You usually had a good idea of a Frank Vincent character just from his name. Billy Batts. Joey Big Ears. Dino the Rat. Tommy the Bull. Or, when he was really starting out, simply, "Mafia Thug."

But you didn't know the real Frank Vincent -- a Jersey City boy who idolized Dean Martin, once had a night-club act with buddy Joe Pesci, enjoyed a good hand-rolled cigar, and even wrote a book "A Guy's Guide to Being a Man's Man."

It was well-titled. And his life -- which sadly ended, during open-heart surgery on Wednesday -- was well lived. (Frank was always cagey about his age -- there are a couple of birthdates out there -- but I'm guessing the earliest one is the closest to being right.)

He leaves behind his wife, Kathleen, and three children. And movies, and memories -- like mine of the great time we had nearly 15 years ago, as he was, typically, giving everything his all....

*

IT is 8:30 on a hot August night in Manhattan, and Frank Vincent is on the roof of the Gershwin Hotel, waiting.

"Endurance," he says. "This is a business of endurance."

Vincent has endured a lot over nearly 25 years as a character actor. Right now, as a co-star and co-producer, he is enduring this, a crowded, tar-beach preview party for his latest film, "This Thing of Ours."

There's a barbecue, with a cook flipping steaks. Two women sit at a folding table, chatting and slicing rolls. There are more cigars in hands than cellphones, and when the DJ plays an old Pretenders song, whip-thin twentysomethings in heels and tight jeans bop their heads.

It's all more old Hoboken than new Hollywood, but that's all right. All the makers of the unreleased "This Thing of Ours" need is one Hollywood person, just one, to walk into this screening with a checkbook. And once a check is signed, this thing of theirs - shot in Jersey, made by Jerseyans - becomes a movie in a real theater.

"It's always a work-in-progress," Vincent says quietly, in between greeting guests and potential investors. "You get a little closer, a little closer. But like the car salesmen say, it's not a done deal till you see the taillights leave the lot."

TWO weeks before the party Frank Vincent slips into GoodFellas, an upscale Italian restaurant in Garfield. The restaurant isn't crowded, yet, but the owner still knows to make sure Vincent gets a table in a quiet corner. For a long time, the actor keeps on his dark glasses.

"Sometimes people start with you," he says. "Especially in local places - 'Hey, go get your shine box,' " he says, quoting his big line from the movie "GoodFellas." "So I go out earlier. I wear sunglasses and a cap ... . That's the downside of being successful."

Long before he was recognized as one of Martin Scorsese's favorite faces, Frank Vincent was Frank Gattuso in North Adams, Mass., born "mumblemumble" years ago. Later the family moved to Jersey City, where Vincent's father - "a very handsome, Errol Flynn kind of guy" - ran a dress factory and a gas station.

His father was also an amateur actor, and encouraged his son to take music lessons. Vincent began appearing in school plays, and rattling the house with his Jolson impressions, blacking his face and singing "Mammy." He also started following music - the Count Basie band was a favorite - and practicing the trumpet and drums.

"I'm dating myself now, but when I was 14, 15 years old I belonged to St. Joseph's Drum and Bugle Corps and we used to get the bus into the city," he remembers. "And we would sneak over to Minsky's burlesque and look for tickets people dropped outside during intermission, and we'd grab the stubs and go in for the second half. Seeing that live show, with the girls and the comedians and the music - it was all I ever thought about. It was, like, an aspiration."

Show business, however, "was not a business my family understood," he says. When Vincent dropped out of high school at 16, a gas-jockey job at his father's station was waiting for him. After days spent learning to fix transmissions - and long hours at home, trying to get the grease out from under his fingernails - Vincent decided to leave it waiting.

Eventually he picked up work as a drummer, playing in nightclubs, recording with everyone from Steve and Eydie to Little Anthony and the Imperials. Finally he formed the Arist-o-cats, a trio with a bass player and a little guitarist from Newark named Joe Pesci. In between songs, Vincent and Pesci would insult each other; eventually they put away the instruments and became a comedy team.

"It wasn't much of an act," Pesci says later, by phone.

"It was very ethnic, very slick humor," Vincent says. "Don Rickles stuff, you know. "Oh, I love that jacket. You buy it new?'"

"Over time, Frank had started to evolve into this insult comic," Pesci explains. "I would stick up for the audience and insult him."

