Dennis Farina
Dennis Farina is an actor, born 1944.
Farina was a Chicago police detective before he was an actor, and the second career came out of the first. Michael Mann hired him as a technical advisor, then put him in front of the camera: a supporting part in Thief in 1981, Jack Crawford in Manhunter in 1986, and then the lead as Lieutenant Mike Torello on Crime Story, a series Mann produced around him. Very few actors get their break because they already knew how the job worked.
That authenticity is the whole act. He plays men whose anger is administrative, who treat threats as paperwork and profanity as punctuation, and the comedy comes from how bored they are by other people's incompetence. Ray Bones in Get Shorty is the peak of it, a mobster whose ego is permanently one inch from bursting. Jimmy Serrano in Midnight Run, Avi in Snatch and Marshall Sisco in Out of Sight are all variations, and all of them are funny without the actor ever appearing to attempt a joke.
He worked steadily in both directions, playing the law as often as the men breaking it: Lieutenant Colonel Anderson in Saving Private Ryan, Detective Joe Fontana on Law & Order, and the host of Unsolved Mysteries. He was born in 1944 and died in 2013, and the filmography is unusually consistent for a character actor of that volume, mostly because nobody ever asked him to be anything other than exactly what he was.
Movies (32)
- Saving Private Ryan (1998)
- Snatch (2000)
- Get Shorty (1995)
- Striking Distance (1993)
- What Happens in Vegas (2008)
- Out of Sight (1998)
- Big Trouble (2002)
- Midnight Run (1988)
- Thief (1981)
- Romeo Is Bleeding (1993)
- Reindeer Games (2000)
- Eddie (1996)
- Code of Silence (1985)
- Havana (1990)
- The Grand (2007)
- Bella Mafia (1997)
- Another Stakeout (1993)
- Knucklehead (2010)
- Bottle Shock (2008)
- Authors Anonymous (2014)
- The Case of the Hillside Stranglers (1989)
- Stealing Harvard (2002)
- Purple Violets (2007)
- Men Of Respect (1990)
- That Old Feeling (1997)
- Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986)
- Paparazzi (2004)
- Little Big League (1994)
- The Mod Squad (1999)
- Sidewalks of New York (2001)
TV (9)
Where to start with Dennis Farina
Get Shorty first. Ray Bones is the purest distillation of what he does, a man of enormous self-regard being repeatedly humiliated, and the film knows precisely how funny his dignity is.
Midnight Run and Snatch are the next two, both comedies where he supplies the menace and gets most of the biggest laughs anyway. Out of Sight shows the warmer version: a father, a marshal, still incapable of not being sardonic.
For the serious side, Manhunter has him as the FBI man who sends Will Graham back to work, shot in Michael Mann's coldest style, and Crime Story is the lead role that period television gave him and nobody has since. Thief is where it all started, a small part in a great film. Saving Private Ryan is one scene, and he makes it count.