N.Y. TIMES
James Gandolfini, the Emmy Award-winning actor who shot to fame on the HBO drama “The Sopranos” as Tony Soprano, a tough-talking, hard-living crime boss with a stolid exterior but a rich interior life....He was traveling in Rome, where he was on vacation and was scheduled to attend the Taormina Film Fest. [The N.Y. Daily News reports he had a massive heart attack.]
Mr. Gandolfini, who grew up in Park Ridge, in Bergen
County, N.J., came to embody the resilience of the Garden State on “The
Sopranos,” which made its debut in 1999 and ran for six seasons on HBO.
Hollywood Reporter: Gandolfini was invited to audition for the part of Tony Soprano after casting director Susan Fitzgerald saw him play a brutal woman-beating mob enforcer in True Romance. His womanizing, hard-drinking, vengeful character in The Sopranos often had to balance family life with the mob; in early seasons, he was hounded by his overbearing mother and suffered from panic attacks that sometimes caused him to lose consciousness. At times, Tony showed a gentle side.
N.Y. TIMES In its pilot episode viewers were introduced to the complicated life of Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mob kingpin who suffers panic attacks and begins seeing a psychiatrist. Over 86 episodes, audiences followed Mr. Gandolfini in the role as he was tormented by his mother (played by Nancy Marchand), his wife (Edie Falco), rival mobsters, the occasional surreal dream sequence and, in 2007, an ambiguous series finale that left millions of viewers wondering whether Tony Soprano had met his fate at a restaurant table.
Mr. Gandolfini, who had studied the Meisner technique
of acting for two years, said that he used it to focus his anger and incorporate
it into his performances. In an interview for the television series “Inside the
Actors Studio,” Mr. Gandolfini said he would deliberately hit himself on the
head or stay up all night to evoke the desired reaction.
If you are tired, every single thing that somebody
does makes you mad, Mr. Gandolfini said in the interview. “Drink six cups of
coffee. Or just walk around with a rock in your shoe. It’s silly, but it works.”
Variety: Chase’s script for “Sopranos” famously bounced around Hollywood in development for years before landing at HBO. But it took an actor of Gandolfini’s talent to breathe life into his character, particularly in the scenes depicting his one-on-one therapy sessions with the counselor Jennifer Melfi played by Lorraine Bracco.