Abe Vigoda Biography

With his hangdog face and rumpled suits, actor Abe Vigoda was a hit as Detective Sgt. Phil Fish on the 1970’s TV sitcom Barney Miller. The show featured a ragtag band of New York City cops, with Vigoda as the comically world-weary grouch. Vigoda starred on the show from 1975-77, then left to star in the spinoff show Fish (1977-78).

Abe Vigoda wasn’t always a specialist in curmudgeonly comedy — his best-known film role was that of the treacherous Tessio in Francis Ford Coppola‘s film The Godfather (1972, with Marlon Brando). His other films included the Neil Simon comedy The Cheap Detective (1979), Cannonball Run II (1984), Joe Versus the Volcano (1990, with Tom Hanks) and Chump Change (2004). Vigoda’s fame was renewed when he made frequent guest appearances on Conan O’Brien‘s Late Night show in the 1990s.

Abe Vigoda also earned a measure of ironic fame for persistent rumors of his death, sparked by an erroneous People magazine story from 1982. (Vigoda “took the mistake with good humor, posing for a photograph published in Variety in which he was sitting up in a coffin, holding the erroneous issue of People,” according to Wikipedia.) The “Abe Vigoda is (not) dead” meme continued until his actual death of natural causes in January of 2016.