A shy fireman and the son of a garbage man: 10 facts about Steve Buscemi (11 photos)

The eccentric and emotional manner of acting of the American actor was remembered by viewers from the films of the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Bay and other famous directors.





Despite the fact that Buscemi most often plays supporting characters, it is in his performance that they become perhaps the most striking characters in any story. Time Out congratulates the actor on his birthday and recalls 10 facts from his biography.

Buscemi was born into an Irish-Italian family



Steve was born on December 13, 1957 in Brooklyn. He became the fourth child in the family of garbage man John, a native of Sicily, the heart of the Italian mafia, and Dorothy Buscemi, an Irish woman who worked as a waitress in one of the local cafes and as a hotel administrator. The father was a Korean War veteran, and the family were believers. So much so that it was difficult for the parents to come to terms with the fact that their son was born on December 13th. They thought this was a bad omen. However, family members still came to terms with this.

Steve spent his childhood in his native Brooklyn. Together with his brothers, he often went to his father’s work, learned to drive a garbage truck and loved to look for all sorts of trinkets while his father sorted out mountains of garbage:

“My childhood was happy. I had three brothers. We lived next door to my father's three sisters and their children and we all hung out together. We watched TV, argued... We played punchball - a simplified version of baseball.”

Steve isn't really Buscemi, but he's used to it





In Steve's family, it is customary to pronounce his surname as "Bucemi" (English - Buscemi). For some reason, everyone around them called them Buscemi. If his father still tried to resist, then Steve quickly gave up and did not correct those who were wrong, because it was this last name that made him famous.

However, sometimes mistakes still stress the actor. One day he and his wife booked a table at a restaurant, and when they arrived there, they told the waitress his last name - Buscemi. She was taken aback and replied: “I recognized you, but it’s correct to say: “Buscemi.” Of course, both Steve and his wife were furious at that moment - was everyone really going to teach them how to pronounce their own last name correctly?

It turned out that Buscemi's version was also incorrect. During a trip to the homeland of his ancestors, Sicily, the actor found out that there the surname in its original form was pronounced as “Bushaimi”.

Steve came close to death several times



As a small child, Steve was hit by cars several times. This first happened at the age of four, and repeated four years later:

“At four years old, I ran into the road and was hit by a Brooklyn city bus. My skull cracked and I lost consciousness. Fortunately, it was winter, I had a lot of clothes on and, most likely, padding saved me from more serious injuries. A few years later, when I was eight, I ran after a ball that had jumped out onto the road and was hit by a car. But it was no longer so serious. I'm lucky, I guess."

At a more mature age, when Buscemi was already a famous actor, an unpleasant thing happened to him. While working on the film The Phantom Menace (2001), on one of the shooting days, Steve, along with screenwriter Scott Rosenberg and actor Vince Vaughn, went to a bar. Vaughn started talking to an attractive visitor, which greatly displeased her boyfriend. A fight ensued, during which Buscemi was stabbed several times in the head, neck and shoulder. When the police arrived at the scene, it turned out that the actor’s condition was critical - he was immediately taken to the hospital and rescued. Despite the injuries, filming continued a few days later.

Before acting, Buscemi had many careers



Since Steve's family did not live well, all the brothers worked from childhood. During his school years, Buscemi worked as a loader, a waiter, a newspaper delivery boy, and even an ice cream maker. Separately, the actor always remembers his work in a Brooklyn cinema, which made him fall in love with the world of cinema:

“I carried a flashlight to help people find rows and kept order in the hall - such a small job. I never broke up kissers, I never broke anyone’s head. I brought friends to watch movies for free, and often snatched candy or popcorn for them.”

Then, despite the fact that all his friends played football, Steve began to attend the school drama studio:

“There was little in common between the jocks and theatergoers, which the high school students from our school were then divided into. I was considered a muscleman - I played football and wrestled. But when I grew up a little, I stopped caring what anyone thought. I took an acting elective and participated in the school production of Fiddler on the Roof. However, they didn’t take me for the role of Tevye the milkman - I wasn’t the right type. I was a battle dancer - one of those guys who dances with bottles on their heads. At first, acting lessons seemed wild. The tasks were something like this: imagine that you are holding a coffee cup in your hand, fill it with coffee and smell it. Or the “shower test”: imagine water rushing over your body. If my friends from Long Island saw this, I would be extremely embarrassed in front of them. But all the students were doing it, so I thought: well, maybe this is what happens, becoming an actor.”

Steve worked as a firefighter and rescued people after the September 11 attacks.



As soon as Steve turned 18, the municipality paid him a handsome settlement for an old bus incident. Having received six thousand dollars, he immediately invested it in his education. In New York, Buscemi studied at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute, whose graduates over the years included Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. In parallel with his studies, for four years he worked part-time in the fire department with endless night shifts and emergency situations.

This experience greatly helped Steve in the future, when he, already an accomplished actor, the very next day after the September 11 terrorist attacks, reported to his native fire department and began to rescue people from the rubble:

“When 9/11 happened, I came back here on the 12th and got my gear, I still had my old gear, you know, my coat, helmet and boots. Despite the horror that happened, the work calmed me, and I remember that it surprised me. I went there to help, but they helped me become a different person.”

