Biography

His mother Mary Ann (b. 1915- d. 2017) lived to the age of 101, passing away in April 2017.

Close friends with late actorMeshach Taylor,until his death on June 28, 2014. The pair were friends for over 40 years.

Until the age of 16, Joe had thought his birthday was November 10th. He found out it was really November 13th when he needed his birth certificate to get his drivers' license. His mother told him that because the cutoff date for starting school was the 10th, and she wanted to get back to work, she told the school (and Joe) that his birthday was November 10th.

April 26, 2004: Received the lifetime achievement award at the Los Angeles Italian Film Festival.

Owns the restaurant Taste Chicago in Burbank, California with his wife Arlene. The restaurant opened in 2003 and serves classic Chicago dishes such as deep dish pizza, Chicago hot dogs, pasta, and Italian beef sandwiches.

[referring to his voice role as mob boss Fat Tony] Nothing interferes with my doingThe Simpsons (1989)!

My father died just as I became an adult. It's a tough thing because you've kind of known this guy as a child and then, just at the point where you start to understand where he's coming from, he's gone. So now you look back and he almost becomes a mythical person to you.

[1991] I'm just grateful to get the work I do.

[2008, onThe Godfather: Part III (1990)] That was quite a year, because I wound up doing that role, and I also worked forWoody AllenonAlice (1990).I was shooting both films almost simultaneously. Literally, I would work onAlice (1990),then fly to Italy to work on Godfather, come back to New York, work onAlice (1990)again. Then Godfather came back to the States and I worked on that again. So that was a real productive year, 1989-1990.

(2008, on playing Dean Martin inThe Rat Pack (1998)) That might be in my top five characters I've played. I had such admiration for him and respect, and loved the era and that music. When I was offered that, it was similar to Godfather, in that my initial feeling was almost intimidation, like "Oh my God, can I really do this? He's such an icon. How do you do this and get anybody to buy it?". But HBO was great, I think they did it right. They spent enough money to do it right. Had a wonderful screenplay, and it was good people involved. Ray Liotta, Don Cheadle, Bill Petersen, everybody just down the line. Well-directed. The cinematographer was the same cinematographer who Christian Bale recently went fuckin' nuclear on. We didn't have that problem-he's a pretty good cinematographer, actually. He was great. In fact, if you look at The Rat Pack,the look of the film was a very big part of the film. It was beautifully shot. But anyway, I loved doing it, and I became dear friends with a few members of Dean Martin's family, his daughter Dina in particular, who actually has been wanting me to help her get a book she wrote of her life story into a film. So it was my introduction into that world, and it was great, we had great times on it. To this day, Ray and Cheadle and I are friends, especially Don, 'cause I see him more often. But it was just fantastic to play those guys, and the fact that Don won the Golden Globe and I was nominated with him-we both were nominated for Emmys as well-it was a satisfaction. For me, it was a payoff for all the work I did. Because I did do a lot of research, and I did work really hard to play Dean Martin, 'cause I didn't want to do him half-assed. I knew I couldn't exactly look like him, or sound like him, or sing like him, there's just no way. But I thought if I could just get the essence, if I could just for a couple hours have the people watching this film forget that it's an actor, you know what I mean, which can happen in any biographical film... At least I get enough comments about it that I feel, "Okay, I have nothing to be embarrassed about.".