Ciao, Dennis

It’s very sad news indeed to learn of the death of actor Dennis Farina, who died yesterday at age 69.

Farina was a character actor, but he had such an innate force to him that he filled the screen whenever he appeared. Between that lived-in looking face, the heavy-lidded brown eyes and his whisky-filtered voice, he struck me from the beginning as a guy you really didn’t want to mess with.

If you were another guy.

If you were a woman, you were willing to take a risk on him because, well, what the hell—it might end badly, but you’d have a really good time while it lasted. That was the vibe he gave off.

He definitely had that mad, bad and dangerous to know look about him.

Farina often played the two sides of the law—either a cop or a mobster. He carried both off with authenticity. Perhaps it was the 18 years he spent as a cop in Chicago that lent such credibility to his performances.

I first saw him in an episode of China Beach back in the 90s. He wiped the floor with everyone on screen with him. Then he was on Law & Order for a couple of years after Jerry Orbach left the series. As Detective Joe Fontana he absolutely conveyed the kind of authority mixed with menace that you expect from a NYC detective.

He never looked like he was acting; he just inhabited the role.

Fontana wore hand-made shirts and bespoke suits, and he carried a roll of bills—all of which made you wonder where he got it all. The L&O producers wisely never speculated. They just let him get on with solving the crimes, and he wasn’t above tossing out some misinformation to do that.

Whenever he and Detective Ed Green’s actions were questioned by a citizen, Fontana would say with absolute assurance, “It’s okay—we’re authorized.”

Well, I believe I’m authorized to dredge out some grappa and lift a glass to the memory of a class act.