Legendary Hollywood Actor And ‘Godfather’ Star Just Died

Iconic film and television actor Abe Vigoda died Tuesday morning in Woodland Park, New Jersey.

The question of his mortality became a running gag that he happily poked fun at.

BEASTIE BOYS: (Singing) Girl in a castle and one in the pagoda, you know I got rhymes like Abe Vigoda.

“He took it in good humour and so on, and so I went and met him and chatted with him and took a picture of him jogging down the street denying he was dead”, said Geddes, now senior digital producer at CBC Edmonton.

Abe Vigoda daughter Carol Vigoda Fuchs told NYTimes about his death.

Vigoda played Sal Tessio, an old companion of Vito Corleone’s (Marlon Brando) who would like to assume control over the family after Vito’s demise by executing his child Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). And then a few hours later…Needless to say, when I told her that Vigoda had died an eerie feeling overcame the both of us.

Unlike the creaky, lethargic Fish, Vigoda was a vigorous man who played handball regularly and was still jogging and working as an actor into his 80s. “But Francis said, ‘I want to look at the Mafia not as thugs and gangsters but like royalty in Rome.’ And he saw something in me that fit Tessio as one would look at the classics in Rome”, he recollected. He also appeared in a handful of episodes of Dark Shadows before landing the iconic role of the mobster Tessio in the 1972 Best Picture victor The Godfather, which he reprised in the 1974 sequel The Godfather: Part II.

Vigoda was a regular for two seasons of Barney Miller and received Emmy supporting actor comedy noms in 1976, 1977 and 1978. For 30 years, he worked in the theater, acting in dozens of plays in such diverse characters as John of Gaunt in “Richard II” (his favorite role) and Abraham Lincoln in a short-lived Broadway comedy “Tough to Get Help”.

In 1982, People magazine listed him as “the late Abe Vigoda” in a story about Barney Miller, and he responded with a full-page advert in Variety showing him in a coffin reading the magazine. He appeared everything from Joe Versus the Volcano and Look Whos Talking, to soap opera Santa Barbara, a live production of Arsenic and Old Lace, and countless other TV, movie, and stage roles.

LIMBONG: Abe Vigoda was a tall guy with hunched-over shoulders and droopy eyes, a distinctive character-actor.

Abe Vigoda as seen as Det.

Meanwhile, journalists, TV talk hosts, even NY politicians were mourning on Twitter.

“Yeah, yeah, tell me, you look like you have hemorrhoids”. “Fish Barney Miller, was 94”, the TODAY anchor tweeted.

Twice married, the actor is survived by his family, including his daughter, three grandchildren, and a great-grandson.