Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 13, 1995 TAG: 9510130011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL WARREN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
``Both of them are exTREMEly sexy,'' he says, rolling his eyes during an interview to promote his latest movie, ``Jade,'' a psycho-sexual murder mystery.
``Linda is very very sexy and it really helps as far as the chemistry goes. ... And Sharon's just - Sharon's beautiful. She's just beautiful. You look at her face, she's perfect. Really perfect. There's nothing you can say that's wrong with her. She's so beautiful it's intimidating.''
Forgive him for gushing. Palminteri's wife is nine months pregnant; some decorum is required. But how many former nightclub bouncers from the Bronx get to share bedroom scenes with two of the sexiest women on screen?
Palminteri and Fiorentino play a philandering power-couple in ``Jade,'' which opens nationwide today, two days before his baby is due. The film is at the Salem Valley 8 and Valley View Mall 6.
He also is wrapping up ``Diabolique,'' a remake of the 1955 French thriller starring Isabelle Adjani as his wife and Stone as his mistress.
``Yeah, I'm starting to kiss the women more often, which is nice,'' said Palminteri, a tall, dark Sicilian-American who started his acting career by playing minor mobsters. ``You know you have a good role when you start beating people up and kissing the women. ... If you're getting beat up and never kissing anybody, that's no good. That's trouble.''
Speaking of trouble, how does his real-life wife, former soap-opera actress Gianna Ranando, deal with his evolution as a leading man?
``We talk about it, but she's really special,'' Palminteri says, his Bronx accent softening. ``She did love scenes and she knows what that's like.''
Calogero Lorenzo Palminteri rests his feet next to the remains of a fruit salad and sinks farther into his chair in a Park Avenue hotel. At 43, he has a hint of gray in his thick, black hair, and his easy smile can't hide his exhaustion.
It's not just the publicity mill for ``Jade'' - Palminteri has made eight movies in the last two years. Minutes from now he has a doctor's appointment for the baby, then he flies to Pittsburgh for a bloody fight scene with Stone.
``It's taken its toll on me and I'm tired,'' he says. ``This is it. The end of this movie, no more. I'm just going to write and wait for the next project to come along.''
Both Fiorentino and Stone dominated men in ``The Last Seduction'' and ``Basic Instinct.'' But Palminteri is no pushover. On screen he can appear ferocious, gathering his bluish jowls into a sneer and punctuating each syllable with lips that slam down over his teeth like locking pliers.
Still, wise guys come cheap in Hollywood; what sets apart Palminteri is the intelligence and warmth he brings to his roles as mobsters, cops and lawyers. His characters are as real as the people he grew up with in the Bronx, where he once threw dice for gamblers and saw a murder at the age of 9.
His father yanked him upstairs after the killer stared him down that day, and he never did tell police. But years later, the scene became the genesis for ``A Bronx Tale,'' a semiautobiographical play that launched his career.
Palminteri played all 18 characters on stage and by all accounts was mesmerizing, using nothing more than accents and postures to evoke the neighborhood of his youth. Hollywood producers clamored for the movie rights, initially offering him $250,000 - a fortune to a struggling, virtually unknown actor. But he refused because they wouldn't give him the lead. They offered more than $1 million. No dice.
Then Robert De Niro saw him on stage and not only offered him $1.5 million, but agreed to direct the film and play the part of Palminteri's father, a bus driver who must challenge the neighborhood's crime boss for his son's affections.
Palminteri played the boss, Sonny, a killer with a conscience - and like his character, developed a reputation for getting exactly what he wants.
``I tried to make him very likable, and I tried to make him very three dimensional but also very violent. That was the most important thing, that he was real.''
Palminteri realized his career was taking off when Woody Allen called before the film opened, and asked him to try out for the part of Cheech, a mobster who risks his life for the good of the show in ``Bullets Over Broadway.''
``After I read the script I was like, `God, I want to be in this movie!' I mean, a gangster who's an artist? Crazy! I mean, come on!''
His performance earned him an Academy Award nomination, and plenty of work. His turn as an FBI agent in love with a Cuban exile in ``The Perez Family'' was praised even though the film failed at the box office, perhaps because he was the only one of the Italian-American cast not to play Cubans. And he is the glue that holds together ``The Usual Suspects,'' a bizarre mystery with an ending that has audiences groaning in delight.
Palminteri got only four hours' sleep after the last, grueling, 23-hour day of filming ``Jade,'' then found himself on the set of ``Mulholland Falls,'' with a different haircut and dressed like an L.A. cop.
``It was the most surreal thing I ever did in my life,'' he recalled.
Before ``Diabolique,'' he also filmed ``Faithful,'' a comedy-thriller that he wrote, with Cher and Ryan O'Neal as a suburban couple who hire him as a hit man to knock each other off.
``It's like you're a football player and you run for the daylight and you see the daylight and you just go,'' Palminteri said. ``That door opened and I just haven't stopped.''
But was ``Jade'' worth the effort? For a mystery-thriller, Joe Eszterhas' script has holes you could direct a parade through, and though Palminteri works himself into the same fury that moved plots forward in ``A Bronx Tale,'' ``Bullets'' and ``Suspects,'' his energy is wasted on wife-beating here. Even Fiorentino is reduced to a sniveling victim by the pen of the famously misogynist Eszterhas, who reportedly sold the movie to Paramount Pictures as a two-page outline for $2.5 million.
Palminteri is diplomatic.
``You know, I see what it is and ... think I can make the part shine, for what it was,'' he says. ``And when I read it, I said `hey, you know, fooled me.' I didn't know who the killer was. So if it fooled me, it can fool some other people, too.''
Palminteri says he hasn't decided on his next project, or even his next apartment (he and his wife are looking for a bigger place in Manhattan). But he does know that his son will not be named Calogero (Italian for Charles, thus the ``Chazz'').
``He would be Chazz Palminteri Jr. That's a hell of a burden,'' he said. ``How can you be as good as your dad? It's just impossible. So I named him after the greatest Italian writer, Dante Alighieri. So his name will be Dante.''
by CNB