Italian American Heritage Month: Vincent Gardenia

Vincent Gardenia, whose original name was Vincent Scognamiglio, was born in Naples. He took his professional name from his father, an actor and manager named Gennaro Gardenia Scognamiglio. 

When Vincent was 2, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, and his father established an Italian-language acting troupe that specialized in melodramas. "The titles changed, but they were usually about a son or daughter who gets in trouble, runs away, then begs forgiveness," Gardenia said. At the age of 5, he made his stage debut in his father's company as a shoeshine boy, and while still a teenager he was playing character roles. He continued acting in the company until 1960, five years after he took his first English-language stage role, as a pirate in the Broadway play "In April Once." 

Gardenia won a Tony Award for his performance as Peter Falk's brother in "The Prisoner of Second Avenue, and at the awards ceremony, he paid tribute to his father's acting company by giving his acceptance speech in Italian.

The film "Moonstruck" (1987) was set in Brooklyn N.Y. Gardenia had lived in Brooklyn for over 30 years until his death in 1992. They named a street after him called the Vincent Gardenia Boulevard. Gardenia and Olympia Dukakis, who played his character's wife, previously co-starred together in "Death Wish" (1974). Gardenia played the main detective investigating the murders, while Dukakis played a police officer.

Gardenia took a workmanlike approach to the craft of acting and a man-in-the-street attitude to the study of human behavior. "You play for truth," he told an interviewer for The New York Times in 1974. In playing the part of a police detective in"Death Wish," he said he drew on memories of a one-time chief of detectives in New York he had often seen on television. "Acting is like storage," he said. "If you're touched by something, it stays with you."