Danny Aiello

Daniel Louis Aiello Jr. was born on June 20, 1933, on West 68th Street in Manhattan, the fifth of six children. His mother, Frances Pietrocova, was a seamstress who had emigrated from Naples, Italy; his father, Daniel Louis Aiello, was a laborer who abandoned the family after his wife lost her eyesight and became legally blind. Aiello publicly condemned his father for many years before the two reconciled in 1993. Of Italian descent, he relocated to the South Bronx at age seven and later attended James Monroe High School. At sixteen, he lied about his age to enlist in the United States Army, served three years, and returned to New York City to take on various jobs to support himself and his family.

Before establishing himself as a performer, Aiello held a range of working-class positions. During the 1960s, he served as president of New York Local 1202 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, representing Greyhound Bus workers. In 1967, he led an unsanctioned wildcat strike after the company altered bus driver schedules; the action was called without authorization from the parent union, resulting in his suspension. He called off the strike after a single day. He also worked as a bouncer at the New York City comedy club The Improv.

Aiello's Broadway career began with the musical Follow the Girls, in which he appeared in 1944. His subsequent stage work unfolded primarily across the 1970s and 1980s. His formal Broadway debut came in 1975 with Lamppost Reunion, the first of three plays he appeared in written by Louis La Russo II. The second, Wheelbarrow Closers, followed in 1976, and the third, Knockout, in 1979. In 1977, Aiello originated the role of Fran Geminiani in the long-running play Gemini. In 1981, he starred alongside Beatrice Arthur in Woody Allen's The Floating Light Bulb, a semi-autobiographical play set in 1945 about a lower-middle-class family in Brooklyn. In the mid-1980s, he joined a replacement cast of Hurlyburly alongside Christine Baranski, Frank Langella, Ron Silver, and Candice Bergen, and then appeared in The House of Blue Leaves in 1986 alongside John Mahoney, Ben Stiller, Stockard Channing, and Julie Hagerty, with Mahoney earning a Tony Award for his performance in that production.

Aiello also worked extensively in off-Broadway productions. In 2002, he starred in Elaine May's comedic play Adult Entertainment alongside May's daughter, Jeannie Berlin; the production was directed by Stanley Donen and opened at the Variety Arts Theatre. In July 2011, he appeared in the two-act drama The Shoemaker, written by Susan Charlotte and directed by Antony Marsellis, a stage adaptation of his 2006 film A Broken Sole.

His film career began in the early 1970s. One of his earliest screen appearances was as a ballplayer in the baseball drama Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) with Robert De Niro. He had a walk-on role as small-time hood Tony Rosato in The Godfather Part II (1974), ad-libbing the line "Michael Corleone says hello!" during a scene involving a hit on rival gangster Frank Pentangeli. He co-led Defiance (1980) with Jan-Michael Vincent and received considerable acclaim for playing a racist New York City police officer in Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981) with Paul Newman. In 1981, he also won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in Children's Programming for his appearance in the ABC Afterschool Special A Family of Strangers.

Aiello reunited with De Niro for Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), playing a police chief whose character shared his own surname. Director Woody Allen cast him in two films: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Radio Days (1987). He gained wide recognition playing the befuddled fiancé of Cher in the romantic comedy Moonstruck (1987). His role as pizzeria owner Sal in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) earned him nominations for both the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture, as well as best supporting actor citations from the film critics' associations of Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune at the time of the film's release, Aiello described it as his "first focal part" and noted that he wrote a crucial scene shared with John Turturro approximately ten minutes before it was filmed.

Among his many subsequent film roles, Aiello played nightclub owner and Lee Harvey Oswald assassin Jack Ruby in the biopic Ruby (1992), the lead in Paul Mazursky's The Pickle (1993), the title character in the Academy Award-winning short film Lieberman in Love (1995), and a political figure with mob ties in City Hall (1996) starring Al Pacino. He appeared in Léon: The Professional (1994), 2 Days in the Valley (1996), Dinner Rush (2000), and Lucky Number Slevin (2006), among others. On television, he played Don Domenico Clericuzio in the miniseries The Last Don (1997) and held a main role in the 1985–86 series Lady Blue.

Aiello also pursued a music career. He appeared in the video for Madonna's 1986 song "Papa Don't Preach," playing the father, and recorded his own answer song, "Papa Wants the Best for You," written by Artie Schroeck. He released several albums featuring big-band arrangements, including I Just Wanted to Hear The Words (2004), Live from Atlantic City (2008), and My Christmas Song for You (2010). In 2011, he and EMI songwriter Hasan Johnson released Bridges, an album of standards fused with rap.

In his personal life, Aiello married Sandy Cohen in 1955 and lived for many years in Ramsey, New Jersey, before later moving to Saddle River, New Jersey. In 2014, he published his autobiography, I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else: My Life on the Street, on the Stage, and in the Movies, through Simon & Schuster. He was the father of stuntman and actor Danny Aiello III, who died in 2010 of pancreatic cancer, and of actor Rick Aiello, who died in 2021 of the same disease. Daniel Louis Aiello Jr. died on December 12, 2019.