Armand Assante - A Life
ACTOR | WRITER | DIRECTOR
Career
The 74th Venice International Film Festival presented the Kineo Diamante Award to Armand in 2017.
2025
Internationally, he is the recipient of more than a dozen Lifetime Achievement Awards in the last twenty years
including the Enrico Caruso Award from the Italian Cultural Institute in both Rome, Italy and New York.
In 2024 American and European Film Festivals have responded to him with a cache of Awards for Best Actor for a small independent he Co-Produced in Manhattan’s Little Italy called ‘ Don Q’
He is soon to be seen in Jivan Avetisian’s Film ‘Revival’ and Dominik Sedlar’s ‘260 Days’ starring Tim Roth, both unflinching examinations of the cost of War.
He is currently co- developing a Documentary ‘Silent Dignity’ focused on Vietnam Veterans who have endured PTSD for over sixty years.
Currently he can be seen as the Philadelphia Boss in William DeMeo’s mob history of Brooklyn’s infamous neighborhood, ‘Gravesend’ on Amazon.
CAREER
Armand is a Four Time Golden Globe Nominee and in September of 1997 Assante received the Emmy for his portrayal of notorious crime boss, John Gotti, in HBO’s 1996 Biographical Drama Gotti, and had previously garnered nominations for Gotti in Golden Globe for Best Actor and Nominations for Screen Actors Guild Award and winning the Capri Hollywood Award in Italy in January of 1997.
In the same year Armand was honored at the Acropolis in Greece for his title role in the Hallmark Entertainment/ NBC four-hour miniseries The Odyssey directed by Andre Konchalovsky who received the Emmy for Outstanding Director and whom the Actor has often described as a seminal influence in his life.
Armand personally confided with Social Activist and acclaimed Author Jean Houston on interpreting The Odyssey. In 1997 The Odyssey was the highest watched miniseries on any Network since 1991 attracting 50 million viewers.
In 1998 he was nominated for Golden Globe for The Odyssey for Best Actor.
He previously received Golden Globe Nominations for Best Supporting Actor in Sydney Lumet’s Film ‘Q and A’ in 1990 and 1988’s CBS Production of ‘Jack the Ripper’ with Michael Caine and himself, garnering an Emmy Nomination in the same category in 1989.
One of the first Actors to matriculate in Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in 1983 he received the Special Jury Prize at the USA Film Festival for his title role of Belizaire the Cajun in 1986.
In the Independent Film World Armand is acknowledged for cultivating completely unknown Actors, Writers and Directors whose careers transformed because of his unwavering belief and proficiency.
Diverse Feature Films over four decades found him as the Cuban Band Leader Cesar Castillo in Arne Glimcher’s The Mambo Kings, based on the Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel by Oscar Hijuelos. He was suspected in the death of Jimmy Hoffa in Danny DeVito’s Hoffa penned by David Mamet opposite Jack Nicholson and he was Chief Advisor to Queen Isabella I in Ridley Scott’s epic 1492, Conquest of Paradise opposite Gerard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver and celebrated in New York again with Ridley Scott for “American Gangster” opposite Denzel Washington which received the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Cast in 2007.
Additional credits in from the late 70’s into the 2000’s include, Paradise Alley, Private Benjamin, Unfaithfully Yours, Little Darlings, I, The Jury, The Penitent, Animal Behavior, Fatal Instinct, Trial By Jury, Judge Dredd, Looking for an Echo, One Eyed King, Federal Protection, Consequence, Last Run, Citizen Verdict, Tough Luck, After the Storm, Dotkill, Two for the Money, The Lost, Striptease, When Nietzche Wept, California Dreamin’ and American Gangster.
In Telefilms Gotti, The Odyssey, Napoleon and Josephine: Sophia Loren Her Own Story, Kidnapped, Blind Justice, Fever, Hands Of A Stranger, Evergreen, Why Me, Rage of Angels, The Hunley, and On the Beach.
In the Spring of 2006, he sought Financing from Millenium’s Avi Lerner for Director Pinchas Perry’s debut and completed filming the title role in Irving Yalom’s critically acclaimed novel “When Nietzche Wept” in the role of the German philosopher Frederich Nietzche, in Rousse, Bulgaria. An independent Film barely even distributed he has received tributes internationally.
The Cannes Film Festival’s Premiere of ‘California Dreamin’ in 2007 received an 8 Minute Standing Ovation and the Camera D’or for 27-year-old Romanian Director Cristian Namescu who was killed tragically upon the Film’s completion a year prior.
Based on an incident during the Bosnian Conflict, it Won 21 International Film Festivals. Armand stood by Christi, his Script and the Studio tirelessly, since 2004.
A prominent Voice in Fan Wen’s critically acclaimed Book for the Animation of ‘Land of Mercy’, the Actor has been the Narrator of numerous International Documentaries, presently for Austria’s ‘Sebastian Kurz’ for PBS.
He was Nominated for the Annie Award for his Voice performance in the animated feature The Road to El Dorado with Kenneth Branagh and Kevin Kline.
