Charley Scalies, greatest identified for portraying Thomas “Horseface” Pakusa on HBO’s The Wire and Tony Soprano’s highschool soccer coach in The Sopranos, has sadly handed away. The actor died on Thursday, Could 1, at a nursing facility in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. His daughter, Anne Marie Scalies, instructed The Hollywood Reporter that Scalies had an extended battle with Alzheimer’s. A Philadelphia native, Scalies checked out all of his roles as a humbling expertise, sharing in a 2015 interview that the factor that made him smile was understanding his great-grandchildren and past would “get to see what Poppi appeared and appeared like.” He was 84.
In The Wire, Scalies starred in the complete second season of the HBO sequence. The present takes a better have a look at the narcotics scene in Baltimore via the eyes of legislation enforcers, drug sellers, and customers. He portrayed Thomas Pakusa, nicknamed Horseface, an incarcerated former IBS Native 1514 longshoreman from the port of Baltimore. Pakusa had a robust loyalty to his crooked boss, Frank Sobo, the secretary-treasurer and a cargo checker for IBS Native 1514. Throughout an interview with Matthew Toffolo in 2015, Scalies revealed that it wasn’t till later he realized the influence of the present and his season.
“Throughout filming, we hoped it might be nominated for an Emmy, particularly when one reviewer mentioned he could not catch any of us performing. Highest reward… Not till later, when the present was known as out as being one of many ten greatest written TV exhibits of all time, did we [come] to understand that we’d have been a part of a present that might not solely be watched, time and again, however studied.”
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The Wire is regularly cited as arguably the most effective TV present of all time, and it was a launching pad for the careers of many well-known actors.
A 12 months earlier than, in 2014, the actor acquired an invite to talk at his Alma Mater and was shocked to study {that a} class was learning The Wire “for its sociological implications.” Scalies additionally talked about his one-off function on The Sopranos. Though some actors known as the set of the sequence intense, for him, it was “very business-like” however regular. Within the episode “The Take a look at Dream,” Scalies embodied the function of Coach Molinaro, the one man moreover Tony’s father that the mafia boss feared and revered. He appeared in Tony’s (performed by James Gandolfini) dream, representing his conscience.
Charley Scalies Cherished Working With “Professional” James Gandolfini on ‘The Sopranos’
Charley Scalies was born on July 19, 1940, and jumped again into the world of performing within the ’90s after taking a director of gross sales and contracts job at Clifton Precision following faculty. He left his place to begin his personal consulting agency, however after a good friend and their accomplice began “The Actor’s Heart,” he was solid in a couple of of their roles and went on auditions. In 2003, he labored on The Wire, which was adopted by a Sopranos look a 12 months later. He described working with Gandolfini as simple as a result of he was a professional.
“I spoke to him as I might my very own son and he answered accordingly. At no time did I really feel like both of us [were] performing. It was that simple. He was a professional and I wish to suppose I’m, too.”
Supply: The Hollywood Reporter, Wild Sound