The first shot of the iconic TV show Sopranos (1999) featured James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, a mob boss, endlessly staring at a piece of sculpture while waiting to be summoned by a psychiatrist.

We didn’t know much about Tony, the show or even the actor in question and couldn’t demarcate where the real ended and the reel began and yet, the look on Gandolfini’s face, an unlikely leading man, said it all. Much like the setting everything about the show — a mobster waiting to spill his fears to a shrink — and the people behind it seemed to be a part of some weird dream that could very well become a nightmare. Yet, the surreal concinnity of David Chase, the man who created the show, HBO, the network which changed the fate of television along with James Gandolfini, the actor who transformed the stage of television drama, ended up creating one of televised fiction’s defining moments.
First noticed as Virgil, the hit man, in Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993) Gandolfini did small parts in Crimson Tide (1995), Get Shorty (1995), Fallen (1998) and A Civil Action (1998) but it wasn’t until Sopranos that he came into his element. Gandolfini was initially apprehensive about playing Tony Soprano due to the show’s violent content and even the portrayal of Italian-Americans. One often meets their destiny on the path they take to avoid it and no one defined it better than James Gandolfini. His interpretation of Anthony Soprano as the brute gangster who is charming and as troubled as anyone of the street revealed a new side of the often stereotypically depicted character of mobsters. Gandolfini made his bones in New York’s unflinching theatre circuit and always tried to include something organic and beyond the scope of the script into the characters he played. It didn’t matter to him whether he was the lead or a supporting act. To imagine Tony Soprano as a homosexual assassin, in The Mexican (2001), with a heart that could put a marshmallow to shame might have been impossible for the average viewer but Gandolfini switched moods easily. He even lost over 40 lbs to make Winston look like a giant oaf and then happily found the weight again to reprise Tony Soprano.
Following the success of Sopranos, the first cable series to win an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, it’d always be difficult for Gandolfini, the colossus upon whom the show practically rested, to find something as fulfilling but the actor never made any bones about the baggage his iconic role carried. He knew what being Tony Soprano had done for him and for the landscape of television acting. Gandolfini singlehandedly made television respectable enough for film actors and more importantly celebrated enough for talented artists such as himself who would have never got a shot at being the lead in movies. His Tony Soprano was the breeding ground for future class acts such as Don Draper from Mad Men. As for himself the actor within who adorned an otherwise two-dimensional hero like Tony Soprano with immense character, Gandolfini went on to make heroes out of almost all the characters he played irrespective of the length of the role. His nameless CIA director in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) or the overgrown boy of an Army General from In the Loop (2009) are all testimony of a consummate actor. For someone who became one of the most recognised faces in the world, James Gandolfini never really lost touch with the struggling actor “Jim Gandolfini” who in the late 1980s lived out of black plastic bags in New York City. The one-time bartender, and bouncer, Gandolfini continued to be the affable “gentle soul”, as remembered by his The Mexican and Killing Them Softly co-star Brad Pitt, for his entire life and unlike actors who become living legends never traded his gentleness. Where else could you find a celebrity financing a childhood friend’s dream of opening a restaurant or at the height of his popularity step in and recuse a woman from being mugged while walking down a dimly lit New York City street?
James Gandolfini died at 51 on 19 June 2013

Gautam Chintamani is an award-winning Indian writer/filmmaker with over a decade of experience in print and electronic media