In a 1990 interview with The New York Times Magazine, he appeared to dismiss Method techniques and preparation. “You know what I do backstage?” he said. “One minute before I go on, I look up at heaven and say, ‘Mama, don’t let me make a fool of myself.’”

He is perhaps best known for playing Sal, the morally complicated pizzeria owner in Spike Lee’s 1989 film, “Do the Right Thing.”

Here’s what else you may not know about him.

He dropped out of high school, joined the Army and was based in Germany during the Korean War.

He was a baggage handler for Greyhound in Manhattan and gave the public its first taste of his raspy voice when he started his job there as public address announcer, calling out the names of the stops for departing buses.

He wandered into a softball game organized by the Broadway Show League. One player, Budd Friedman, who owned the Midtown nightclub the Improv, offered him a job as a bouncer. Soon Mr. Aiello was filling in as M.C. at the Improv and doing late-late-night readings from “The Godfather” (the book, that is; the movie hadn’t been made yet).

A playwright patron, Louis LaRusso, persuaded Mr. Aiello to be in a production of his play “Lamppost Reunion.” The play opened Off Broadway in 1970, with Mr. Aiello making his New York stage debut at age 37 as a Hoboken bar owner. When the play finally made it to Broadway, in 1975, Mr. Aiello was back in the role.

His first film role was in the baseball drama “Bang the Drum Slowly” (1973), with a young Robert De Niro. The next year, the two men appeared in “The Godfather: Part II.” Mr. Aiello improvised a memorable line as his character strangles a rival mobster: “Michael Corleone says hello.”