The pugnacious, raspy-voiced Jon Polito, whom I always found a distinctive if somewhat overbearing performer, particularly in his Coen Brothers roles (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There), has passed at age 65. Sorry. I wish that just once he had played (or that I had seen him play) a calm, mellow type who never yelled. I never knew Polito was openly gay — hilarious. His career got rolling in ’81. He worked like a sonuvabitch on television. Big voiceover guy — he voiced “Conquedor” in the 2011 TV series Thundercats. I sometimes thought of him as am angrier, less thoughtful Danny De Vito. I even had an idea they were roughly the same size…wrong. De Vito is 4′ 10″ — Polito was 5′ 8″.
