Ralph Cifaretto¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Joe Pantoliano
- Position
- Capo, Aprile crew — the family's biggest earner
- Partner
- Rosalie Aprile
- Died
- 2002 — beaten to death by Tony, "Whoever Did This" (S4E48)
- Emmy
- Supporting Actor, 2003 — won after the character was dead
Are you not entertained?
The series' most purely repellent character, and one of its funniest.
The problem he presents¶
Ralph is a huge earner. That's the whole difficulty. In a business organized entirely around money, he generates more of it than anyone, which buys him tolerance for behavior that would get anyone else killed.
He is also genuinely psychopathic in a way the show's other criminals aren't — Tony is a violent man with a conscience he overrules; Ralph appears to have nothing to overrule. He quotes Gladiator constantly. He is cruel for entertainment. He makes a joke about Ginny Sacrimoni's weight that nearly starts a war between two families.
"University"¶
Season three. Ralph takes up with Tracee, a young dancer at the Bada Bing, gets her pregnant, and then beats her to death in the parking lot for talking back to him.
The episode intercuts this with Meadow's college life — two young women the same age, one of whom has options.
Tony's reaction is the point. He hits Ralph — a serious breach of protocol, striking a made man — and the reason he gives is not that a girl is dead. It's that it happened at his place of business, and that it's disrespectful.
The show had spent two and a half seasons letting the audience treat the Bing as amusing set dressing. This is the invoice.
"Whoever Did This"¶
Ralph's son is critically injured in an archery accident, and for one episode he is genuinely, wholly sympathetic — Pantoliano plays it with every layer of performance stripped off.
Then Pie-O-My, the racehorse Tony had come to love more than most people, dies in a stable fire that Ralph probably set for the insurance money.
The kitchen fight that follows isn't choreographed like television: two middle-aged men in a confined space, clumsy, ugly, mostly grappling. Tony kills him with his hands, and there is a bald cap involved that has entertained viewers for two decades.
He and Christopher then spend the rest of the episode dismembering the body and arguing about logistics.
Tony killed Ralph over a horse and not over Tracee, and the show knows exactly what that says. He also killed a made man without sanction, and manages that lie for the rest of the series.
Joe Pantoliano¶
Pantoliano won the 2003 Emmy for Supporting Actor — for a season in which his character had been dead since episode nine.
He has said he found the character genuinely unpleasant to inhabit and was not sorry to be finished with him.