The lifelong connection between John Travolta and James Gandolfini
John Travolta and James Gandolfini have both had similar journeys with fame, with intermittent periods of dizzying success and time spent away from the spotlight, with their most iconic roles sprinkled in throughout the most tumultuous periods of their personal lives.
The pair collaborated on multiple films, including Get Shorty, Lonely Hearts and The Taking of Pelham 123, but met when they were children, with both their fathers working in the motor industry and regularly buying tyres from each other. The two formed a close friendship, with Travolta saying “He was one of those people who you would fall in love with the moment you met him”.
Travolta came from a large working-class family in New Jersey, in which he said acting hadn’t felt like a realistic career path. However, Travolta was heavily inspired by Gandolfini and also his Mother who had been an actress and singer, later becoming a high school drama and English teacher, nurturing Travolta’s love for the movies.
After dropping out of school, Travolta moved to New York, where he began taking small roles in musicals and off-broadway plays before eventually moving to Los Angeles, where he found his first major movie role on Brian De Palma’s Carrie, someone who he developed a long-lasting working relationship with, later starring in Blow Out.
His first project with Gandolfini was Get Shorty in 1995, in which Travolta plays Chilli Palmer, a Miami mobster who finds himself involved in a Hollywood film production. At the same time, Gandolfini was working on projects such as Crimson Tide and The Juror, before later finding international success with one of the most famous television shows of all time, The Sopranos.
Travolta found commercial success in Saturday Night Fever and Grease, which catapulted him to stardom and earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor. However, in the following years, Travolta struggled to find his next hit, declining roles in American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman. However, it was this dry spell that led to perhaps his most iconic performance as Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, changing the landscape of independent filmmaking entirely and revitalising his career by doing something unexpected.
But throughout the course of Travolta’s career, his friendship with Gandolfini remained constant, and when asked about his friendship with Gandolfini, Travolta said “I’ll tell you two small stories that will explain how I feel about him. The background is that my father sold automobile tyres to his father in New York, and he would see my photograph in the store window, and it inspired him to be an actor. Later, we ended up doing five movies together. When my son passed away, he would not leave the city until I was OK, he was worried about me, and I felt it was so human, and so unusual for an actor to have this depth of feeling about someone. Before that, we were shooting a little movie with Salma Hayek [Lonely Hearts]. He was going through a divorce and was very sad. I saw him backstage and said: ‘Jim, did I ever tell you something?’ He said: ‘What?’ and I said: ‘I loved you the moment I met you.’ He started to cry, because he needed to cry. That was a true connection, and I hope these two stories explain it a bit”.
