We Lost James Gandolfini (1961-2013)

James Gandolfini, a stellar character actor who exploded into superstardom for his portrayal of New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano on the HBO series The Sopranos, died today while vacationing in Italy. It is being reported that he died from a massive heart attack.

There were other outstanding original cable series, but when The Sopranos made its debut in 1999, it didn’t just transform cable, it transformed television. Gandolfini as Tony Soprano was a weekly master class in acting. He perfectly captured Tony’s conflicted and complex persona. One minute he could be the loving, caring husband and father. The next, cold, cruel, selfish, self-loathing and self-destructive. The beauty of the performance was how he captured the conflict, but the full awareness of being a troubled soul. He did it effortlessly, never grandstanding and his use of subtle gestures were sublime. It’s no wonder that the Tony Soprano character is rated as one of the greatest in TV history.

Even if Gandolfini never played Tony Soprano, there’s the string of memorable supporting roles he’s played through the years: the brutal mob henchmen Virgil in True Romance; Bear, the ex-stuntman turned enforcer in Get Shorty; the
insecure Colonel Winter in The Last Castle; Ben Pinkwater, the meek insurance man who’s actually a Russian mobster in Terminal Velocity; the impulsive Wild Thing Carol in Where The Wild Things Are and the adulterous Big Dave Brewster in The Man Who Wasn’t There.

Even at the height of The Sopranos success, Gandolfini maintained a low key, no press lifestyle. His post Sopranos output included producing two critically acclaimed documentaries on Iraq War veterans, and a film based on Ernest Hemingway – all for HBO.

Beloved by peers and fans, James Gandolfini leaves behind a body of work that will stand the test of time.

Rest easy James.

Updated, 06/27/13.  Today at James Gandolfini’s funeral, David Chase was one of the speakers. You can read the full transcript of his moving Eulogy on hitfix.com.  Here is an excerpt.

I was asked to talk about the work part, and so I’ll talk about the show we used to do and how we used to do it. You know, everybody knows that we always ended an episode with a song. That was kind of like me and the writers letting the real geniuses do the heavy lifting: Bruce, and Mick and Keith, and Howling Wolf and a bunch of them. So if this was an episode, it would end with a song. And the song, as far as I’m concerned, would be Joan Osborne’s “(What If God Was) One Of Us?” And the set-up for this — we never did this, and you never even heard this — is that Tony was somehow lost in the Meadowlands. He didn’t have his car, and his wallet, and his car keys. I forget how he got there — there was some kind of a scrape — but he had nothing in his pocket but some change. He didn’t have his guys with him, he didn’t have his gun. And so mob boss Tony Soprano had to be one of the working stiffs, getting in line for the bus. And the way we were going to film it, he was going to get on the bus, and the lyric that would’ve one over that would’ve been — and we don’t have Joan Osborne to sing it:

    If God had a face
what would it look like?
And would you want to see
if seeing meant you had to believe?
And yeah, yeah, God is great.
Yeah, yeah, God is good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Tony would get on the bus, and he would sit there, and the bus would pull out in this big billow of diesel smoke. And then the key lyric would come on, and it was

    What if God was one of us?
    Just a slob like one of us?
    Just a stranger on the bus
    trying to make his way home.

And that would’ve been playing over your face, Jimmy. But then — and this is where it gets kind of strange — now I would have to update, because of the events of the last week. And I would let the song play further, and the lyrics would be

    Just trying to make his way home
    Like a holy rollin’ stone
    Back up to Heaven all alone
    Nobody callin’ on the phone
    ‘Cept for the Pope, maybe, in Rome.