On screen, Buscemi's characters are constantly being beaten or dying



Of course, Steve is far from the fame of Sean Bean, whose characters die in literally every film, and this has already become a meme, but his characters also often become victims in criminal games. It all started with his first role, when Buscemi first appeared on television:

“Don Johnson and Willie Nelson beat me up on Miami Vice. This happened in 1986. They were beating information out of my hero, a man named Rickles. That's when I learned how to take a fake punch. And a little later, Willie used me as a human shield, covering me from the shooting. Willie had a good grip. I got a sprained arm when he twisted it behind my back, packing my hero - take after take, over and over again."

As soon as Buscemi did not die on screen: the bandits shot him in different parts of the body, stuffed him into a wood chipper, Danny Trejo pelted him with knives, and in the end, he died of a heart attack. Steve calls his most brutal on-screen death an episode from the series “Tales from the Crypt”:

“In Tales from the Crypt, I played a guy who was exposed to pesticides for a secret government program. My body was naturally rotting. They dressed me up in a costume from head to toe as a rotting guy, and they shot me in it. To do this, either 12 or 15 explosive packages were attached to the suit, and each of them burns when it explodes. I also remember how Gus Van Sant made me crash a minivan in the movie “Even Cowgirls Are Sad Sometimes.” I was driving Uma Thurman down an alley and crashed into a trash pile. It was fun. But then I was practically cut out of the film.”

Steve doesn't have many acting awards.



During his career, Buscemi played in almost 150 films and TV series, but he has almost no prestigious awards. Side by side with the actor, Quentin Tarantino began his journey into cinema; he was appreciated by the Coen brothers, thanks to whom he became a world celebrity. Steve was also adored by his close friend, director Jim Jarmusch:

“He is very sympathetic, worries about others, but he knows how to cheer up. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it makes me so happy to know him and be his friend.”

He had to wait more than 25 years for professional recognition with awards since the start of his career in the mid-1980s. Buscemi received his first and only Golden Globe for his role in the TV series Boardwalk Empire in 2015. That same year and the year after, he was awarded the Screen Actors Guild Award for the same role. There was no Oscar or even nominations in Steve’s career. And this didn’t bother him at all. On the contrary, at a certain moment, even before receiving the first prestigious awards, he felt that he had reached the peak:

“I just couldn’t understand where next, where this was all going. I felt like I was at that weird age where I was too old to play some characters and not old enough to play others.”

Buscemi is an incredibly shy person



In his youth, Steve was an extremely shy guy. He sang in the school choir and took an acting class while his football player friends were partying and meeting girls. Because of shyness, Buscemi did not have a girlfriend for a long time:

“My first kiss came at the age of 16, and even then the girl, apparently, just drank too much. Anyway, immediately after the kiss she vomited on my shoes. I remember one time my son asked me if I liked to kiss at school. I begin to tell him a long story about my shyness, about how I finally got a girl and was sent away because I didn’t dare to kiss her, and how then I got into trouble with another girl, but I didn’t kiss her either out of shyness; how I was always embarrassed by the lack of knowledge of kissing techniques: where to put my tongue and all that stuff, how during a kiss not to think about anything other than the kiss. This truth was a secret to me for a long time... And my son listened to all this patiently and said: “Dad, I just asked if you liked the band Kiss at school...”.”

Shyness remained with Steve into adulthood. For example, he is still embarrassed by erotic scenes in films - when he sees them on the screen or is directly involved in their filming.

Steve spent more than 30 years married to cinematographer Jo Anders



Buscemi met his wife, American director, actress and artist Jo Anders, in the early 1980s. At that time, he was still working in the fire brigade and, according to his confession, he tried to impress his chosen one by walking with the dog in front of her house, and then, after they met, showing off work boots and a suit. They got married in 1987, and in 1990 their son Lucian was born, who helps his father with projects and makes music in Los Angeles.

The family idyll in 2015 was interrupted by Joe's fatal illness. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which she initially managed with chemotherapy. After a short-term remission, the cancer returned accompanied by another rather rare disease - encapsulated peritoneal sclerosis. This was the cause of the death of Buscemi’s wife in 2019. Steve accepted this grief with pain:

“She has gone her way. She was surrounded by friends and family. She came face to face with tragedy. I don’t think she was afraid of death.”

Buscemi is not sure that he will leave an inheritance to his son



Buscemi moved to his home in Brooklyn in the early 1990s. He settled in a huge three-story mansion in the Park Slope area, which is considered a local landmark. On his porch, tourists often left a variety of things like dolls, music cassettes, wardrobe items, and Buscemi took all this to his home. His friends even created a special blog to catalog items.

After his wife's death in 2019, Buscemi decided to move out of the mansion, which was apparently too big for him alone. Gradually, he began to sort out old things before selling them:

“I’m like Plyushkin. The process is slow because I am constantly interested in reading and looking at objects from our shared past.”

The actor hopes his son Lucian won't have to inherit a house with "all the rubbish":

“He will be all alone when I die. He will have to go through all this alone.”