Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster drama Goodfellas opens with a bang. Three mobsters are driving at night when they hear a persistent thudding. They pull over and warily open the boot. Inside is Billy Batts, the man they thought they had killed, wrapped in blood-soaked tablecloths and pleading for his life. Armed with knife and gun, and bathed in an infernal red from the vehicle’s rear lights, the hoods finish what they started. The unfortunate Batts was played by Frank Vincent, who has died aged 80.
A flashback later in the picture, which shows what Batts did to warrant such an unhappy end, gave Vincent the catchphrase that followed him around for the rest of his days. “Go home and get your fucking shinebox!” he tells the volatile Tommy (Joe Pesci), a former shoeshine boy, enraging him and sealing his own fate. Vincent and Pesci had been close friends since the late 1960s. They were co-stars in the 1976 film The Death Collector, which brought them to Scorsese’s attention when he was casting Raging Bull (1980). In the latter film, Pesci is shown breaking a glass in Vincent’s face and repeatedly slamming a car door on his upper body. In Scorsese’s Casino (1995), Vincent gets his own back for this, and for his treatment in Goodfellas, by luring Pesci into a cornfield, beating him savagely with a baseball bat and then burying him alive.
Vincent’s Italian-American heritage, natty appearance and confident comportment made him a wise choice for wiseguy roles; he looked the part, with thick black eyebrows, a helmet of silver hair and an insinuating chin. The actor’s familiarity from Goodfellas initially gave David Chase pause early in the casting of the groundbreaking HBO television series The Sopranos. But he relented and Vincent became an important part of the show’s last two seasons, broadcast between 2004 and 2007. He played the crime boss Phil Leotardo, referred to mockingly by Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) as “the shah” on account of his resemblance to the last shah of Iran. (“It’s irrelevant, Phil!” says a stooge, trying to placate him.) Phil was the final character murdered on screen: he is shot and then, in a gruesome flourish, his head is crushed by his wife’s SUV, which she has left unattended without its handbrake on.
Vincent was born in North Adams, Massachusetts; his father, Frank, an iron worker, moved the family to New Jersey when Frank Jr was three. He was educated at St Paul’s grammar school, where music was his passion. “A lot of guys I know went to jail,” he said. “Music saved my life.” He became a bugler in the Jersey City department of recreation’s drum and bugle corps and then joined St Joseph’s Cadets of Newark, taking part in national competitions.
He became a session drummer on records by Paul Anka and Del Shannon, among others, as well as drumming live with Bobby Blue and the Aristocats. Eventually he took over that outfit, which was by then a trio, and replaced Blue’s name with his own. The clubs he played, he later said, were “more or less run and owned by the guys that I portray in the movies”. In 1969, he hired Pesci as a guitarist for the band. “We had such chemistry,” Vincent said. “Not just playing. We’d do bits back and forth. We both got a lot of laughs, and before you know it we’re doing two hours of comedy a night.” It wasn’t all plain sailing. “We were like a husband and wife and broke up many times. Every night we’d argue over every word. We would never say who’s the boss but we were two very creative people.” The partnership dissolved in 1975 but a year later Pesci got Vincent a part in The Death Collector, which gave him the first of many grisly on-screen deaths: he is shot in the leg and throat while sitting on the toilet.
He teamed up again with Pesci in the comedy-drama Dear Mr Wonderful (1982), about a nightclub owner trying to make it in Las Vegas. He also starred in Brian De Palma’s knockabout crime comedy Wise Guys (1986) and two of Spike Lee’s best films, Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991). He played Jennifer Aniston’s father in the romcom She’s the One, a police captain in Sidney Lumet’s Night Falls on Manhattan and John DiBernardo, a member of the Gambino crime family, in the TV movie Gotti (all 1996). He also reprised his Casino character that year in the music video for Street Dreams by the rapper Nas. This led to him becoming an acting coach to several rappers, including Nas, DMX and Method Man, during the shooting of Belly (1998), in which Vincent also appeared.
He was sanguine about typecasting. “It is a pigeonhole and Hollywood has a tendency to do that to you. They don’t want to give you a chance to stretch. But as a working actor, you have to work, you do what you can do.” It did not stop even when Vincent wasn’t visible on screen: he had a recurring role as the mobster Don Salvatore Leone in the Grand Theft Auto series of video games between 2001 and 2005.
In 2006, he published A Guy’s Guide to Being a Man’s Man, in which he offered advice on how to eat, date, listen to music and smoke like a man. He sold his own brand of hand-rolled cigars as well as merchandise emblazoned with his Goodfellas catchphrase; he was immortalised as a character in Killogy, Alan Roberts’s series of graphic novels set during a zombie apocalypse.
He is survived by his wife, Kathleen, and three children.
• Frank Vincent Gattuso, actor, born 4 August 1937; died 13 September 2017
