This will not be a particularly juicy Celebrity Sunday Matinee, I’m afraid, but blame that on Joe Montegna, who has led a very low-key life undistracted by the follies and Big Personalities of so many of my subjects.
Joe was born in Chicago to a father from Sicily and a mother from Apulia (Puglia, in Italian.) If you know Italy as a boot, Apulia is the heel. He graduated from the Art Institute’s Goodman School of Drama and made his debut in the 1969 Chicago production of Hair. Please let there be grainy black and white video of that. In 1975 he married his current wife and so there are no strange “celebrity meetings of minds and bodies” to report. His wife, Arlene Vrhel, owned a Chicago-themed restaurant in Burbank (CA) but that closed in 2019 “for personal reasons,” wiki tells me, but frustratingly does not divulge what they were.
One interesting thing about Joe is that he has had a long and productive working relationship with potty-mouthed fellow Chicago native David Mamet. He won a Tony for his portrayal of Richard Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross, and was in three Mamet movies, House of Games, Things Change, and Homicide. He appeared in Speed the Plow in 1988 and during its run developed Bell’s Palsy, the effects of which he demonstrates in a very slight way to this day. In 1986 he was one of The Three Amigos, and in 1990 was in The Godfather, Part III, which, isn’t that the one everyone pretends doesn’t exist because it was so bad compared to I and II? He was in three Spenser for Hire made-for-TV movies which I should really track down because I like the books. He spent most of the 21st century (2007–2020) playing David Rossi on Criminal Minds, appearing in a whopping 237 episodes and directing nine. He and Shemar Moore are apparently very close; Joe is said to be Shemar’s father figure.
One more slightly interesting thing is he has a star on Toronto’s Italian Walk of Fame. I never knew such a thing existed and why an Italian-American wound up there is anyone’s guess. Other Italian-Americans so honored there are Celebrity Sunday Matinee subject Connie Francis and Dean Martin, who Joe played in the 1998 miniseries The Rat Pack. Dino died in 1995 so was not around to comment on the performance.
I chose Joe Mantegna as the subject of today’s sermon because today is his birthday and he has a carbonara recipe which his character makes on one of the Criminal Minds episodes. I already gave you my carbonara recipe a long time ago but here’s another one and you can never have too many, even though they vary so little. This is also a triumph for me but might be a challenge for you: I found this recipe as an image and was able to successfully integrate it mid-text, for the very first time. Unfortunately you won’t be able to read this on a phone, and I can’t copy-and-paste the text out of it. I could give you the source of the image, a somewhat strange website, but you wouldn’t be able to read that either.
But here goes. Ci andiamo:
You also forgot his role as Fat Tony from the Simpsons (1990-2000) and the ongoing continuing suck known as the Simpsons (2000-forever)
Joe Mantegna is a distant cousin of mine and my older sister is friendly with him and his wife. I would eat his spaghetti alla carbonara.
Lucky her. I have a weird long-running “celebrity” connection. When I was growing up, not too far away from us lived a weather forecaster for one of the local radio stations. He was friendly enough with my parents but they didn’t exactly socialize. Then, one of my siblings married a woman whose family (from a different town) was really close friends with their next-door neighbor, who was a radio weather forecaster. About 20 years ago I was standing around in a gay bar waiting for some of my unreliable friends to finally show up and was hit up by…a radio weather forecaster. Around the same time Better Half was out on Fire Island and he was hit up by a weather forecaster, but his was a better class, he worked for a local TV station.
You would think that for all the actors I know at least one of them would have gotten to know a bold-face name thespian and I might have been introduced to and befriended them, but oh no. Actually one of my friends was the lead in a nationally released movie but it bombed (it kind of ruined her career) so I’ll spare her a mention.
Criminal Minds, ugh. Shows like that have been a plague on the country with their propaganda of endless genius serial killers defeated by supergenius detectives able to extract conclusive evidence from a single molecule found on the antenna of a cockroach.
One thing that really struck me for the 10 minutes or so of the show I’ve seen is…
…how…
…padded…
…the dialogue…
…
…
…is.
Every character speaks so slowly, pauses, pauses some more, finally finishes their sentence, and then the other people in the room look around, say a word, pause, look around some more, then eventually get in a few more words, pause, shuffle….
I have to assume the actors fill their time while they’re waiting for their turn to give their lines by drifting off into wondering whether craft services will be having salmon or chicken for lunch, why the shirt they got from costuming has less starch than last time, whether the makeup artist noticed the scratch they got from their cat….
I’ve never actually knowingly seen an episode but we watch so much crime drama that it’s all a blur to me. Except for Mariska Hargitay, then I know we’re watching a L&O rerun, and I love Mariska because she is Jayne Mansfield’s and Mickey Hargitay’s daughter.
I just read her Wikipedia bio to find out who her dad was. I hadn’t realized she was in the car when her mother was killed. Yikes.
Solid recipe, looks delicious
Thank you for the scoop and the pasta!