John Ventimiglia

Ventimiglia was born in Ridgewood, Queens to Sicilian immigrants from Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily and grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey. Ventimiglia grew up speaking Sicilian at home with his parents and still speaks fluent Sicilian to this day. He graduated from Teaneck High School in 1981 where he played on the football team. In the 1980s he lived in the East Village with Michael Imperioli, who would later play Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos.Ventimiglia has had parts in feature films such as Cop Land, Jesus' Son, The Iceman, The Funeral, The Wannabe, and Mickey Blue Eyes and has appeared in numerous television shows including Law & Order and NYPD Blue. He also made a brief cameo in the made-for-television movie Gotti.

In August 2007, Ventimiglia and the David Amram quartet presented a musical and oral homage to sociologist C. Wright Mills and beat author Jack Kerouac. They continued with a Kerouac show in Denmark in autumn of 2007. Ventimiglia starred in the comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead (2008), playing the role of Theo Horace. In 2008, he played a small role as a police officer in Notorious. In 2011, he appeared as "Weinstein" in the film Flypaper.

In 2011, he starred in a small indie film, PONIES. In 2012, he guest starred in the short lived CBS series Made in Jersey. In 2012, he starred as General Humberto Delgado in the Portuguese film Operation Autumn, a film about Delgado's brutal assassination in Spain by the Portuguese fascists.

In 2016, he played Harry Magarac on the episode of Elementary, entitled "Murder Ex Machina", first aired on January 21, 2016. He also did narration for the Nat Geo television documentary series Inside the American Mob.