"We were like the Smothers Brothers," Vincent says.

Like the Smothers Brothers with a vicious agent. Instead of hip Greenwich Village coffeehouses, the pair played tiny North Jersey clubs, "where people are drinking, and no one is listening, and you had to learn how to get their attention," Vincent says. Many of the places, Pesci says "were full of rough characters and wannabes."

It was the real "GoodFellas" world - only seen from the other side of the stage, looking out at an audience of big men at tiny tables knocking back Chivas doubles. Vincent remembers one night when a gentlemen approached the stage and quietly told the two they really, really should stop making fun of his girlfriend's hat.

The gun in his waistband convinced them to take his advice.

"Those days, you saw a lot of those guys," Vincent says. "And I tell you, it was a very glamorous time. There was a lot of money, a lot of women, everybody dressed up, and those guys would go out spending money, seven nights a week ... But that era's gone."

When it went, it took many of the duo's steady gigs with it. "We were too early for the comedy clubs," Vincent says, "and the bars all started putting up that ball, and playing disco, and it started getting tougher to get jobs." The two appeared in a low-budget gangster movie called "Death Collector" in 1975; Vincent started emceeing a Gong Show night at a bar in Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Then Martin Scorsese cast the pair in a picture called "Raging Bull."

THE party has been going on for awhile now.

In one corner, a young woman with a Hustler T-shirt chats with an older man with tightly muscled arms. Former "Sopranos" star Vincent "Big Pussy" Pastore holds court at the bar. A producer named Anthony Esposito confides that he's developing a movie with Vincent about drugdealers and the Amish; Mariah Carey is being approached to co-star.

Then director Danny Provenzano comes in, looking thrilled.

After small parts in movies with titles like "Vampire Vixens From Venus," the Upper Saddle River resident hopes "This Thing of Ours" - in which he also co-stars - will get him known as a filmmaker. Currently he is chiefly known as the great-nephew of deceased Teamsters boss and reputed mob captain Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, and the defendant in his own upcoming racketeering case. He's facing trial on a 44-count indictment that includes extortion and kidnapping charges.

"Frank's a class act," says Provenzano, who hopes to direct him in the Amish picture. "You think gangster, you think sharp, you think Frank. He's got such a great face."

And then Provenzano sees Steve Tyler come in - the singer's Aerosmith bandmate, Joe Perry, did the music for the movie - and interrupts himself to hurry away with a quick, hungry grin. There are celebrities to meet. There are distributors to court. There is, somewhere, a deal to be made.

And, thanks to Bergen County prosecutors, a real deadline to meet.

"THERE was an article about me once, and the first line was "It's good to be a gangster'," Vincent says, finishing his frittata. "Well, I'm not a gangster. I'm an actor."

It's not that Vincent is squeamish about the subject, or in some state of denial about the Mafia. He saw plenty of mobsters in the bars he used to play. Plenty more became fans after he started playing them on screen. A few even became critics.

"They didn't like it when Joe beat me up in "Raging Bull,'" he says. ""Why'd you let that little guy beat you up?' And this one guy, Blackie something, I don't remember his name, but I remember him saying "What is it with the f------ language in that picture?' And, I thought, this guy's killed nine guys and he's concerned about the language?'"

It's not that Vincent minds playing gangsters, either. He had great parts in "Raging Bull" and "GoodFellas" (and got viciously attacked by Pesci in both of them); he had another good part in "Casino" (and finally got his old partner back, with a baseball bat). He realizes the mob roles are the ones he's remembered for and, as a character actor, believes "it's better to be typed than not typed."

Still, the shallowness of the assumptions annoys him. Vincent's a good uptempo drummer, with a genuine love of jazz; he's a natural comic, when he's gotten the chance to show it in films like "She's the One." He's worked with Scorsese, Spike Lee, Brian De Palma and John Sayles. But because he's a big, dark Italian-American, some people assume the gangster parts he's played are the only ones he can, or even the person he really is.

It's a hurdle a lot of actors have faced, and a situation that Vincent's friends protest.

"People typecast you because they're not very imaginative," says Pesci. "They need a certain kind of actor and they know you did that part before and so they come to you. And Frank can do a lot of things. He's very natural, and he's got a good sense of humor and a quick wit."

