Joe Pesci became famous in 1990 with one of the shortest sentences that have ever written film history. “Funny how?” was his increasingly angry question in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” to the fellow gangster played by Ray Liotta, who had described him as a funny guy. The false outburst of rage of the choleric, pathologically brutal mobster Tommy DeVito, played by Pesci, is indistinguishable from an actual one, neither for his mafia colleagues nor for the viewer.

Later, on the same whim of the moment, DeVito murders two men without a joke. Pesci received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in 1991. He was already known there. In 1980 he played the touching brother of boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, also with Robert De Niro. Four years later, he reappeared in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, with the man who had brought him back to film from his existence as a restaurant owner, as the mafioso of the Chicago scene.