The path from successful character actor to becoming a star is difficult. It’s even harder when you’re self-destructive. Tom Sizemore, who has died aged 61 after a brain aneurysm, will be best remembered for his roles in Saving Private Ryan, as Tom Hanks’s wise sergeant, and in Heat, as the muscle in Robert De Niro’s bank-robbing crew.
His characters were often informed by their volatility: affable nihilism could explode into violence, which made him a natural player of bent cops and detectives, as believable in straight roles as in over-the-top variations, such as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. But his own personality bore many of those same traits. His career was sidelined repeatedly by addictions to heroin and methamphetamines, and his peripatetic drug-fuelled sex life led to repeated cases of domestic violence.
In 1998, after starring as the criminal gangster boss John Gotti in the television film Witness to the Mob, Sizemore received a visit from De Niro and his mother, who forced him into rehab. Steven Spielberg then hired him for Private Ryan, provided Sizemore be drug-tested regularly, and threatening to reshoot all his scenes if he failed a single test.
Five years later, on the verge of television success as the lead in Robbery Homicide Division, he was kicked off the set of a movie, Piggy Banks, accused of molesting an 11-year-old female actor, and convicted of domestic violence against his then girlfriend, “Hollywood madam” Heidi Fleiss. The double scandal contributed to the TV show’s cancellation.
The two sides of Sizemore’s talent could be traced back to childhood. Born in Detroit, he was the son of Thomas Sr, a lawyer and philosophy professor, and Judith (nee Schannault), who worked in the city ombudsman’s office. A self-described “wayward, angry teen”, he was drawn to acting after watching Montgomery Clift, James Dean and Marlon Brando playing such roles, and by De Niro in Taxi Driver.
He was also influenced by his father’s two brothers. His sober father won a scholarship to Harvard; his uncles were exuberant denizens of a world of drugs and crime. Sizemore tried for years to produce a script about them, An Honest Thief, written by his lawyer brother Aaron, which nearly got made in 2014, starring Sizemore and Danny Trejo. It fell through; a much different version, Good Thief, eventually appeared, without Sizemore, in 2021.
He studied theatre at Wayne State University, Detroit, taking a master’s at Temple, in Philadelphia. He began in off-Broadway theatre in New York; his friends included James Gandolfini, John McGinley and Edie Falco, with whom he had a relationship.
His first film role was in Lock Up (1989), and among his other three roles that year was a part in Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July. He did Blue Steel (1990) and Point Break (1991) for Kathryn Bigelow, the Wesley Snipes vehicle Passenger 57 (1992), and the Quentin Tarantino-scripted True Romance (1993), directed by Tony Scott, where he turned down the part originally offered him because he did not want to beat up Patricia Arquette on screen, and suggested Gandolfini, in his first Hollywood movie, for the role.
During the filming of Natural Born Killers (1994) he and Juliette Lewis began an affair; for four months they stayed in her mansion, doing drugs and having sex. “Temptation is impossible for me to resist,” he said. “Come on, this is Hollywood … it’s in the job description.”
From there he played Bat Masterson opposite Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp (1994) and was excellent in Bigelow’s overlooked Strange Days (1995). He had earned a lead role, which came in Peter Hyams’s The Relic (1997), but another small though telling part in Enemy of The State (1998), along with Private Ryan, seemed to lock him into supporting roles.
In his memoir By Some Miracle I Made it Out of There (2013), Sizemore detailed a long affair with the actor Elizabeth Hurley. In 1996 he married Maeve Quinlan, who had also been in Natural Born Killers; they divorced three years later amid accusations of drug use and physical abuse.
He had leads in three TV movies before Robbery Homicide Division, which was based on the original Michael Mann script that eventually became Heat. When he was not charged with molestation Sizemore returned to Piggy Banks (retitled Born Killers, to capitalise on his notoriety). Fifteen years later, the child actor, now 26, sued him for $3m, but a Utah court dismissed the lawsuit; Sizemore dismissed the allegations as “misconstrued”. His 2003 conviction in the Fleiss case resulted in seven months in jail after he failed drug tests during his probation.
At the same time he began a relationship with Janelle McIntire. In 2005 the couple had twin boys, named Jaden and Jagger. Yet at that point he made a video film called Triple X Tom, with Jersey Jaxin and three other porn actors, in which he claimed to have slept with Paris Hilton. When the celebrity denied it, he said he had made it up to impress the other actors . He did receive an XRCO award nomination as “Best New Stud”. When McIntire divorced him in 2006, he began an affair with Maxine Entwistle, the former wife of the Who bassist John.
Arrests for drug possession and spousal battery followed. He appeared on two Celebrity Rehab shows in 2010 and reunited with Fleiss on Dr Phil (2013). He ping-ponged between scandals and small parts in as many as 16 films in a year, yet still held recurring parts in series such as Hawaii Five-O and Shooter. He was dropped from Shooter when, after accidentally running over a stunt man, he was convicted in 2017 of two charges of domestic abuse against a girlfriend. He was allowed to finish his probation sentence despite a 2019 arrest for heroin possession. His last big film was playing Liam Neeson’s FBI rival William Sullivan in Felt (2017).
Sizemore wrote in his memoir: “There are so many guys who had good lives, great lives, and blew it … I think there are some guys who think they don’t deserve to have good lives.”
He is survived by his sons.
• Tom (Thomas Edward) Sizemore, actor, born 29 November 1961; died 3 March 2023
