The actor Tom Sizemorebest known for playing Sergeant Mike Horvath in ‘Saving Private Ryan’, he died following a cerebral aneurysm that had struck him on February 18th. Sizemore, 61, died “peacefully in his sleep at the Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank” where he was hospitalized, “with his brother Paul and the actor’s twins Jayden and Jagger at his side. This was reported by his manager, Charles Lago, who earlier this week stated that the doctors assisting the actor had informed the family that there was no more hope for Sizemore, suggesting that end-of-life procedures be initiated .
Sizemore first gained notoriety in 1998 when Steven Spielberg cast him opposite Tom Hanks and Matt Damon in the Academy Award-winning WWII film ‘Saving Private Ryan’. A role that changed his career. In fact, Sizemore was about to start shooting Terrence Mallick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’ when Spielberg called him and asked: “Do you want to go to Australia with Terry Malick or do you want to come to Great Britain and Ireland with me and Tom Hanks?”. The actor chose to go with Spielberg. And in a 2018 interview he confessed that that had been “a fundamental experience for me” because “Steven and his staff were working on a totally different level from what I had seen up until then”. And he added, “The scope of his vision, the attention to detail, was beyond anything I’d ever imagined.”
Born November 29, 1961, Thomas Edward Sizemore Jr. was raised in Detroit. His father was a lawyer and professor and his mother a city ombudsman. “I was a tough kid,” Sizemore said in 1995. Sizemore’s family moved to the suburbs until his parents divorced and the children moved back to Detroit with their mother. At age 16, Sizemore “wanted to get on” with his life. “I knew I wanted to be an actor,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “I wanted to get out of Detroit.”
After attending Wayne State University, Sizemore earned a master’s degree in theater from Temple University and moved to New York City to pursue acting. His first break came when Oliver Stone cast him in a small role in ‘Born on the Fourth of July’. Sizemore played tough guy roles throughout the 1990s in films such as Natural Born Killers, Wyatt Earp and Heat. In 2000, he received a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of an ex-mobster on the run in the TV movie “The Witness’s Cold Eye.” He also had a lead role in the movie ‘Black Hawk Down’.