Biography

Joe Pesci (born February 9, 1943) is an American actor and musician whose compact frame, sharp comic timing, and explosive intensity made him one of the most recognizable performers in American film. He is especially associated with crime dramas, although his work also includes broad comedy, family entertainment, television, and music. His best-known collaborations have been with director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro.

Born Joseph Frank Pesci in Newark, New Jersey, Pesci began performing at a young age. As a child, he appeared on the television program Startime Kids, and during the 1960s he worked as a musician and entertainer. He played guitar with Joey Dee and the Starliters and recorded the album Little Joe Sure Can Sing! in 1968 under the name Joe Ritchie. Pesci also worked as a barber and performed comedy with Frank Vincent. Their nightclub act, Vincent and Pesci, combined traditional double-act routines with insult comedy and helped establish the partnership that later became familiar to film audiences.

Pesci made his first significant film appearance in the low-budget crime movie The Death Collector (1976). The performance attracted the attention of Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, who cast him as Joey LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980). As the volatile brother of boxer Jake LaMotta, played by De Niro, Pesci delivered a performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a British Academy award for newcomer. The film also introduced the combination of controlled menace and sudden violence that would become central to his screen persona.

His defining role came in Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990), in which he played Tommy DeVito, a small-time gangster whose unpredictable temper makes him both frightening and darkly funny. Pesci won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the performance became one of the most influential portrayals of cinematic gangster violence. He reunited with Scorsese and De Niro for Casino (1995), playing the brutal enforcer Nicky Santoro, and later appeared with them again in The Irishman (2019) as the quietly authoritative crime boss Russell Bufalino. His restrained work in the latter film contrasted sharply with the ferocity of his earlier gangster roles and brought another Oscar nomination.

Pesci also demonstrated a strong gift for comedy. He played burglar Harry Lime in Home Alone (1990) and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), using physical comedy and exaggerated frustration to create a character far removed from Tommy DeVito. As attorney Vincent Gambini in My Cousin Vinny (1992), he carried the film with fast-talking confidence and comic persistence. He also played Leo Getz in three Lethal Weapon sequels, turning the loud, intrusive character into a recurring comic counterpoint to Mel Gibson and Danny Glover.

After a reduced period of screen work, Pesci appeared in The Good Shepherd (2006), Love Ranch (2010), and the animated film A Warrior's Tail (2015). He returned to recording with Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You (1998), a humorous album built around his My Cousin Vinny character, and later released Pesci... Still Singing (2019). He also appeared in the television series Bupkis and the film Day of the Fight in 2023. Across his career, Pesci has remained notable for making intensity, danger, and comic absurdity coexist within the same performance.