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Rise to Fame
He got into The Godfather through an open call, the kind meant for actors without agents. That's how Salvatore Tessio ended up being the most quietly menacing traitor in the film. Three years later, Phil Fish on Barney Miller turned his naturally haggard face into a punchline and a character, and the role was popular enough that ABC gave him his own spin-off. Two landmark parts inside a decade, both built on the same quality: a face that looked like it had already given up.
In the Spotlight
People magazine declared him dead in 1982, when he was 60 and still working. Instead of ignoring it, he posed for a photo in Variety sitting up in a coffin holding the offending issue. That became a template. Letterman, Conan, and half the internet spent the next three decades treating his continued existence as the punchline. AbeVigoda.com launched in 2001 to track whether he was still breathing. When he actually died in January 2016, news outlets ran disclaimers in bold saying it wasn't a hoax. He'd spent 34 years being famous for not dying.
Side Notes
He spent roughly 25 years doing stage work before Hollywood found him, including Broadway productions in the 1960s. The Fish character worked because his face looked permanently resigned to disappointment, which is an impossible thing to manufacture. Off-screen, he was apparently the opposite: colleagues consistently described him as warm and generous. Al Pacino sent flowers to his family after he died in 2016, describing him as "a gentle kind soul." For a man who spent three decades being the punchline about death, his actual death brought out a lot of genuine affection.
Final Chapter
His funeral was held January 31, 2016, at The Riverside in New York, with over 100 people in attendance. Comedian Gilbert Gottfried opened the service with "This is the 20th time we buried Abe Vigoda," getting a laugh from the room. Robert Duvall wrote that it was impossible to watch The Godfather without remembering his performance. The 2016 Academy Awards left him out of the memorial reel, prompting enough backlash that the omission became its own news story.