Tom Sizemore, the actor who saved Private Ryan dies The Irish Times

Tom Sizemore, a tough actor whose career, which included roles in Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, was at times overshadowed by his drug addiction and legal issues, died Friday in Burbank, Calif. He was 61 years old.

The death was announced by his manager, Charles Lago. The cause was not immediately known, but Sizemore suffered a stroke on February 18, which caused a brain aneurysm. He had been in a coma and on life support since then.

Sizemore could be intense, charismatic and manic in roles as soldiers, thugs, cops, killers and, in a TV movie, baseball player Pete Rose. As Sgt Mike Horvath in Steven Spielbergs Saving Private Ryan (1998), he was the devoted second-in-command to Captain Miller (played by Tom Hanks) in a small group of Army Rangers whose mission after the invasion of D-Day was to locate a soldier. whose three brothers had already died in combat.

Spielberg wasn’t the only high-profile director Sizemore worked with. In Oliver Stones Natural Born Killers (1994), he was an obsessed detective pursuing a young couple in a series of murders. In Michael Manns Heat (1995), he was part of a team of robbers led by Robert De Niro. And in Ridley Scotts Black Hawk Down (2002), based on a failed 1993 US military raid on Mogadishu, Somalia, to capture a brutal warlord’s lieutenants, he was the commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

When Sizemore starred in the television series Robbery Homicide Division, a police procedural set in Los Angeles and broadcast in 2002-2003, Robert Philpot of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said he was the main reason to watch.

Using his oversized head, which hangs slightly as if too heavy for his body, and his expressive eyes, Philpot wrote, Sizemore projects total authority, keeping underlings as well as suspects in line.

Sizemore was then struggling with serious drug problems, which dated back to the 1990s. Over the years, he used heroin, crystal meth and cocaine, and he was in rehab.

How long sober now? Larry King asked her on his show on CNN in 2010.

Three hundred and twenty-six days, said Sizemore.

What was the longest duration of your abstinence before that? asked the king.

A few minutes, Sizemore said. No that’s not true. I got sober in ’97 and stayed sober until 2002.

In 2003, he was found guilty of physically abusing his former girlfriend, Heidi Fleiss, who in the 1990s ran a high-end prostitution ring and was nicknamed in the media Hollywood Madam.

In a letter to the judge who sentenced him, Sizemore writes, I am convinced that if I had not been under the influence of drugs, I would have controlled my behavior.

He served eight months in prison.

In October 2004, he pleaded guilty to one count of methamphetamine possession and was placed on probation. The probation was revoked in 2005 when he was caught using a prosthesis to fake a drug test. His probation was later reinstated.

And in 2007, he served several months in prison for violating his probation after being arrested at a Bakersfield, California hotel for possession of methamphetamine.

The gods are trying to tell me he doesn’t want me to use drugs because every time I do I get caught, Sizemore said in a jailhouse interview with The Associated Press.

He appeared on 10 episodes of the reality series Celebrity Rehab With Dr Drew in 2010-2011, starring Fleiss, former basketball player Dennis Rodman, actor Mackenzie Phillips and others.

In a 2009 New York Times Magazine article on the series, Chris Norris wrote that Sizemore had fallen from an Olympus populated by Pacino, De Niro, Spielberg and Scorsese to this beige-carpeted, cable-only Hades.

Thomas Edward Sizemore Jr was born on November 29, 1961 in Detroit. His father was a lawyer. His mother, Judith (Schannault) Sizemore, worked for the Detroit City Ombudsman.

He graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit with a bachelor’s degree in theater in 1983, and earned a master’s degree in the same subject from Temple University in 1986. Three years later, he made his television debut in the series Gideon Oliver, and on film, in Lock Up, with Sylvester Stallone.

Lock Up was a flop, but United Press International wrote that Sizemore, as an intriguing inmate loser, emerged with semi-star potential.

His role as a gangster in Witness Protection (1999) earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries. That year, he and eight other Saving Private Ryan actors were nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast.

Sizemore continued to play characters on either side of the law, and despite his substance abuse issues, he remained busy for the rest of his career. He portrayed an internal affairs investigator on five episodes of Hawaii Five-O in 2011 and 2012; a CIA agent responsible for rescuing three American journalists taken hostage in Radical (2017); and a commander in the sci-fi film Battle for Pandora (2022).

And in a supernaturally creepy role, he played a depraved building manager who goes on trial for kidnapping and killing a little boy in a 2015 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Sizemore is survived by his mother; his twin sons, Jagger and Jayden; his brother, Paul; his half-sister, Katherine Sizemore; and his half-brother, Charles Sizemore. His brother Aaron died last year. His marriage to Maeve Quinlan ended in divorce.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times