JAMES GANDOLFINI DIES IN ITALY

Wow. The Sopranos was the first show that I HAD to watch every single episode. And that was mainly due to Gandolfini's acting. Dude was amazing.

I managed to watch the whole show via Netflix discs in the mail, renting a season from my local video store and buying and then reselling other seasons. Took pretty much an entire summer for my wife and I to get through it, but it was worth every minute.

Buddy will be missed. Don't sleep on his other roles, either. One that stands out for me is his role in "Fallen" with Denzel. Superb acting.
 
R.I.P.

I hate to admit it, but I've only watched a few episodes of The Sopranos. I may finally get around to watching the series on HBO GO now.

Also, I didn't that he was only 51. I thought he was in his 60s, at least.
Side note: My aunt met James Gandolfini on set some years ago, as her boyfriend was friends with him. I know this because my grandmother has photo on of them together on her refrigerator.
 
Eerie to think he his last filmed role (Animal Rescue, due out in 2014) had parts filmed near my area of Brooklyn for the past few months. Hopefully they have all of his parts filmed, similar to the Ledger-Dark Knight situation.

Someone else mentioned it on the last page, but his role as Tony will forever be remembered. An iconic show and role.
 
Dude died in Rome, couple blocks away from where I roomed in when I studied abroad two years ago. :frown:

So sad man, still shocked.

Jersey legend. RIP
 
sad news, he's a legend in my eyes. sad we also might ever know the true story behind the series finale as well. R.I.P. :smh:
 
RIP
ohwell.gif


dude brought us 5 seasons of perfection
 
Big J 33 said:
Damn man.. a lot of celebrity deaths are kind of "that sucks, he was great but it was his time", but man.. Gandoflini was still pretty young. He was always overweight but still... this sucks.

For fans of the Sopranos, do yourself a favor and read this article about the finale, but as soon as I heard the news I immediately thought of the final couple paragraphs.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/made-in-america,89671/
Anyone who was putting off watching The Sopranos, do yourself a favor and start now. It's one of the best shows ever made and Gandolfini gives a legendary performance. He will be missed.
Click to expand...

Damn those 2 paragraphs struck a cord. Everyone must watch this scene: http://t.co/fbG0DFEsqN
 
Didn't see this posted. This episode of Inside The Actors Studio aired in 2009. The Sopranos ushered in a new era in modern TV that transcended the medium & made it equal to film This show was the precursor for shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. Gandolfini personified that show & was a fine actor. I loved him in True Romance, Get Shorty, & Crimson Tide among others. RIP.
 
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One day in 1999, James Gandolfini walked down a driveway in a bathrobe, picked up the newspaper and changed television forever. If back then you were watching this new HBO drama with the title that seemed to be about opera, then you know how much talent the world lost when he died, suddenly and too soon, at age 51 on Wednesday (in Rome, of all places, where Tony Soprano sojourned in the show’s second season). But with his forceful, charismatic, yet subtle performance as a suburban mobster, Gandolfini changed the TV you watched even if you’ve never watched a minute of The Sopranos.

Because without Gandolfini, there would be no Tony — not as we know him. And without Tony, there would be no Walter White, no Vic Mackey, no Carrie Mathison. Through Tony, Gandolfini wrote the blueprint for the modern, complicated TV antihero; he took the wall between stand-up TV good guys and wicked bad guys and bashed it down with a baseball bat.

(MORE:   Tributes to Tony Soprano: Hollywood Mourns the Death of James Gandolfini)

And without The Sopranos, becoming a smash pop-culture phenom by telling an incredibly sophisticated story, it’s hard to imagine Deadwood, The Americans, or dozens of other ambitious dramas that came after; it’s hard to imagine the now widespread belief that TV could be art. Without the made men, no Mad Men  (whose creator, Matthew Weiner, apprenticed writing for The Sopranos). “Lately,” said Tony in one of his early scenes with his therapist, Dr. Melfi, “I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end.” Gandolfini, on the other hand, got in on something on the ground floor.

He very nearly didn’t: at various points in The Sopranos’ conception, Anthony LaPaglia was considered for Tony, as was Steve Van Zandt (who ended up taking the more comic-dramatic role of consigliere  Silvio Dante). But as creator David Chase told  Vanity Fair  in an oral history of the show last year, “when Jim Gandolfini walked in, that was it.”

(LIST:  Top 10 Sopranos  Episodes)

Boy, was it. Yes, to look at him, Gandolfini was just the kind of guy you might cast for a New Jersey  titan of “waste management,” bullheaded and terrifying and thus all the more ironic when squinched into a therapist’s-office chair. If that had been all there was to him, The Sopranos  might have been a simpler, though entertaining, show. But Gandolfini immediately brought so much more to life in Tony: his intelligence, his sadness, his fear, his self-pity, his mama’s-boy wrath. Yes, he could kill a man in a bathtub convincingly, but he just as easily could sit at a family dinner and chafe against his own skin, and make you feel a lifetime of pinpricks, many self-inflicted, stabbing him from the inside.

