Burt Young, a onetime prizefighter from Queens who played multifaceted tough guys in dozens of movies and television shows, becoming a fixture of the Rocky franchise with his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Paulie Pennino, Rocky Balboa’s best friend turned cornerman, has died. He was 83.
A prolific actor with a fireplug physique, Mr. Young had more than 160 screen credits, playing charming hoodlums, grubby street toughs and aging gangsters who retained a menacing aura long after their hair turned gray. He appeared in acclaimed films such as “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), with Robert De Niro and James Woods, as well as long-running series like HBO’s “The Sopranos,” in which he guest-starred as Bobby Baccalieri Sr., an ailing mobster who comes out of retirement for one last hit. (Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, likens him to the Terminator.)
Mr. Young’s performances were memorable even when they were brief. For “Chinatown” (1974), filmmaker Roman Polanski’s bleak portrait of Los Angeles corruption, he appeared in the opening scene as a disheveled fisherman who moans and whimpers, crying into the Venetian blinds after a private detective (Jack Nicholson) shows him evidence of his wife’s infidelity. For the comedy “Back to School” (1986), he played Rodney Dangerfield’s limo driver and bodyguard, crushing a metal napkin holder with one hand and pummeling football players who are less than half his age.
While he often played thugs and brutes, Mr. Young had a knack for making subtle, unexpected choices — down to the way his characters walked, talked or ate pastrami — that impressed his colleagues. “He has the guts, which very few people have,” said actor James Caan, his co-star in films including “Cinderella Liberty” (1973) and “The Killer Elite” (1975), in a 2002 interview with the New York Observer. Mr. Young’s acting teacher, Lee Strasberg, reportedly called him “an emotional library.”
“Burt was an actor of tremendous emotional range,” his manager said in a statement. “He could make you cry and he could scare you to death. But the real pathos that I experienced was the poignancy of his soul. That’s where it came from.”
Mr. Young had been acting for less than a decade when he was cast in “Rocky” (1976), the Sylvester Stallone boxing film that became the year’s highest-grossing movie, turned the stone steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art into a tourist destination and spawned eight sequels and spin offs, including the “Creed” films.
As Paulie, Mr. Young was “defeated and resentful, loyal and bitter, caring about people enough to hurt them just to draw attention to his grief,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert. His character is a hard-drinking butcher, violent and almost psychopathic when he throws away a Thanksgiving turkey while pressuring his sister Adrian (Talia Shire) to go on a date with Rocky (Stallone). He could also be loving and supportive, introducing Rocky to the meat freezer where the boxer trains for a championship bout against Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers).
“You’re breaking the ribs,” he says as Rocky pummels a side of beef in the cold. “You do that to Apollo Creed, they’ll put us in jail for murder.”
Directed by John G. Avildsen from a screenplay by Stallone, “Rocky” received 10 Academy Award nominations and won three, including best picture. Mr. Young and co-star Burgess Meredith, who played Rocky’s trainer, were nominated for best supporting actor but lost to Jason Robards for “All the President’s Men.”
Mr. Young played Paulie in five more Rocky films, as the character alternately veered between kindness and cruelty, generosity and ineptitude, finding companionship through a robot butler in “Rocky IV” (1985) and inadvertently sending Rocky’s family into bankruptcy in “Rocky V” (1990).
He wanted to play Paulie as “all burly on the outside and all quicksand inside,” he told the Observer, explaining that “the bluster covered him, the way he walked. I made him wide. I put on three pair of clothes. I made him have no neck.
“His insecurity, of course, I patterned from me.”
Mr. Young was born in Queens on April 30, 1940, and grew up in the Corona neighborhood. Accounts differ on his birth name, which is often given as Gerald Tommaso DeLouise. His father was a sheet-metal mechanic and iceman who later became a high school shop teacher.
By the time Mr. Young was 16, he had been kicked out of two high schools. He joined the Marine Corps, lying about his age with help from his father, and began boxing. According to Mr. Young, he fought in more than a dozen bouts and went undefeated as a professional fighter, and once did a three-round exhibition with Muhammad Ali. But he never made more than $400 from a fight, in his telling, and found more reliable work laying carpets, among other jobs.
“I was in every business in the world that didn’t have an inventory,” he told Newsday. “Anything that required sweat and a lot of bravado.”
In his late 20s, he turned to acting by chance while trying to impress a waitress named Norma. “She said she’d always wanted to study with Lee Strasberg but couldn’t get in,” he told Bright Lights Film Journal. “I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was. I thought it was a girl. But I figured maybe if I could help her out, I could hold hands with her.”
Mr. Young sent a letter to Strasberg, one of the country’s most renowned acting teachers, figuring that if he could get into one of Strasberg’s classes he could help Norma do so as well. She was out of luck, but the instructor was taken with Mr. Young, who studied with Strasberg for two years.
“Acting had everything I was fishing for,” he said. “In my life till then, I’d used tension to hold myself upright. Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”
Mr. Young made one of his first film appearances in “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971) and went on to work with filmmakers including Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in “Convoy” (1978). He later appeared in the drama “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1989) and acted onstage, making his Broadway debut in a 1986 production of “Cuba & His Teddy Bear,” as an affable drug dealer opposite De Niro.
His wife Gloria died in 1974, according to the reference work Contemporary Theatre, Film and Television. He was also predeceased by a son, Richard, according to the biography. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
When he wasn’t acting, Mr. Young wrote plays and screenplays, including for the 1978 film drama “Uncle Joe Shannon,” in which he starred as a trumpet player who loses his wife and son in a fire. He also painted with oils and acrylics, making brightly colored pictures of friends, acquaintances, the forest and the sea.
“I’ve always painted, like I’ve always written,” he told Bright Lights in 2006, “but then livelihood took over. But it takes me over in a good way. Whether it’s laying a carpet or learning a part, I try to lighten the burden of whatever I’m doing.”
