HEY, VITO, ARE YOU SURE HE'S GOING TO GO FOR IT?:

Bruno Kirby (Daily Telegraph, 18/08/2006)

Bruno Kirby, who died of leukaemia on Monday aged 57, was a dependable American film actor, giving perhaps his best remembered performance as Billy Crystal's moustachioed friend and romance counsellor in When Harry Met Sally (1989). [...]

He was born Bruno Giovanni Quidaciolu in New York on April 28 1949. His father was the actor Bruce Kirby, most recently seen as Matt Dillon's father in Crash (2005).

After growing up in Hell's Kitchen, Bruno Kirby moved to California in the late 1960s and soon began landing small parts in films and television, including the first episode of M*A*S*H, the army hospital comedy set during the Korean War. His breakthrough came in 1974, when he was cast in The Godfather Part II as the mobster Pete Clemenza, who tempts the young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) into bad habits. Thereafter Kirby appeared regularly in such television series of the time as Kojak, Columbo - in which his father had a long-running part as an assistant to Peter Falk - and Fame, before again making his mark in the cinema in This is Spinal Tap (1984), the spoof rock documentary directed by Reiner. The joke was that his character, the chauffeur to the band, actually preferred Frank Sinatra to rock music. This was taken from life by the film's writer Christopher Guest, who had also played softball with Kirby.

The notion that a guy who appeared in the Godfather films is best remembered for a chick flick is at best metrosexual.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 18, 2006 10:03 AM