Who

As mob chieftain Tony Soprano—the role in which he will forever be frozen—the bearish Gandolfini became both an iconic tough guy and a heartthrob for chubby-chasers.

Backstory

Gandolfini knows his home state well: He grew up in Westwood, New Jersey and attended college at Rutgers, before moving to New York in the 1980s and working as a bartender and bouncer at a string of Bada Bing-like establishments. He enrolled in his first acting class at 25, and made his Broadway debut alongside Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange in the 1993 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Gandolfini soon moved into film, with small roles as hoods in Sidney Lumet's A Stranger Among Us, True Romance, and Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty. He spent the duration of the '90s typecast as mobsters in films like Terminal Velocity, The Juror, and Quentin Tarantino's True Romance, and it was his performance in the latter that attracted the attention of one David Chase, who was then plotting a series about a troubled north Jersey mob boss. Gandolfini was cast as the lead and won endless critical acclaim and three Emmys before the show's conclusion in 2007.

Of note

For a former character actor with no name recognition to speak of, Gandolfini's role on The Sopranos was the opportunity of a lifetime, securing him an indelible place in TV history. But while The Sopranos made him a star, it also earned Gandolfini a rep as a diva: He had a nasty dispute with HBO over his salary in advance of the show's fifth season in 2003 (he later doled out $500,000 to his co-stars to apologize for holding up production); by the time the series concluded, he had established himself as one of the highest paid performers in cable history, earning a million dollars an episode. Despite the hefty cash flow, Gandolfini didn't seem upset about the show ending. "The character has been with me for so long, it's a relief to let him go." Post-"Don't Stop Believin'," he's executive-produced a documentary about wounded Iraq war vets for HBO, Alive Day, and has signed on to star in a handful of movies, including Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are (co-stars will include Michelle Williams and Forest Whitaker), Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna, and an Ernest Hemingway biopic.

The look

When he was playing Tony Soprano, exercise was far from the 295-pound Gandolfini's mind. He told Esquire magazine that "people don't take to skinny Mafia men, and I don't feel right when I'm thin." On a related note, he was named the city's "Sexiest Fatty" by New York in 2003.

Close call

While riding his Vespa on Hudson Street in May 2006, Gandolfini was hit by a taxi. He ended up having knee surgery (Dr. David Altchek wielded the scalpel) and his subsequent recovery ended up delaying the filming of the Sopranos' final episodes.

Personal

Gandolfini was married to Marcy Wudarski until 2002. (During divorce proceedings, she accused him of snorting coke with other Sopranos cast members and having "kinky sex with multiple mistresses.") He later got engaged to writer Lora Somoza, but called it off in 2005. He popped the question again in 2008, this time to former model Deborah Lin. The couple lives in a loft on Greenwich Street in Tribeca.