When Paul Sorvino was supplied the function of Paulie Cicero, the Queens-based mob underboss in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990), he very a lot didn’t wish to settle for it. Within the first place, he was a proud Italian American. A connoisseur of Italian tradition, notably meals and music, he was not inclined to play a Mafioso. As well as, Sorvino, who died Monday at 83, was a voluble man, and he appreciated taking part in voluble guys. Paulie was largely a brick. A lot is made within the early scenes of the film about how many of the legal’s directives have been executed with a mere nod.

He accepted the function anyway and went into rehearsals. A couple of days earlier than taking pictures started, he referred to as his agent and requested if he may bail. At a 2015 panel on the Tribeca Movie Pageant commemorating the 25th anniversary of “Goodfellas,” Sorvino poked a bit enjoyable at individuals who complimented him on his “decisions” in what turned one among his signature roles. He scoffed on the thought of “decisions,” insisting: “I discovered the man and the man made the alternatives.”

“It was very tough,” Sorvino advised the panel moderator Jon Stewart. “I’m a poet, I’m an opera singer, I’m an creator … none of it’s gangster.” However then, for Sorvino, got here a second. In his telling at this panel, it was when he was straightening his tie. In different recountings, he was eradicating a little bit of spinach from between his tooth. In each variations, Sorvino regarded within the mirror. And there was a hard and fast scowl assembly him.

“I noticed this man.” And that was it.

Sorvino’s imaginative and prescient of Paulie was an extremely nuanced portrayal of a person who, on the web page, comes throughout as easy and as disagreeable as sudden demise. In “Clever Man,” the nonfiction guide that was the premise of “Goodfellas,” the creator Nick Pileggi wrote, “It was understood on the road that Paul Vario” — the mobster’s surname was modified for the film — “ran one among New York’s hardest and most violent gangs.” Within the Brownsville-East New York space of town, “the physique counts have been at all times excessive, and within the 1960s and 1970s the Vario thugs did many of the strong-arm work,” Pileggi defined, including later, “There have been at all times some heads to be bashed on picket traces, businessmen to be squeezed into making their loan-shark funds, independents to be straightened out over territorial traces, potential witnesses to be murdered, and stool pigeons to be buried.”

Vario, then, was a center supervisor of mayhem. Sorvino performed him as a man who saved his cool and tried to maintain his underlings in line.

A lot of “Goodfellas” (streaming on HBO Max) is dedicated to how three underlings, performed by Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, didn’t keep in line. Paulie generally is a tolerant and affectionate “dad.” Sorvino makes use of his pure heat when greeting “good earner” Jimmy (De Niro) at a back-room on line casino early within the film. Later, overseeing elaborate dinners in jail, he has a particular system for slicing garlic, and as soon as his cellmate Henry (Liotta) enters bearing wine and Scotch, he proclaims, “Now we will eat.” Presiding over a celebration of Henry’s launch from the joint, he’s Uncle Paulie.

But it surely’s when he’s taking part in the brick that Sorvino kills. At that celebration, he brings Henry into his yard. Henry had been dealing medication in jail, with Paulie’s tacit approval. Now in fixed-scowl mode, Paulie tells Henry to “steer clear of the rubbish.” When Henry performs dumb, Paulie isn’t having it. “Don’t make a jerk out of me. Simply don’t do it.” With out shedding any of the character’s outer-borough intonations, Sorvino clips the phrases like he’s snapping necks.

Henry and his merry males are both paying tribute to Paulie with a proportion of their ill-gotten features or mendacity to his face. These character dynamics are sophisticated — Paulie appears too sharp to not know he’s being deceived, however what can he do about it? One factor he can do is remove Joe Pesci’s Tommy from the group, utilizing brother Tuddy Cicero (Frank DiLeo) as his deadly proxy.

Paulie’s remaining phrases to Henry — “Now I gotta flip my again” — are as chilling as any of the film’s grisliest sights.

Sorvino’s decades-long profession was checkered. One among his first main roles was as a male rape sufferer in a extremely misbegotten 1974 ABC Film of the Week referred to as “It Couldn’t Occur to a Nicer Man.” Within the 1974 model of “The Gambler” (out there to lease or purchase on main platforms) he performed his first mob-adjacent character, a bookie named Hips, however this character was no Paulie: he has a real private affection for the title character (James Caan), Hips’s most screwed-up and indebted consumer.

For one more style of the extra voluble Sorvino, his flip as Curtis Mahoney, a federal agent posing as an investigative journalist in Mike Nichols’s much-maligned 1974 “The Day of the Dolphin” (out there on Kino Now), is price wanting into. Removed from an achieved mole, Mahoney is a too-chatty bumbler. Sorvino can also be memorable as Edelson, the commanding officer of the undercover cop Burns (Al Pacino) in William Friedkin’s “Cruising” (from 1980; lease or purchase on main platforms). Assigning his underling to work the homosexual sex-club underworld of Manhattan seeking a killer, Edelson inquires into Burns’s sexual historical past with probably the most blunt query possible, not batting an eyelash.

Each earlier than and after “Goodfellas,” Sorvino was a daily presence in photos directed by and starring Warren Beatty, most lately “Guidelines Don’t Apply” (2016). Sorvino’s post-“Goodfellas” filmography veered between stable character roles in indies like “The Cooler” (2003) and James Grey’s “The Immigrant” (2014) and the standard gigging-actor dreck.

In 2018 the world realized how passionate Sorvino could possibly be offscreen. Responding to revelations of abuse and blackballing that his daughter, the actor Mira Sorvino, endured by the hands of disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein, Sorvino advised TMZ he hoped Weinstein would do jail time: “As a result of if not, he has to fulfill me.” Sorvino then associated in no unsure phrases what would occur.

The function of a proud father pushed to indignant, justified rage was one which suited this performer effectively sufficient. However one needs that he hadn’t been obliged to reside it.

Glenn Kenny is a critic and the creator of “Made Males: The Story of ‘Goodfellas.’”