Watch: Frank Vincent's Mob Movie Legacy: From Goodfellas to The Sopranos

Frank Vincent spent thirty years as American film's most convincing mobster: Billy Batts telling Joe Pesci to go home and get his shinebox, then Phil Leotardo telling New Jersey to go to war. Watch the video above, then read his legacy.

Vincent's face is part of the genre's architecture: Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, and a dozen more, usually as the man whose calm makes the room dangerous. Phil Leotardo was his masterpiece, the role that let the menace carry a whole series' endgame: twenty years of prison silence behind every quiet sentence. He died in 2017, and the outpouring made clear what the industry knew: nobody alive played old-school Cosa Nostra with more authority, because nobody had spent more years studying it from the inside of the frame.

Quick answer: Frank Vincent defined the screen mobster across four decades, from Billy Batts in Goodfellas to Phil Leotardo, his crowning role, in The Sopranos.

Keep reading: New Hollywood Crime Story Documentary Traces the Mob’s Movie Empire · Donnie Brasco’s True Story: What the Mob Movie Changed

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