\n<\/p>\n
Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in the Corona section of Queens, Mr. Young got an early taste of the streets. \u201cMy dad, trying to make me a gentler kid<\/a>, sent me to Bryant High School in Astoria, away from my Corona pals,\u201d he wrote in the foreword to \u201cCorona: The Early Years,\u201d (2015), by Jason D. Antos and Constantine E. Theodosiou.<\/p>\n \u201cSoon, however, I got thrown out, and it was on to St. Ann\u2019s Academy in Manhattan, getting booted out after one term,\u201d he continued. \u201cFinally, it was the Marines at 16, my pop fibbing my age to get me in.\u201d<\/p>\n He started boxing in the Marine Corps and went on to a successful, if relatively brief, professional career under Cus D\u2019Amato<\/a>, the boxing trainer and manager who shepherded the careers of Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. He had a win-loss record of about 17-1 \u2014 his own accounts varied \u2014 when he quit the ring.<\/p>\n In his late 20s, he was laying carpets and doing other odd jobs when he became infatuated with a woman who tended bar, and who told him that she dreamed of studying acting with Mr. Strasberg. \u201cI didn\u2019t know who Lee Strasberg was,\u201d he told Bright Lights. \u201cI thought it was a girl.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Young set up a meeting for the two of them with Mr. Strasberg, the father of method acting, and ended up studying with him for two years. \u201cActing had everything I was fishing for,\u201d he recalled. \u201cIn my life till then, I\u2019d used tension to hold myself upright. Lee\u2019s great gift to me was relaxation.\u201d<\/p>\n His many other film credits ranged from \u201cLast Exit to Brooklyn\u201d<\/a> (1989), a harrowing adaptation of the scandalous<\/a> 1964 novel by Hubert Selby Jr. about lost souls from the underside of midcentury Brooklyn, to the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy \u201cBack to School.\u201d<\/a> Mr. Young also wrote and starred in \u201cUncle Joe Shannon\u201d<\/a> (1978), the story of a jazz trumpeter whose life implodes before he finds redemption.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n