Obituary: James Gandolfini - A combination of charm, danger and raw energy

1961-2013

JAMES Gandolfini, the actor, who has died suddenly aged 51, played the neurotic, doughy-featured mob boss Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, putting in a sustained performance of intoxicating menace and charm to become the linchpin of a series that transformed the television landscape.

Over 86 episodes originally broadcast between 1999 and 2007, The Sopranos proved that popular television could match the look and feel of anything on the big screen. Moreover, it showed that audiences around the world would respond to writing of the highest quality and that extended story lines of subtlety and nuance were not incompatible with commercial success. Gandolfini, as the series's utterly convincing lead, was central to its allure.

Not that The Sopranos, with its organised-crime setting, initially appeared too innovative. But under the detailed eye of its creator, David Chase, it quickly became clear that something unusually ambitious was afoot. Tony Soprano was not to be simply another Don Corleone knockoff. Instead, the character was seen juggling the pressures of managing both a family at home and a wider crime family on the streets of suburban New Jersey. Buckling under the strain, he slowly revealed a rich, dark inner world to a psychotherapist.

It was the role of a lifetime: a brooding, fidgety man whose charisma cannot hide a deep well of anger; a down-to-earth antihero who rejects the shallow glitz and glamour of his chosen career; a man of Italian-American descent whose fraying connection to the traditions of the "old country" still infuses much of his life. Gandolfini was a natural.

He was born James Joseph Gandolfini on September 18 1961 in Westwood, New Jersey. His father, a bricklayer turned school janitor also called James, had himself been born in northern Italy, near Parma, and was married to Santa, a school-dinner lady who had been raised in Naples. Both were devout Roman Catholics and often spoke Italian together in front of their children when, as their acting son later recalled, "they didn't want us to know what they were talking about".

James jnr was educated at Park Ridge High School and Rutgers University, where he completed a degree in communication studies. While there, his girlfriend died in a car accident, an incident which he later suggested spurred him on to make it as an actor. In particular, he would seek out the emotional release that came with inhabiting a dramatic role.

Having worked his way through college as a bar and club bouncer, however, his instinct on leaving university was not to act, but to head to Manhattan and continue on the nightlife scene. He started at a club called Private Eyes. "It was straight two nights a week, gay two nights a week and everything else the other two nights of the week. I spent a few years there, on the job, just watching people in amazement."

After two years he plucked up the courage to accompany a friend to an acting class. The first exercise involved threading an imaginary needle. Shaking with tension and rage, Gandolfini could not do it. "I was so angry and so nervous at the same time," he said. Eventually he boiled over, smashing up the stage around him and leaving himself with bloody knuckles. Marshalling that explosive energy would become key to his acting success to the extent that he would deliberately work himself into a state before a casting, hitting himself or going without sleep. "If you're tired, every single thing that somebody does will piss you off. Drink six cups of coffee. Or just walk around with a rock in your shoe. It's silly, but it works."

The first of several off-Broadway roles was as an Elvis impersonator. Other odd jobs he took to make ends meet included carpentry, bookselling and delivering soda water for the Hasidic Jewish owner of a business called Gimme Seltzer.

But then, in 1992, through an old girlfriend, he met the casting director for a Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Gandolfini was cast opposite Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin in the role of Steve, one of Stanley Kowalski's poker crew. The same year Sidney Lumet offered him a small role in the film A Stranger Among Us.

It was the following year that he got what was to prove his big break, playing a brutal enforcer with a streak of charm in True Romance. The film's director, Tony Scott, recalled of the audition that "you don't have to be a brain surgeon to spot someone who's got that much talent. He's such a unique combination of charming and dangerous."

The two men worked again in 1995 on the submarine thriller Crimson Tide. As in True Romance, Scott noted, Gandolfini committed himself wholly to the role, a draining experience that would cause the director to reflect midway through the decade-long Sopranos run that Tony Soprano might be "stealing his [Gandolfini's] soul".

For few celebrated actors can have been more associated with a single character that Gandolfini with Tony Soprano. And although the actor always maintained a restrained, almost shy, public persona and disdained the violence of The Sopranos, he forgave those who struggled to make the distinction. Opening a door suddenly at the height of his fame, he encountered a stranger "and the guy just turns white. All of a sudden I realise: 'He thinks I'm Tony.'" As the actor conceded: "I'm playing an Italian lunatic from New Jersey and that's basically what I am."

He had been astonished, with his experience only of small parts, to be offered the lead in The Sopranos. But Chase, having had Gandolfini's scene in True Romance brought to his attention, knew that he had found his man. "Some of the turmoil that's inside of Jim, that pain and sadness, is what he uses to bring that guy to the screen," Chase said. Gandolfini considered himself more "a 260-pound Woody Allen" and Chase struggled to convince the actor of his own worth. "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."

Gandolfini was six times nominated for an Emmy, winning three times. His success made him a rich man with earnings rising to $400000 per episode, then a million. Yet he remained an unassuming figure.

He did not use his extraordinary profile to claim a host of starring roles in Hollywood blockbusters. Instead, he continued to pop up in character parts, such as an anti-war general in the British satire In the Loop; the Mayor of New York in the thriller The Taking of Pelham 123 (both 2009); or a CIA chief in Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

He did use his influence to produce several documentaries, however, notably Home from Iraq (2007) and Wartorn: 1861-2010 (2010), about the impact of war on US servicemen.

He was uncomfortable with fame. "My father always said a million times we're peasants," Gandolfini said in 2001. "It's just a little odd for me to get that slightly different treatment ... And I'm uncomfortable with it. I want nothing to do with privilege."

Gandolfini was on holiday in Rome when he suffered a suspected heart attack. He had been due to travel to Sicily to the Taormina film festival.

He married, first, in 1999, Marcella Wudarski, with whom he had a son. He married, next, in 2008, Deborah Lin, who survives him with their daughter.