Abe Vigoda, the sad-faced actor who emerged from a workmanlike stage career to find belated fame in the 1970s as the mobster Tessio in The Godfather and the dyspeptic Det Phil Fish on sitcom Barney Miller, died yesterday in Woodland Park, New Jersey, at 94.
His daughter, Carol Vigoda Fuchs, said Vigoda had died in his sleep. "I'm really not a Mafia person," Vigoda, who was of Russian-Jewish descent, told Vanity Fair in 2009. To prepare himself, Vigoda frequented the New York neighbourhoods that are backdrops in the story.