Burt Young, the Rocky star who made his name with the Sylvester Stallone franchise, was more than just ‘Paulie’.
While the actor might be best known by many boxing fans as Adrian’s brother, he also appeared in the finest television show of all time, The Sopranos.
Young appeared in episode five of season three, Another Toothpick, playing Bobby Baccalieri Sr., the younger Bobby’s father.
Young would have been in his early 60s when the episode, broadcast in March 2001, was filmed, and he plays a man diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
Bobby Sr. is called out of retirement to deal with an argument between Bryan Spatafore, Vito’s brother, who is assaulted by a character known as Mustang Sally.
The order is given to kill Mustang Sally, and Bobby Sr. locates his godson before paying him a visit, and killing him in an attempt that becomes spectacularly grubbing, ending with an already bleak denouement of Bobby Sr. coughing with satisfaction, lighting up one last cigarette to enjoy, in his words, feeling “good being useful for a change.”
His character arc would continue for a few more moments, driving away, as he then suffered a coughing fit exacerbated by the cigarettes, apparently suffering a heart attack and crashing his car.
While Young's Paulie in Rocky imbued a less subtle pathos, he remained a sympathetic character, and while the Sopranos often offered up its own cartoonish interpretations of real life, finding farce amongst the darkness of organised crime, Young's Bobby Sr. was pitched to find the hopelessness of an old man looking to go out on his own terms, at the expense of his own son's fears. Turning a hitman into a sympathetic figure is now an almost obsolete motif in cinema and television, but few did it as memorably and credibly with as little screentime as Young.