In the late 1960s, Burt Young dashed off a letter to Lee Strasberg, who ran the Actors Studio in New York, hoping to be taken on as a student. “Seriously, Lee, I don’t know if acting has anything for me, or vice versa, but I’m treading water,” he wrote. “So see me.”
The letter was intended to curry favour with a woman whom Young was trying to impress, and whose dream it was to study with Strasberg. Both she and Young were invited to audition. She quit after drying up during her first acting class but Strasberg was impressed by the stubby, paunchy Young, telling him: “You have huge tension about you. I feel you’re an emotional library.”
Less than a decade later, Young, who has died aged 83, found fame playing Paulie Pennino, the gormless, rough-and-tumble butcher who is brother-in-law to the aspiring prizefighter Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) in the rags-to-riches hit Rocky (1976).
“I thought the script had the cleanest street prose I’d ever read,” said Young. Among the film’s 10 Oscar nominations was one for him as best supporting actor. It won three prizes, including best picture.
In Young’s hands, Paulie was roguishly endearing as well as exasperating. The actor described him as “all burly on the outside and all quicksand inside”. Paulie’s tenderness toward Rocky is forever being complicated by his jealousy at the boxer’s success. Any initial tension or piquancy in the drama, however, was diluted by a stream of sequels in which Stallone and Young reprised their roles. One low-point was Rocky III (1982), which begins with Paulie receiving a robot butler as a gift from Rocky, whose success has made him profligate. Paulie modifies the robot to give it a female voice.
He is last seen in the sixth instalment, Rocky Balboa (2006), where he is once again the boxer’s corner-man. The character’s death is alluded to in the spin-off Creed (2015), in which Young does not appear.
Paulie was typical of many of the roles that came Young’s way: you could hear the hair growing in their ears, smell the stink on their singlets, feel their brain cells dying. In Back to School (1986), for instance, he played a tough-guy chauffeur described by the hero, played by the comic Rodney Dangerfield, as “an animal. In his family, he’s only the second generation to stand upright.”
For Young, it was never that simple. In Robert Aldrich’s vulgar cop comedy The Choirboys (1977), his turn as a cackling sergeant was singled out by the Washington Post as “human and appealing”. Cast as the flawed, the coarse or the criminal in films such as Sergio Leone’s gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984) or Alan Alda’s whimsical Betsy’s Wedding (1989), he allowed a rumpled warmth to shine through the cracks, his actorly intelligence informing every choice.
Esteemed co-stars respected his craft. Jack Nicholson shared a scene with Young at the start of Roman Polanski’s neo-noir thriller Chinatown (1974), and was said to have greatly admired the actor and to have used him as the model for the laconic hood he played in Prizzi’s Honour (1985).
James Caan, with whom Young first worked on the shore-leave love story Cinderella Liberty (1973), wangled parts for him in The Gambler (1974), inspired by (though not adapted from) the Dostoevsky novella of the same name, and The Killer Elite (1975). The latter was the first of two films that Young made for the director Sam Peckinpah, the other being the action-comedy Convoy (1978).
“Everybody was scared of [Peckinpah],” said Young. “The studios were scared of him. The other actors. And so they would go through me, because I had no fear of nobody.”
It was Aldrich who became Young’s friend and loyal collaborator, directing him in The Choirboys, the nuclear-age thriller Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) and …All the Marbles (1981), a salty comedy about female wrestling released outside the US as The California Dolls.
A 1978 Esquire magazine profile dwelt on the actor’s history of juvenile delinquency and general criminality, noting that his life was “lifted right out of the pages of Damon Runyon”.
He was born in Queens, New York. His birth name has been listed variously as Gerald De Louise and Richard Morea, with Burt Young the name he adopted once he became an actor. His mother, Josephine, and father, Michael, an ice-delivery man and sheet metal worker who later trained as a teacher, tried to improve his chances by sending him to Bryant high school, an establishment in a better neighbourhood, but he was soon expelled. He attended St Anne’s academy, from which he was also ejected.
At 16, he joined the Marines, served tours of duty in Japan and the Philippines, and developed an aptitude for boxing. After a dishonourable discharge, he returned to New York and boxed professionally, training under the renowned Cus D’Amato and Charley Goldman. Fighting under three different aliases, he claimed to have amassed a record of 17 wins to one loss.
He became a truck driver, managed a silk-screen printing business that went bankrupt, part-owned a bakery and a bar, and worked for his brother’s Manhattan carpet-cleaning firm, before starting an outlet of his own in Queens. He later opened his own restaurant, Burt Young’s Il Boschetto, in the Bronx.
His first acting jobs included parts in the daytime soap The Doctors (1969) and the crime comedy The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971). Over more than half a century, he accumulated around 160 movie and TV credits including The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) with Mickey Rourke, a harrowing adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), the Hugh Grant comedy Mickey Blue Eyes (1999), which reunited him with Caan, and Transamerica (2005), in which he was the father of a trans woman played by Felicity Huffman.
He also wrote and starred in two films: the TV movie Daddy, I Don’t Like It Like This, about a boy whose father tries to toughen him up, and the sentimental Uncle Joe Shannon (both 1978), in which he played a bereaved trumpeter. In recent times, Young devoted much of his life to painting.
One of his most wrenching performances was in a 2001 episode of the HBO series The Sopranos. He played an ageing hoodlum, dying of cancer and grateful to be given one final hit to carry out. The assignment ends unforgettably in blood and bathos.
Crime was an area he felt he might have lapsed into were it not for the approval he received from Strasberg. “I come from that life,” he said. “To this day, two of my best friends are doing 100 years.”
But he was acting well into his dotage. “Rather than flying high, I’m wide,” he said in 2002. “I still have ambition, but I’m slow. I’ll never be Tom Cruise.”
Nor would anyone have wanted him to be: there was more character in one grin or grimace from Young than in a dozen vehicles featuring sleeker, shinier stars.
He is survived by Anne, his daughter, from his marriage to Gloria, who died in 1974.