His was an amazingly delicate performance for a big guy. Those eyes. Gandolfini could concentrate all of Tony’s physicality and criminal cunning into them, as those black pellets darted about and he conceived a lie to tell Carmela, or a way out of a business bind. That a man with such a hulking physicality — a presence that was itself essential to the character — could convey so much through such minute gestures was like watching a giant sit and play a virtuosic Goldberg Variations  on a toy piano.

Gandolfini’s performance as Tony, in fact, was so rich, so effective, that it sometimes had unintended consequences. Some fans came to love Tony, to cheer for him, or at least become thrilled by his exploits; they followed the show to see who would get whacked or how Tony would extricate himself from his troubles with Phil Leotardo. In the final season, Chase dialed up the darkness in his antihero, and Gandolfini responded with a run of work that was the greatest thing on TV since — since, well, the first season of The Sopranos.

Snuffing the life out of his own nephew, looking trippily at a desert sunrise and shouting with smug self-delusion, “I get it!” — Gandolfini made the emptiness at the core of Tony something you could weigh on a scale. And yet we couldn’t just write Tony off and distance ourselves. We were in too deep with him. It would have been an easy thing for Gandolfini to make us fear Tony Soprano. It would have been a neat parlor trick to make us love him. James Gandolfini — in sync with Chase and a peerless cast of co-stars — made us understand Tony, in all his pathetic, charismatic devilry. And that was the work of an artist.

(MORE:  Q&A: Not Fade Away’s David Chase, James Gandolfini and Steven Van Zandt)

Tony Soprano was not all there was to Gandolfini. Typecasting may have kept him from getting movie work commensurate with his small-screen greatness, but he disappeared in roles from drama to comedy to fantasy: Zero Dark Thirty, Where the Wild Things Are, Chase’s own Not Fade Away. But if it was TV that used him best, that’s only appropriate. He ushered in, practically created, not just an era of really good TV shows, but an idea: that TV could be as rich, great, relevant, moving, conversation-driving and significant as any contemporary movie or even novel.

(And it mattered, by the way, that Gandolfini was ridiculously entertaining: fun, compelling, thrilling. To change TV, The Sopranos  needed to be a huge commercial hit as much as it needed to be a work of genius. The scripts put ideas in our heads, but it was Tony who put butts on couches.)

James Gandolfini was our usher into that new TV era, by taking a performance that could have been cartoonish (remember Analyze This?) and making it psychologically layered and unshakeable. This was a man who could show us a brute throttling a Mafia turncoat while looking at colleges with his daughter and make us think: I want to know this guy better. He could lead us, mildly contemplating an onion ring, to the finale’s famous cut-to-black, to the tune of “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and leave us wondering whether he lived or died, and what he deserved, and what it all meant.

We can only wonder what more Gandolfini would have done with a more fair measure of years. “He was special man, a great talent,” read an HBO statement, “but more importantly a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect. He touched so many of us over the years with his humor, his warmth and his humility.” Chase paid him touching tribute: “A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes. I remember telling him many times, ‘You don’t get it. You’re like Mozart.’ There would be silence at the other end of the phone … He wasn’t easy sometimes. But he was my partner, he was my brother in ways I can’t explain and never will be able to explain.”

Like that final scene, Gandolfini’s potential was cut short. But his accomplishment, and the way he expanded the possibilities of his medium and his craft: it goes on and on and on and on. RIP.



Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2013/...as-a-made-man-he-made-tv-great/#ixzz2Wl9QtwzQ
 
I grew up on The Sopranos. 

Every Sunday, then it was the DVD set, and I hope they release the entire collection on blu soon.

My mom called and told me you're boy died...

My boy?

Yeah, Tony Soprano.

Huh?

Crazy, and that's shows how much she knew I loved the character, show, and everything. 

Shows how much we can get caught up in shows or what not, but The Sopranos was not your normal TV series. 

It changed TV forever imo, and honestly besides it and The Wire I haven't watched a series faithfully in years. 
 
The writing got better and better as the series progressed. This one always gets me. Subtle but brilliant.


 
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I was really taken back when I heard the days. Looks like I was be firing up the HBO GO this weekend. R.I.P.
 
I remember first in True Romance and Crimson Tide. Tony is one the most iconic characters in American history film or television.

If they would have made Sopranos and movie he could have gotten a Oscar for that role.

I hope he was with family and people he loved in such a beautiful country.
 
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