One of Hollywood’s best-known and talented character actors is dead.
Tom Sizemore lived an intense and troubled life, marred by addiction and legal issues. It was arguably matched only by his exploits on the silver screen. Despite having roles that rarely qualified as top billing, he left an indelible impact on the audience.
WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
Sizemore, 61, died after a brain aneurysm from a stroke two weeks ago. He had remained in a coma during that time.
Sizemore’s more famous roles also included “Black Hawk Down” and “Natural Born Killers.”
Yahoo! Entertainment further reports:
The Detroit native said he fell in love with movies as a kid when his mother, a movie buff, began taking him and his siblings to the triple feature the local theater showed on Saturdays. His mind was blown when he first saw The Wizard of Oz on a TV channel for classic movies.
“When we saw a movie called Beckett, with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, I guess I was probably 11 or 12, and … I didn’t understand the movie so much as I got that the relationship between Burton and O’Toole was special, and I got into the drama of that,” he told Decider in May 2022. “And then a few years later, when I was 14, I saw Taxi Driver. And that was the first time I remember wanting to know who the actor was, who the person was playing this part. I was so taken with the Travis Bickle character (played by Robert De Niro) that I wanted to know, ‘Who’s the guy doing this?’ And I got obsessed with it. I saw that movie every week for, like, two months when it was playing in the theater. I saw it 11 weeks in a row. That’s when I first started thinking, ‘Whatever that is they’re doing up there, I want to be part of it. I want to do that.’ And I started to figure out how to become an actor, and I started doing some investigating, and my mother helped me.”
Sizemore began his own career with small roles in Born on the Fourth of July and Point Break and spent the ’90s mostly in action movies, although he did something different with the romance Heart and Souls in 1993, in which he played one of Robert Downey Jr.’s guardian angels.
His on-screen work was dwarfed, however, by the drama in his personal life, which included drugs and arrests, which he wrote about in his 2013 memoir, By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There. He said that, for a time, alcohol helped him cope with his success, but it soon wasn’t enough.
Sizemore’s career suffered profoundly due to his unhealthy coping mechanisms and legal issues.
In recent years sobriety prevailed, and according to friends, he “was getting his life back to a great place.”
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