The first time I encountered Tony Sirico he was working at a hot New York club as a fierce doorman/bouncer/security guard. His name in those days was Junior Sirico. He wore his hair slicked back, a pinky ring, and talked tough, but was very nice to me and my friends at the club. A few years later he appeared as a houseguest, visiting my friend Lenny Barin in LA, and I was told he recently got out of prison and wanted to become an actor. My friend laughingly pointed out that Junior always had a stack of Playboy magazines and a gun under his bed, but he was very close to his mother in Brooklyn. Junior started dating a roomate of mine and I had a party where he met Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had started filming Pumping Iron, but was still just a bodybuilder. Tony was immediately drawn to Arnold and seemed thrilled to meet him. The unlikely pair talked about acting. The next thing I knew he had landed a small role in The Godfather Part II. Junior announced that he was no longer Junior- we had to call him Tony from then on. The rest is history- he started enjoying his new life as an actor.
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And the good news is Paulie won’t have to do 4,000 years standing on his head in purgatory because there is no afterlife. Good on ‘ya, Tony, for turning your life around and giving us some indelible screen characters.
He was a man of many talents.
This sounds like another delicious chapter in Janet’s upcoming book about her days (and nights!) as a groupie in the 1970’s.