Abe Vigoda: Still With Us

By Stephen M. Silverman

04/22/1998 at 12:00 AM EDT

Actor Abe Vigoda, best known for his TV role as Phil Fish on "Barney Miller" and, before that, as Tessio, one of the Corleone henchmen in the screen classic "The Godfather," turned 80 on March 18, and there was a party to mark the occasion, notes The New York Times. The paper also says that despite some reports to the contrary a few years ago, the actor is not dead. "People have known for some time that I'm alive," he told The Times. "People don't seem to stop and ask me anymore." He is about to star in a new movie, called "Tea Cakes or Cannoli," but despite all this good news, there is one role that Vigoda wishes he could have had but that just got away from him: that as the lead in Richard Attenborough's 1982 screen biography, "Gandhi." He claims that his agent once got a call about it. "I look Indian, Italian, whatever you want," said Vigoda. "But they came back and said: 'You look too young.' " Ben Kingsley won an Oscar as best actor for the role that clearly should have gone to Vigoda.