Actor, writer and director Chazz Palminteri wrote his own ticket to the top with his one-man stage play “A Bronx Tale,” an Italian-American coming of age story that wooed movie studios and Robert De Niro, who directed the 1993 screen adaptation. Palminteri’s starring film role as a Mafia boss set the tone for his subsequent film career, where he lent dimension to streetwise characters, like the undiscovered literary genius behind a craps-shooting bodyguard in “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994), for which he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. His soft-hearted tough guys
