Steven Van Zandt

Music was the whole career until 1999. Van Zandt plays guitar and mandolin in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, has run Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul on and off since the 1980s, and collected two working names along the way, Little Steven and Miami Steve. Then The Sopranos arrived and the first screen credit of his life landed when he was in his late forties, which almost never happens.

Silvio Dante is the part, and the reason it works is that he was not a trained actor. The stiffness reads as caution, the delivery is careful rather than fluent, and for a consigliere whose job is to agree in exactly the right tone that is close to ideal casting. He shares two Screen Actors Guild ensemble awards for drama-series work. Lilyhammer took the same figure and relocated him to Norway under a new name, a fish-out-of-water premise that gets its comedy from a man who cannot conceive of a world with different rules.

The rest of the page divides into two piles. There is character work, all of it heavily flavoured: the singer Jerry Vale in The Irishman, Wolfie in The Christmas Chronicles, Isaac Rabinowitz in The Trainer, a voice part in Under the Boardwalk. And there is a growing archive of him appearing as himself, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame anniversary concerts, in the James Gandolfini tribute, on Talking Sopranos and in the David Chase documentary. He has become a custodian of two histories, one musical and one televisual.