The Vincent Pastore Top Five

Scorsese's gangster epic, and Pastore's first real credit, he's on screen for seconds, rolling a coat rack through the kitchen of the Bamboo Lounge, credited simply as "Man with Coat Rack." It's not a performance so much as a presence, but it's the film that put him in the room with De Niro, Pesci, and Liotta at the start of his career, and it set the template for the kind of world he'd spend the next three decades working in.

Brian De Palma's underrated companion piece to Scarface, with Al Pacino as a Puerto Rican ex-con trying to go straight and Sean Penn as the lawyer dragging him back in. Pastore plays a "Copa Wiseguy", another small, textural role, but a step up in visibility from Goodfellas, and proof he was becoming a reliable face for this kind of New York crime picture rather than a one-off extra.

A hard left turn, DreamWorks animation, and the first time Pastore gets to lead with his voice rather than his face. He plays Luca, a fish-mob enforcer, essentially sending up his own tough-guy image for a family audience. It's the film where you can hear how much personality he actually had underneath the background roles, and it's arguably his widest-reaching performance in terms of audience.

Guy Ritchie's ambitious, divisive crime thriller, tangled up in psychological trickery and philosophy as much as gangster plotting. Pastore plays Zach, a proper supporting role with real dialogue and screen time, a rung above the cameo work of his early films. It's messier and less loved than Ritchie's earlier hits, but it gave Pastore more to actually do than most of his film work up to that point.

Luc Besson's dark comedy about a mob family in witness protection, with Robert De Niro back in Pastore's orbit more than two decades after Goodfellas. By this point Pastore isn't background dressing, he's a known quantity, cast because audiences recognise him and the shorthand he brings. It closes the loop nicely: same actor, same well-worn world, but now with the audience already knowing his name.