Chazz Palminteri

Calogero Lorenzo Palminteri, called Chazz, was born in the Bronx in 1952 and got into film through the back door, as a writer. He wrote a play about his childhood, A Bronx Tale, and when it became a film in 1993 he played Sonny LoSpecchio, the neighbourhood gangster in it. That is an unusual entrance: most actors spend a decade waiting for a part that specific, and he built his own.

What he does better than almost anyone is play a man who has already decided and is being polite about it. Cheech in Bullets Over Broadway is the best use of it, a mob bodyguard parked in a theatre with a far better ear for dialogue than the playwright he is guarding, and it brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Dave Kujan in The Usual Suspects is the same energy in a police interview room: the whole film is one man leaning on a witness, and it needs an actor who can make courtesy feel like pressure.

After that he worked constantly, often inside the same silhouette. Primo Sidone in Analyze This, Angelo Bruno in Legend, Elleroy Coolidge in Mulholland Falls, Monty in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Detective Rydell in Running Scared. He is funnier than the casting suggests, in Oscar and as the club owner Benny Zadir in A Night at the Roxbury, and he has done a long run of family voice work, Smokey in Stuart Little and Buster in Lady and the Tramp II among them. He directed one feature, Noel, in 2004, and played Shorty across a decade of Modern Family.