During the production of Blind Dragon, a Documentary he had written and directed on the global landmine crisis, in the winter of 2003 in Africa, prior to boarding his rented plane, a government official in Angola warned Armand that upon landing, ‘protection money’ would expropriate his budget, and he was forced to stop filming.
A second Short Documentary he wrote, produced and directed in 2012 “Dialogue from the Steppes” focused specifically on ‘Semipalatinsk’ in Kazakhstan which under the USSR endured over 469 Nuclear Detonations between 1949 and 1989, the same year Nursultan Nazarbayev became President who in a courageous motion immediately gave Kazakhstan’s Fourth Largest Nuclear Arsenal in the World to the United States. In this singular gesture for geopolitical stability between Russian and the United States he joined the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and Committment to Global Nuclear Disarmament.
Receiving Best Short Film at the Tampa International Film Festival in 2013 he received the Career Achievement Award at the Minsk International Film Festival ‘Listapad’ in 2014 in Belarus.
He has served as President of the Jury at the Moldoist Film Festival in Kiev, Ukraine in 2012 and has held Master Classes in the US, Italy, and in Moscow, Russia. He is a longtime Board Member of the Garden State Film Festival.
EARLY LIFE
Born in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 1949 he is a native New Yorker and resident of Orange County, New York. He is the son of an Italian American Artist Armand A, Assante Sr. and an Irish American Musician and Poet Katherine Healy Assante.
In 1966 at the age of sixteen, restless and discontent with school, Armand announced to his Father, a First Infantry Marine Corps Veteran of WWII that he had decided to join the Marine Corps, the immediate riposte from his Father being, “Put yourself through school on your own buck now, you know nothing about the Marines and you’re not going to Vietnam.”
Armand finished school and as a laborer and professional Drummer and Singer he paid for his own education.
He has often reflected “My Father who was a genuine Hero to me, saved my life. Between 1968 and 1969 more nineteen-year-old American boys died in Vietnam than in the history of the entire War. He saved my life.”
Winner of the Kineo-Diamanti Award, Best Actor, Best Doc, Venice FF 2017
THEATRE
In 1967 seventeen-year-old Assante entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts where he won the Jehlinger Award for Best Actor in 1969, making his professional theatre debut that same year opposite Imogene Coca in Why I Went Crazy under the direction of Joshua Logan.
He spent close to ten years in Theatre, Music, and simultaneously 3 years in Daytime Television working eighteen hours a day before his film debut in 1977, opposite Sylvester Stallone in his Film ‘Paradise Alley.’
His Off Broadway Debut in 1971 was opposite Hal Holbrook in Lake Of The Woods by Steven Tesich produced by Wynn Handman at his American Place Theatre in New York.
In 1975 he joined Rubbers and Yanks 3, Detroit 0, by Reggie Jackson and Robert Wuhl, as well as S.J.Perelman’s The Beauty Part again at the American Place Theatre.
Playing the main stage of almost every regional theatre on the East Coast since he was nineteen years of age, additional New York stage credits include the Broadway productions of Boccaccio, Comedians, Romeo and Juliet and Edward Sheehan’s Kingdoms in 1982 as Napoleon Bonaparte.
A student of Mira Rostova at 21, he remained her student in New York for twenty- five years while employed. In the Nineties when leading roles came in succession, he engaged Cliff Osmond as his Script Analyst who worked closely with him for twenty years. Armand raised the initial financing for Cliff’s Film ‘The Penitent’ in 1985 and it was he who brought Raul Julia to the project, finally produced by Michael Fitzgerald.
HUMANITARIAN
The Actor whose Mother was paralyzed from the neck down with Polio the night he was born, has demonstrated staunch empathy for people severely afflicted frequently.
He has been a landmine removal activist and an active member of Landmine Survivors Network, which is a data based communications group that specializes in the immediate rehabilitation and medical assistance for landmine victims globally. LSN is based in Washington, D.C. and was founded by landmine survivors Jerry White and Ken Rutherford.
Present on active landmine sites in Croatia 1998- 2001 with Slavko Majetic, the head of Doking Engineering, Assante personally contributed and raised further financing for Doking Engineering, a firm specializing in the removal and detonation of landmines. His contributions created international assistance that addressed the landmine sweep in Croatia dramatically. He has been a guest of Croatia for over twenty years.
In 1988-1989 alongside Activist Mitch Snyder he campaigned for the Homeless in both New York and Washington D.C.
FAMILY
His Daughter, Anya, 42, a graduate of the University of Michigan has been Marketing Director for the clothing line ‘Theory’ in Manhattan. She has two children and Armand’s Daughter Alesandra, 36, attended Hunter College in Manhattan and is a working Film Actress, Singer/Composer.
They live in Manhattan and often frequent their Father’s 223 Acre Farm in the Hudson Valley, his preserve and realm residence for the past 41 years.
Armand’s outdoor passions has seen him raise Horses, champion bloodline German Shepherds, Bulls and Trees.