Dennis Farina
Dennis Farina
Dennis Farinawas an Italian-American actor of film and television and former Chicago police officer. He was a character actor, often typecast as a mobster or police officer. His most known film roles are those of mobster Jimmy Serrano in the comedy Midnight Run and Ray "Bones" Barboni in Get Shorty. He starred on television as Lieutenant Mike Torello on Crime Story and as NYPD Detective Joe Fontana on Law & Order. He also hosted and narrated a revived version of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth29 February 1944
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
I have a home in Arizona. I go a couple months a year, but basically Chicago is my home.
I know people who go back and check themselves, but it drives me crazy. Everybody wants to look in the mirror and see Cary Grant looking back at them, but that's just not the case.
I wanted to do Buddy Faro as a small budget movie. They said no. So I wanted to do it as a series of recurring TV movies, and they said no. So I agreed to do it as a series.
You can change a person's life in an instant; put him in a movie, and you start thinking differently, you want to be in another movie. It's like an addiction almost.
What you do as a policeman might be the right thing to do, but it's not entertaining. I left that behind me.
There's a whole catalogue of actors that never went to acting school.
This is my first experience working in a foreign movie, but the mechanics, I think, are pretty much the same all over; you still have to wait in the trailer.
I love England and the historical aspect of it.
I learned a long time ago: You're in the entertainment business. You're not in the reality business. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
When too many people get their hands on things, they want to make it commercial, and they wanna do this, and they wanna do that.
I was in New York on Sept. 11 doing the publicity for Big Trouble. What happened was beyond horrible, and everybody knows that. But we have to go on.
We keep monitoring ourselves, censoring ourselves, being too sensitive to this, too sensitive to that. We can't keep doing that.
You cant act for the editing. You just go in and do the scene the way you think is right.
I don't like to be talked into anything. I don't want to be cajoled.