Michael Imperioli names his favourite director and actor
It would be hard to say that Michael Imperioli is not best known for playing Christopher Moltisanti in HBO series The Sopranos, such was the iconic nature of the show. But the actor has also featured in the likes of GoodFellas, Bad Boys, and The Basketball Diaries in the 1990s, as well as the more recent comedy-drama The White Lotus.
When it comes to Imperioli’s greatest cinematic loves, they don’t come bigger than his passion for the American director John Cassavetes and the actor Gena Rowlands. In a feature with Criterion, the actor named his ten favourite films of all time, and Cassavetes’s works occupied three of the slots.
The first is A Woman Under the Influence, the 1972 film Imperioli considers his “favourite of all time”. Detailing further, he said: “The most honest on-screen depiction of mental illness ever. Cassavetes perfectly nails the heartbreak and frustration that eclipses a family when a loved one’s sanity slips away. It’s at times both gut-wrenching and oddly hilarious, and Cassavetes manages to make gorgeous cinema with colors and composition.”
The film stars Cassavetes’ wife, Rowlands, and Peter Falk of Columbo fame, but Imperioli is equally impressed by its supporting cast and called them “flawless, including both Cassavetes’s and Rowlands’s own real-life mothers, Katherine and Lady, and in particular George Dunn in his role as Mabel’s one-night stand Garson Cross.”
But it’s Rowlands that is the real star of the show when it comes to Cassavetes for Imperioli. He named Opening Night as another of his top picks and said: “Gena Rowlands is the greatest American actor or actress ever. Period. No prosthetics, no extreme weight gain or loss, no accents or limps. Has any other actor ever created two more distinct, honest, or complete human beings on-screen?”
He continued: “Has any other actor ever created two more distinct, honest, or complete human beings on-screen? Rowlands somehow simply shifts her center of gravity and transforms from Woman’s selfless and fragile Mabel Longhetti into Opening Night’s cunning and self-obsessed Broadway star Myrtle Gordon.”
Finally, Imperioli chooses’ Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie another favourite, although it’s a different kind of film from the previously mentioned two. “This time, he takes on the gangster/noir genre but does it in his own inimitable abstract-expressionist style, where time slows down or sometimes speeds up, so we never know exactly where we are in terms of a traditional story arc or act structures,” he said.
“We are in dreamland…an opium-induced reverie”.
