Burt Young, ‘Rocky’ Actor Who Played Complex Tough Guys, Dies at 83

Growing up in a working-class neighborhood within the Corona part of Queens, Mr. Young received an early style of the streets. “My dad, trying to make me a gentler kid, sent me to Bryant High School in Astoria, away from my Corona pals,” he wrote within the foreword to “Corona: The Early Years,” (2015), by Jason D. Antos and Constantine E. Theodosiou.

“Soon, however, I got thrown out, and it was on to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, getting booted out after one term,” he continued. “Finally, it was the Marines at 16, my pop fibbing my age to get me in.”

He began boxing within the Marine Corps and went on to a profitable, if comparatively temporary, skilled profession underneath Cus D’Amato, the boxing coach and supervisor who shepherded the careers of Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. He had a win-loss file of about 17-1 — his personal accounts different — when he give up the ring.

In his late 20s, he was laying carpets and doing different odd jobs when he grew to become infatuated with a girl who tended bar, and who advised him that she dreamed of finding out appearing with Mr. Strasberg. “I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was,” he advised Bright Lights. “I thought it was a girl.”

Mr. Young arrange a gathering for the 2 of them with Mr. Strasberg, the daddy of methodology appearing, and ended up finding out with him for 2 years. “Acting had everything I was fishing for,” he recalled. “In my life till then, I’d used tension to hold myself upright. Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”

His many different movie credit ranged from “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1989), a harrowing adaptation of the scandalous 1964 novel by Hubert Selby Jr. about misplaced souls from the underside of midcentury Brooklyn, to the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School.” Mr. Young additionally wrote and starred in “Uncle Joe Shannon” (1978), the story of a jazz trumpeter whose life implodes earlier than he finds redemption.