With most actors, they’ve been to acting school, they’ve been to Juilliard. That’s all they know. But Danny’s been out here. He’s lived a little.”

With Bruce Willis in ‘Hudsom Hawk’. Aiello’s background gave him the right look and temperament to play a range of malefactors (Tri-Star/Rex)

Aiello’s Sal, the last white business owner in his Brooklyn community, was a tragic figure, nurturing and racist and proud, unwittingly provoking the destruction of his life’s work amid simmering racial tensions. The role brought him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

Daniel Louis Aiello Jr was born in Manhattan in 1933. He was the sixth of the seven children of a truck driver and a mother who worked as a seamstress and eventually went blind. Before he turned 10, Danny began shining shoes and hawking newspapers at Grand Central Terminal.

He quit high school after two weeks and, as a gang member, stole from the grocery stores and bowling alley where he worked. After three years of army service, he returned to the Bronx. He spent several years working for Greyhound bus lines, first as a baggage clerk and eventually as a public address announcer. He was elected president of his local transit workers union and, in 1967, was blamed for leading an unauthorised strike. The international union sided with management and fired him.

He spent the next two years working at after-hours saloons on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he recalled finding himself more than once “between two guns” when violence erupted. When he could not make his rent payment, he resorted to burglary. “Do I regret stealing? Absolutely,” he said. “But I still think it was the right decision if it kept us from being out on the street.”

In Hollywood, his background gave him the right look and temperament to play a range of malefactors. His presence enlivened even the most risible films, from Eddie Murphy’s gangster comedy Harlem Nights (1989) to the Bruce Willis action spoof Hudson Hawk (1991).

He was a police officer in Sergio Leone’s gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and the Dallas strip club owner Jack Ruby, driven to kill alleged presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, in Ruby (1992). Aiello wrote a memoir, I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else: My Life on the Street, on the Stage, and in the Movies (2014).

He is survived by his wife Sandy Cohen, whom he married in 1955, and three children. One son predeceased him.

Danny Aiello, actor, born 20 June 1933, died 12 December 2019

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