Michael Imperioli

Michael Imperioli is an American actor, writer, director and musician whose career has spanned more than four decades. Born on March 26, 1966 in Mount Vernon, New York, he grew up in a working‑class Italian‑American family; his father was a bus driver and amateur actor and his mother a department‑store employee who also performed in community theater. After a brief plan to study pre‑medicine at SUNY Albany, Imperioli abandoned those ambitions at age seventeen and moved to Manhattan’s East Village to train at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, where he forged a lifelong friendship with future‑co‑star John Ventimiglia. His early breakthrough came with the role of Spider in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), which opened doors to a string of memorable supporting parts in films such as Jungle Fever, The Basketball Diaries, Bad Boys and Shark Tale. Imperioli’s most iconic performance arrived in 1999 when he was cast as Christopher Molti­zanti on HBO’s landmark series The Sopranos, a role that earned him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2004 and solidified his place in television history. Beyond acting, he co‑wrote the screenplay for Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (1999), penned five episodes of The Sopranos, and made his directorial debut with the feature The Hungry Ghosts (2008, which he also wrote). In recent years he has continued to diversify, starring as Dominic Di Grasso in The White Lotus (2022) – a performance that garnered another Emmy nomination – and appearing onstage in the 2024 Broadway revival of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. A committed philanthropist, he serves as artistic director of Studio Dante, supports The Jazz Foundation of America, and won the Chopped Tournament of Stars in 2014, donating $50,000 to the Pureland Project. His personal life is anchored by his marriage to Victoria Chlebowski since 1996, with whom he raises three children and practices Tae Kwon Do, while also embracing Buddhism and a lifelong passion for music as guitarist and vocalist for the band Zopa.