Burt Young, a former boxer who rose to fame playing tough guys in Hollywood, died earlier this month, his daughter Anne Morea Steingieser told the New York Times. He was 83 years old. Young was primarily known for his role as Pauliethe brother-in-law of Rocky Balboain the film franchise Rocky. He earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance.
Sylvester Stallone, who played Rockypaid tribute to Young on Wednesday.
“To my dear friend, BURT YOUNG, you were an incredible man and an artist. “Both I and the world will miss you very much… Rest in peace,” he wrote. Stallone along with a photo of both of them in a scene from one of their movies together.
Born in the New York borough of Queens, Young He grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Corona before joining the Marines at age 16 after his father helped him lie about his age, according to the Times.
He began boxing in the Marines and continued once he left the service, briefly as a professional under the tutelage of famed trainer and manager Cus D’Amato.
Young He explained in a 2006 interview with Bright Lights that he got into acting in his twenties because a young woman he was interested in “said she had always wanted to study with Lee Strasberg, but couldn’t get into it.”
“I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was. I thought he was a girl,” she recalled. Young. “But I thought maybe if she could help her, she could hold her hand. But when I wrote to Strasberg, he took me seriously.”
The performance, Young said, “had everything I was looking for.”
“In my life up until then, I had used tension to stay upright,” he said. “Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”
His first credited role was as a waiter in an episode of The Doctors in 1969, but his career as a character actor soon took off with roles in television series such as MAS*H and The pioneersas well as in films like chinatown and Serpico.
The paper of Young as Paulie in the hit 1976 film Rocky helped take his career to the next level. He told The Sweet Science in 2009 he was the only actor who did not have to audition.
“I was in the lot of MGM when Sly Stallone He came up and introduced himself to me, he told me that he wrote Rocky and he said ‘you have to do it,’” he recalled. Young. He “wanted to do it right away, but he also wanted to twist their arm a little, not seem too eager.”
“I thought the script had the cleanest street prose I had ever read,” he added. “Stallone Not only is he a workaholic, he is a genius who is always thinking three years ahead. He has a real eye for what is happening in the world.”
Helped establish Young as an actor who could play the antagonist, but also be complex.
His career took him to do everything from appearing alongside Robert De Niro and Ralph Macchio in Cuba and His Teddy Bearwhich played both off and on Broadway, to playing veteran mobster Bobby Bacala Sr. in The Sopranos.
More recently, Young appeared in Kevin Can Wait and Russian Doll. He was also linked to several projects in production at the time of his death, according to his IMDb profile.
Via: cnn
Editor’s note: This guy was such a good actor that since I was a kid he made me hate Paulie in Rocky, He will be missed.
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