His death was confirmed by Bob McGowan, his manager. No reason was given. Paulie Walnuts – which was Paul Gualtieri’s nickname because he once grabbed a truck full of nuts (wait for TVs) – was one of mob boss Tony Soprano’s most loyal, hypersensitive and reckless men. Paulie was the guy who would be in an intervention for a drug addict and when it was his turn to speak, he punched the guy in the face. He loved his mother (though he found out she was really his aunt) and he loved him for writing the checks to keep her in an expensive nursing home. Paulie wore overalls, slept with thorns, feared germs, hated cats and watched TV in a chair covered in plastic. He hated being stuck with a nearly $900 restaurant check, but he could appreciate a tasty packet of ketchup on a cold night in the Pine Barrens when there was nothing else to eat. When the “Sopranos” cast appeared in a group shot for the cover of Rolling Stone in 2001, Paulie stood with a baseball bat nonchalantly slung over his right shoulder. No hairstylist on the “Sopranos” set was allowed to touch Mr. Sirico’s hair — dark and lush with two silver “feathers” on either side. He dried it and sprayed it himself. Mr. Sirico’s face was also familiar, in quick flashes, to fans of Woody Allen films. He appeared in several of them, starting with ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ (1994), in which he played the right-hand man of a powerful gangster turned theater producer. He was a boxing coach in “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995), an escaped convict in “Everyone Says I Love You” (1996), an upstanding prison cop in “Deconstructing Harry” (1997) and a gunslinger. gangster at Coney Island in “Wonder Wheel” (2017). Gennaro Anthony Sirico Jr. was born in Brooklyn on July 29, 1942, the son of Jerry Sirico, a stevedore, and Marie (Cappelluzzo) Sirico. Junior, as he was called, recalled the first time he got into trouble when he stole nickels from a kiosk. He attended Midwood High School but did not graduate, said his brother Robert Sirico. “I grew up in Bensonhurst, where there were a lot of mobsters,” he told Cigar Aficionado in 2001. “I watched them all the time, watched the way they walked, the cars they drove, the way they approached each other. There was an air about them that was very interesting, especially for a child.” He worked in construction for a while but soon succumbed to temptation. “I started running with the wrong types of men and found myself doing a lot of bad things,” she said in the James Toback documentary The Big Bang (1989). Bad things like armed robbery, extortion, coercion and possession of a weapon for a felony. While serving 20 months of a four-year sentence at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York, he saw a troupe of actors, all ex-convicts, who had stopped by to perform for the inmates. “When I watched them, I said to myself, ‘I can do this,’” he told the Daily News in 1999. He was an uncredited extra in “The Godfather: Part II” (1974) and made his official film debut in “Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell” (1977), by Larry Buchanan, the self-proclaimed Schlock director. Mr. Sirico followed that with more than a decade of small television and film roles, covering the flamboyant mobster Tony Stacks in “Goodfellas” (1990). His first advocate among directors was Mr. Toback, who cast him in a crime drama, ”Fingers” (1978), with Harvey Keitel. a romantic drama, “Love & Money” (1981), starring Ray Sharkey and Klaus Kinski; and a comedy-drama, “The Pick-Up Artist” (1987), starring Molly Ringwald and Robert Downey Jr., as well as the documentary. Before “The Sopranos,” he was a cop in “Dead Presidents” (1995), a suburban mobster in “Cop Land” (1997) and a Gambino capo in the TV movie “Gotti” (1996). Once “The Sopranos” aired in 1999, it became extremely and widely popular. Mr. Sirico soon realized that he was very famous. “If I’m with five other Paulies,” he told The New York Times in 2007, imagining a rather unlikely situation, “and someone calls out, ‘Hey, Paulie,’ I know it’s for me.” After the HBO series ended in 2007, he often worked with his “Sopranos” co-stars. After playing Bert, with Steve Schirippa’s Ernie, in a Christmas special “Sesame Street” (2008), he appeared with Steven Van Zandt in the series “Lilyhammer” (2013-14), with Michael Rispoli in “Friends and Romans ” (2014). ) and with Vincent Pastore and others in the film ‘Sarah Q’ (2018). He also voiced a smart dog named Vinny in the animated series “Family Guy” (2013-16). He appeared in a crime drama, “Respect the Jux,” this year. Mr. Sirico married and divorced early. He has two children, Joanne Sirico Bello and Richard Sirico. a sister, Carol Pannunzio; two brothers, Robert Sirico and Carmine Sirico; and many grandchildren. He brought at least one admirable lesson from the mobster world to “The Sopranos.” He insisted that his character would never be portrayed as a rat, someone who would prey on the crime family. He was also reluctant to ask his character to kill a woman—Paulie suffocated an elderly resident at the nursing home with a pillow when he interrupted the theft of her life savings—but was pleasantly surprised that the people in the old neighborhood didn’t seem to think less of him after viewing the episode. Early on, however, it sometimes occurred to him that he had rejected the dark side. “I was this 30-year-old ex-con sitting in a classroom full of fresh, serious drama students,” Mr. Sirico recalled in the Daily News interview. The teacher “leaned over to me after I made a scene and whispered, ‘Tony, leave the gun at home.’ After all these years of carrying a gun, I didn’t even realize I had it with me.” Vimal Patel contributed reporting.
