In Memoriam: Danny Aiello 1933-2019

 Danny Aiello seems to have come rather late to acting. After a stint in the army, he served as president of a union representing Grayhound Bus workers in New York City, and then for a while was a bouncer  at Manhattan's famed comedy club The Improv before breaking into the movies playing a character called Horse in 1973's Bang the Drum Slowly, based on Mark Harris well-regarded novel about a dying baseball player (despite the premise, neither the book nor the film is particularly depressing.) Aiello played one of the teammates of the doomed jock (a then-unknown Robert De Niro), and, sorry, I can't recall much about his performance (hey, the doomed jock did have seven other teammates!) I do recall Aiello's performance in his next film, 1974's The Godfather, Part II, even though it lasted just a few seconds, as he ad libbed "Michael Corleone says hello!" (God forbid anyone greets you in such a fashion.) His most notable film after that came in 1980 when he played a racist New York City cop in 1980s Fort Apache, The Bronx, starring Paul Newman. He appeared once again as a cop in Once Upon a Time in America, which also starred De Niro (by now very well-known.) He played Mia Farrow's abusive husband in The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Madonna's disappointed father in the video for "Papa Don't Preach". His career advanced significantly when he played Cher's continuously bewildered fiancee in one of the great latter-day romantic comedies, Moonstruck (1987). Though you can't really blame Cher for eventually dumping him in favor of  one-handed brother Nicolas Cage, you still feel a bit for the big lug anyway, who, good sport that he is, even participates in a toast for the new couple. Toward the end of the 1980s  Aiello played his best-known character, Sal, the proud Italian-American pizzeria owner who can't come to terms with the fact that his Brooklyn neighborhood is no long proudly Italian-American in Spike Lee's masterpiece Do the Right Thing. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the film basically secured Aiello's stardom, though that turned out to be his career peak. He had no real hits afterward, but stayed gainfully employed in film after film toward the end of his days.

Oh, I forgot to mention that in addition to acting, Danny Aiello could sing! 1991's Hudson Hawk justifiably bombed at the box office, but you might want to give it a look some day anyway to see and hear Aiello and Bruce Willis perform "Swinging on a Star". Or just watch this video:

It may not make you forget Bing Crosby's rendition of the same song in Going My Way (1944), but then when was the last time you saw a priest burglarize a museum?