Prior to yesterday’s announcement about the passing of Burt Young, I was honestly under a vague impression that he had passed 10 or 15 years ago.
I’m not saying this disrespectfully — I had just come to believe that Young, 83, had breathed his last during the Obama administration, or even before that. Somehow that driving-and-coughing death scene in that Sopranos episode (he played Bobby Baccalieri‘s cancer-ridden dad) had lodged in my memory as the real thing, or an omen of same.
Oh, and Young’s Chinatown character (“Curly”) wasn’t a “rotten client” of Jack Nicholson “Jake Gittes”, as THR’s Mike Barnes described him yesterday. Curly was actually a decent schlubby guy from Long Beach who helped Jake out in a pinch.
Young’s second most vivid performance was as “Bed Bug Eddie” in The Pope of Greenwich Village (‘84).
I know he played “Paulie” in all those Rocky movies, of course, but those were mostly paycheck gigs. Okay, the first one (in the 1976 John Avildsen-directed original) wasn’t — Young actually derived a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination out of that effort.
Young passed on 10.8, or a week and a half ago.
