Tony Sirico

Before he played a gangster, Tony Sirico lived like one. Growing up in Brooklyn, he was arrested more than two dozen times as a young man and served time in Sing Sing prison for armed robbery in the 1970s. While he was inside, a troupe of former convicts came to perform a play for the prisoners, and Sirico decided that he could do what they did. When he got out, he started taking acting jobs, often playing the kind of men he had known.

He was born Gennaro Anthony Sirico on July 29, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York. There is no record of the time he was born, so his Ascendant is unknown, but his planets fit him closely. His Sun is in Leo, with Pluto also in Leo and Mars in the last degrees of the sign. Leo is proud, theatrical and fond of swagger, and Pluto adds power and intensity. A Leo emphasis like this describes a personality built on bravado and presence, and Sirico's most famous character, Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri on The Sopranos, was all swagger: the silver-winged hair, the tracksuits, the boasting stories.

Venus and Jupiter are both in Cancer, the sign of family, loyalty and home. In the world of The Sopranos, loyalty to "the family" is everything, and Sirico famously insisted to the show's creator, David Chase, that Paulie must never become an informer. He said he would not play a character who "rats."

Saturn and Uranus, both in Gemini, describe a sharp, unpredictable way of talking and a mind that works fast. Paulie's rambling, superstitious, paranoid monologues were among the show's funniest moments, and Sirico delivered them with perfect timing.

Before The Sopranos, Sirico appeared in small roles in many crime films, including Goodfellas, and he became a regular in Woody Allen's films, appearing in Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite and others.

Neptune in Virgo describes a gift for disappearing into a role that seems drawn from life, and Sirico's performances often felt less like acting than like recognition. He played Paulie from 1999 to 2007, through all six seasons, and the character's episode lost in the snowy woods of the Pine Barrens is one of the most celebrated in television history.

He also served in the U.S. Army and later spoke about how acting had given him a second life. He liked to say that he had been given something rare, a chance to start over, and that he never forgot where he came from. Younger actors on The Sopranos remembered him as generous and funny on set, a man who treated the job with real gratitude. He died on July 8, 2022, at seventy-nine. The Leo planets gave him the swagger; the Cancer planets gave him a lifelong loyalty to his own world.