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Perhaps no actor ever appeared in as many landmark movies without ever being recognized by the general public. During the 1970s and 1980s, if there was a must-see Italian-American movie starring Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro or Sylvester Stallone…you know who else was going to be in it? Joe Spinell.

Joe Spinell virtually trademarked the mid-low-level mafia gangster, the kind of character fleshed out by Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco. In that film, after years of playing Al Pacino, Al Pacino was playing Joe Spinell. Spinell appeared across from Pacino in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II as Willi Cicci, a hitman who ends up on the witness stand in a grand jury indictment of the Cosa Nostra. He also appears across from Pacino in Cruising, a little known but pretty-good film about Pacino as an undercover cop hunting a serial killer in the gay underworld.

Spinell later appears in Taxi Driver as the character who sets the stage for the film, giving Robert DeNiro a hard time when he applies for a job as a cabbie, the first in a long string of stressors that ultimately causes Travis Bickle to snap, shave his head and build a gun-extension mechanism that he attaches to his forearm.

But he will perhaps be best remembered for his appearance in the first two Rocky films, as one of the most important supporting characters in the series, the asthmatic mafia loan shark Mr. Gazzo. A mafia crook he may have been, but he was a loan shark with a heart of gold, always looking out for Rocky at a time when few people on the streets actually were. The character fell by the wayside as Rocky moved up from the streets to mansions and Lamborghinis, but would surely have returned for Rocky V or Rocky Balboa if Spinell hadn’t unfortunately passed away in 1989.

One interesting fact about Spinell is that (in addition to suffering from hemophilia) he was asthmatic in real life, likely making that character choice in Rocky one of the instances where off-camera reality was thrown into on-camera performances to add authenticity, a trend that was particularly prolific in the 1970s. He remained a staple in several early Sylvester Stallone films, including Paradise Alley (Stallone’s first film as a director in 1978) and Nighthawks (1981).

For many, though, Spinell made his greatest impression as the writer-star of Maniac, a low-budget 1980 slasher film that has gone on to an enormous degree of cult status. Spinell stars as depraved loner Frank Zito, a schizoid killer who scalps his female victims. As much as the film was not going to be winning the Oscar for Best Picture any time soon, Spinell was once again strong with his performance, carrying the (demented) film in a horror that was based more on his character study than action or quick cuts. Particularly in this era of Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, it was rare and a daunting challenge to have a horror film and the majority of its screen time focused on a maskless villain, rather than on the young people trying to escape him.

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