‘Biggest flirt’
Before Gandolfini had three Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe hanging on his mantel, he was a typical Italian American boy growing up with his working-class family in a modest Westwood, New Jersey house.
His father served as the building maintenance chief at a Catholic school, and his mother worked as a lunch lady in a high school. Childhood friend Pam Donlan, who would go on to become a well-known actor in Hollywood, said of him as a “happy, cute little boy.”
The young man, who was slightly over six feet tall, was a popular student in his senior year at Park Ridge High School in New Jersey in 1979.
The Get Shorty star, who excelled in extracurriculars and academics alikе, studied theater in high school and honed his acting abilities there.
The Where the Wild Things Are star got to know John Travolta during these years; the latter’s father had a shop that the elder Gandolfini frequented.
