Abe Vigoda, Godfather and Barney Miller actor, dies aged 94

“It’s a sad day”, Ross told us after learning that the 94-year-old “Fish” actor has passed away.

“Im really not a Mafia person, ” Mr. Vigoda, who was of Russian-Jewish descent, told Vanity Fair magazine in 2009.

Vigoda was also famous for playing detective Phil Fish on television’s comedy show Barney Miller from 1975 until 1982. His work on the show earned him Emmy nominations in 1976, 1977 and 1978, as well as a short-lived spinoff, Fish.

“Abe was just 53 when he first started Barney Miller”. I said, ‘You must be joking.’ She said, ‘No, I’m not. Do you know how I found out what happened?

Abe Vigoda, who starred in The Godfather and The Godfather II, died in his sleep on January 26. It lasted two seasons and 35 episodes. Conveying utter reality and barely concealed thuggish menace with a smile that might quickly turn into deadly violence, Vigoda was so convincing that film extras who were genuine minor underworld figures could not believe that he was a thespian, rather than a real thug walking through the part. “People magazine acknowledged their mistake and awarded itself the Mark Twain Exaggerated Death Award “for announcing the demise of ‘Barney Miller’s” Abe Vigoda before his time”, months after the article was published, but it was too late.

Through the rest of the 1960s Vigoda did everything from Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare festival – “Richard II” and “The Tempest”, where his castmates included James Earl Jones – to way, way out-of-town productions of “Naughty Marietta” and “Wish You Were Here”. “I was always taught to speak well of the dead”.

“So you’re anything but dead”, Letterman responded, and then asked Vigoda to breathe on a mirror, to which Vigoda graciously obliged.

Born in New York City in 1921, Vigoda attended the Theater School of Dramatic Arts at Carnegie Hall. After that, his uncertain attendance among the quick or the dead became a running joke with comedians.

Later, he appeared on Broadway in The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, in Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth and, as Abe Lincoln, in the comedy Tough to Get Help. Declared “the late Abe Vigoda”, he said his wife began receiving condolence letters.

The New York Times reports the lab brought about the notion that digital information should be shared freely and was part of the original ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet. Though he had continued to make occasional television and film appearances into the 21st century, he revealed in 2001 that it was the first film that mattered the most to him.