Tom Sizemore has died after being taken off life support on March 3, 2023, about two weeks after suffering an aneurysm.
He was once one of Hollywood’s most common supporting players, and thanks to his ice-cold glare and husky laugh, he was a constant presence in each movie he was in. He also possessed a quality that made him truly special: a brooding, subdued roughness that is becoming more and more uncommon these days and is only seen in people like Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, and Ray Liotta.
Sizemore found fame in the 1990s, often playing supporting roles as tough guys – usually military, police or criminal. His other credits included Natural Born Killers, Pearl Harbor and Heat.
Born in a working-class area of Detroit, Sizemore obtained a masters degree in theatre before his Hollywood break arrived with a bit part in Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July in 1989.
That work led to bigger roles in 1990s dramas such as Tony Scott’s True Romance, Devil in a Blue Dress, opposite Denzel Washington, and the biopic Wyatt Earp, alongside Kevin Costner.
Sizemore was nominated for a Golden Globe for playing a mobster in the 1999 TV movie Witness Protection and provided the voice of mafia boss Sonny Forelli in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in 2002.
Here are five of Tom Sizemore’s best performances:
Saving Private Ryan | 1998
Sizemore’s role in Saving Private Ryan stands out because it features him playing the opposite of his archetype. In Steven Spielberg’s Second World War epic, Sizemore is earnest and noble as Sgt Horvath and commands a great chemistry with Tom Hanks.
The greatest compliment you can pay an actor is that the real person can’t be seen in the film and Sizemore is so convincing as a WW2 soldier you’d think he’d have served himself. It should have been the role that elevated him to leading man.
Heat | 1995
“The action is the juice.” If ever there was a line that summed up Michael Mann’s epic crime masterpiece of Sizemore’s own life, it was this. In a film dripping with existential macho intensity, Sizemore — as veteran bank robber Michael Cheritto — feels every bit the authentic criminal he’s supposed to be.
The famous stare in the diner, the hulking posture, the desperate death scene: Sizemore proved just why he was the best character actor of the 1990’s.
Bringing Out the Dead | 1999
Sizemore’s only collaboration with Martin Scorsese, Bringing Out the Dead is an angsty, metaphysical ride through Hell that also stars Nicolas Cage, John Goodman and Ving Rhames. Sizemore plays the haunted Tom Rolls, a slightly crazed paramedic propelled by violence.
It’s a quintessential Scorsese and Sizemore character and came at the end of his golden streak of supporting performances. His deathly black eyes still haunt and linger.
Natural Born Killers | 1994
In Oliver Stone’s frenzied ultraviolent satire about mass media, Sizemore is at his sleaziest and most dangerous. He plays psychopathic detective Jack Scagnetti who is obsessed with taking down serial killing couple Mickey and Mallory and it’s a performance of gutteral menace layered with depravity and only heightened by Stone’s manic editing.
To get into character, Sizemore says he would do cocaine between takes.
Devil in a Blue Dress | 1995
In a just world, we’d have gotten a whole series of Easy Rawlins movies starring Denzel Washington as the post-war private eye but after becoming a commercial failure, we have to cherish Devil in a Blue Dress that bit more.
Sizemore is electric as fellow PI and the nefariously vicious DeWitt Albright. It’s a performance that’s all in the eyes, the way he can hold a stare as if his pupils are magnets. The scene where he threatens Denzel with a knife makes Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs look like Barney the Dinosaur.
