Dominic Chianese¶
At a glance¶
- Born
- February 24, 1931, the Bronx
- Role
- Corrado "Junior" Soprano, 1999–2007
- Emmy nominations
- 1 — no win
- Also
- Johnny Ola in The Godfather Part II (1974)
The lineage¶
Casting Chianese as Junior is a deliberate piece of genre inheritance: he played Johnny Ola — Hyman Roth's fixer, the man who turns Fredo — in The Godfather Part II.
The Sopranos is constantly built out of these choices. Its characters have all seen the mob films; casting the actors from those films into it collapses the distance between the fiction and the fiction the characters imitate. See Mob Movies & Self-Awareness.
He was 68 when the series began.
Junior¶
A performance that has to do two very different jobs across six seasons.
Early on, Junior is a comic figure — vain, aggrieved, absurdly proud, feuding over hedges and portions and a decades-long ledger of slights. Chianese plays the vanity as completely sincere, which is what makes it funny.
By season six he is playing dementia, and the shift is handled without a shred of sentimentality: confusion, then fear, then absence. The scene in which Tony tries to make him remember that he and his brother ran North Jersey — and Junior, mildly interested, says that's nice — is one of the saddest things in the series.
Only one Emmy nomination, which is remarkable.
The singer¶
Chianese is a genuine performer — a working folk and Neapolitan singer with released albums, who has played clubs and concert halls for decades and continued into his nineties.
The singing on the show is his own. His performance of the Neapolitan song "Core 'ngrato" at a wake in season three is unfaked, and it stops the episode dead.
He also appeared in Boardwalk Empire, The Good Wife, and Damages, and has spent years performing in senior residences and hospitals — work he has described as more meaningful than the acting.