Danny Arnold, who was producing the pilot, remarked to Vigoda that the actor looked exhausted, and Vigoda told him about the long run.
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Vigoda landed his role in The Godfather after auditioning at an open casting call. He “practically lived in Little Italy during the shoot”, he told Vanity Fair. But they’re the acting world’s utility players, at once chameleonic and inimitable as they cycle between different roles, sort of like The Godfather’s sly, calculating Tessio switching mob allegiances to suit his own scheming self-interest.
But he later became a figure of disloyalty who paid the ultimate price for his betrayal.
Abe Vigoda, an actor best known for starring in 1972’s The Godfather, has sadly died. The actor was nominated for three Emmys for his performance. In 1977, he starred in the spinoff, Fish, which ran until 1978. The actor posed for a photograph sitting up in a coffin to prove the reports wrong. The subsequent scene in which Tessio is cornered – and marked for death – by the family, provided Vigoda with his most poignant moment in the film. Declared “the late Abe Vigoda”, he said his wife began receiving condolence letters. Belatedly realizing her mistake, she admitted to it the next day, but too late for viewers who had all night to absorb his demise.
While certainly a little macabre, the decades of jokes about Vigoda’s death revealed something about the way we consider our character actors and utility players.
I’m the same Abe Vigoda, he told an interviewer.
Born in New York, Abe has been a part of theatre for nearly 30 years.
Later, he appeared on Broadway in The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, in Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth and, as Abe Lincoln, in the comedy Tough to Get Help.
With the success of Barney Miller, Abe soon became a household name.
But it was the first film that mattered the most to him. Abe Vigoda, until the real end, showed a sense of humor that he flashed one honest, pained look at a time.
It seems as if the media always had a target on the back of this star. Lt. Phil Fish seemed to fit Vigoda perfectly, and he frequently had some of the most memorable lines of the episodes he was in.
A reporter from the publication was at the party and noted the “late” Vigoda was not in attendance, coming as quite a surprise to the then-vigorous 60-year-old actor.
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A prominent role in one of the best movies ever made and a later life as a cultural icon.