"He's a gifted and talented person, very giving," says Pastore, who appears in "This Thing of Ours" and just began shooting a Romeo-and-Juliet comedy with Vincent called "A Tale of Two Pizzas." "I came to this late, and when I started, he recommended me for a lot of jobs. He's like a teacher, really. When we're not working, I call him Uncle Frank."

Uncle Frank isn't ready for the rocking chair and the bocci court yet, though - or resigning himself to playing nothing but middle-aged, mid-level mobsters. Recently he's been reaching out to younger filmmakers, making his own opportunities. That's why he made "This Thing of Ours." That's why he's making "A Tale of Two Pizzas," and developing "Sinking Springs," the Amish film.

It is all, he explains, part of the business - and some of that business involves risk, and tradeoffs.

Not every director is a Scorsese. ("We are so connected that there's a little Morse code - he just says "Yes', or "No', and you know where he wants you to go with it.") Chances to work with people like Lee (in "Jungle Fever" and "Do the Right Thing"), or Sayles (an early part, as a singer, in "Baby It's You") don't come along every year. Sometimes the directors are untried or uncertain.

But Vincent isn't.

"It's just so refreshing to be with someone who appreciates film and is so professional about it," says Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno. Currently the Newark filmmaker is working on a feature about the '67 riots; previously she made a documentary about Vincent for the Independent Film Channel, and directed him in a straight-to-cable picture, "Rub Out."

"He's very intelligent, very observant," she says. "He is not the stereotype of his characters at all."

"This Thing of Ours" was an attempt to stretch the stereotype a bit. Vincent has a larger part as a boss; the crimes are more high-tech than usual and James Caan has a cameo, giving the low-budget film a nostalgic link to "The Godfather." It should have challenged the cliches, a little. Instead, the charges against its director have only emphasized them.

"I don't know about it," Vincent says firmly, asked about Provenzano's indictment. "I don't know about it. I don't know about any of the legalities. I've been to two hearings, to support him as an associate and an artist, but as far as knowing any details ... ."

His voice trails off.

"I understand he's going to defend himself and that's considered to be a pretty foolish move," he says finally. "But he's a very daring kid and hopefully it will turn out OK ... I met with Danny 10 years ago at this table, about a project. Making movies is what he's always wanted to do."

The topic makes Vincent a little uncomfortable. Partly that's due to an old-fashioned, neighborhood-guy circumspection (he obliquely refers to John Gotti as "that one who just died," and prison terms as "going away"); mostly it's due to his weariness with the old cliches. When Vincent says that Provenzano's problems are due to "guilt by association, absolutely," it's with conviction; the actor knows what it's like to contend with stereotypes.

It's why would-be wiseguys with a couple of drinks in them start up with him in bars. It's why, known as he is as an actor, he still has to initiate some of his best projects himself. "I can't imagine why he's not on a TV comedy," says Bongiorno. "He's perfect for it. He's attractive, articulate, funny - he just loves life."

And he does - which is how, ultimately, he's able to take this in stride. Vincent has his house in Nutley, and his wife, Katharine, and three children. He still plays drums and hangs out in the neighborhood. He still has the same friends he's had for decades. No matter how many characters he's played, he still knows who he is.

"He's always been a good friend," says Pesci. "He's been a better friend than I am, 'cause I tend to want to just go off by myself. But it's never been the kind of friendship where, you know, "You never call me, you haven't called me in six months.' And when we do get together, it great."

And Vincent still has the work - and his sense of perspective.

"Actors are real egomaniacs," he says. "They get into a movie, they think the whole movie's about them. Well, as a character actor, you have to understand that it's not about you. You have to remember it's about someone else's life. And your character is just passing through."

BACK at the Gershwin Hotel, the movie screens to several dozen people, interrupted occasionally by the real police sirens of the city. There's applause afterward, and then the guests go back to their drinks. Vincent holds the center of the space, surrounded by friends.

A week later, he says that there were "nibbles," but the movie remains unsold.

"You have to have the confidence that it'll be seen, but as an actor there's not much you can do," he says. "You try your best and promote the film and just hope the producers they have their business hats on correctly and can do it. I would say that 90 percent of the film I've done has eventually reached an audience, either on dish or video or cable or theaters."

"In the meantime," he says, "I start a new film on Saturday."

Stephen Whitty may be reached at stephenjwhitty@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwhitty. Find him on Facebook.

