Early Life
Palminteri is of Sicilian origin; his family is originally from Menfi in the province of Agrigento. His grandparents, Calogero Palminteri and Rosa Bonfante, married in 1908 and moved from Menfi to the United States in 1910. Chazz Palminteri was born in the Bronx on May 15, 1946, the son of Rose, a homemaker, and Lorenzo Palminteri, a bus driver. He struggled to become a star, splitting his time between acting in off-Broadway plays and moonlighting as a bouncer, alongside Dolph Lundgren. His big break did not come until 1988 with the premiere of his autobiographical one-man show, A Bronx Tale, which he wrote after being fired from a club for refusing entry to super agent Swifty Lazar; Robert De Niro later developed and directed a film version (1993). Palminteri confirms he witnessed a murder first-hand as a child, as depicted in the play and film.
Read more about this topic: Chazz
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;Mnot be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)