Andy Sipowicz
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Andy Sipowicz[1][2] is a fictional character on the popular ABC television series NYPD Blue. Dennis Franz portrayed the character for its entire run.[3].
Sipowicz is a New York City police detective working in a fictionalized 15th Precinct placed on the lower east side of Manhattan. He was the central character of the show during its twelve year run, and the only one to have been a regular cast member in every episode. (Detective Greg Medavoy (Gordon Clapp) did not appear until Episode 3 of the first season and did not become a regular until the start of Season 2.)
Jason Gay of The Boston Phoenix described Sipowicz as a "drunken, racist goon with a heart of gold" who is "the moral core" of NYPD Blue. In 1997 he described Sipowicz as becoming "sobered up" and that Sipowicz "won't ever go totally soft." Gay describes Dennis Franz as adding "underrated, edgy mixture of grit and sensitivity" to Sipowicz.[4]
According to a second season episode aired in 1995, Sipowicz was about to celebrate his 47th birthday on April 7, implying he was born in 1948. (This would make the character three and a half years younger than the actor.) His place of birth was Brooklyn where he worked in a local candy store as a boy, later returning under sad conditions when a son of the shop owners organized a robbery that led to his mother's death. Both his mother and father were of Polish origin and had blue-collar backgrounds. Andy's father suffered from alcoholism and lost his job as a meter reader because of this. He defiantly returned to finish his route after dark, but was stabbed in the eye by a black citizen who mistook him for a robber. The twisting of this story to make his father appear as the victim was the basis for Andy's racism; a major turning point for Andy came in Season 6 when he realized his father had lied about being an innocent victim of a black criminal when in fact his father was a racist liar.
Before becoming a policeman, Sipowicz served in the United States Army, doing an 18-month tour in Vietnam that he did not talk much about. He became incensed when an obnoxious fellow cop lied about being a combat veteran in Vietnam and told the jerk that he could lie to his heart's content about anything else but Andy would not let him lie about Vietnam. Although it is unclear at what point he joined the NYPD, it had to be somewhere in the early 1970s. One of his early police assignments was infiltrating the Black Panthers and posing as a leftist radical who wanted to help rob a bank in Andy's childhood neighborhood. These events accentuated his already-developing racist tendencies.
At some point in his police career, Sipowicz worked in Robbery Squad, but he transferred to the 15th by the mid-1980s, since he was already well established there in 1993 when NYPD Blue began to air. He received the gold shield of Detective Third Grade (the "beginning" rank) in 1978.
Andy was married to Katie Sipowicz for twelve years and they had a son, Andy Jr. (born 1973). However, by 1993 both his ex-wife and son were estranged from him, due to Andy's heavy drinking. After being shot six times in an ambush by a mobster named Alphonse Giardella and almost dying, Sipowicz decided to change his life. He stopped drinking, focused on the job, and rebuilt his relationship with his son.
When NYPD Blue premiered, Sipowicz's partner was John Kelly, who left the force in 1994 after withholding evidence in a murder investigation of his lover Janice Licalsi. After Kelly's resignation, Bobby Simone became Sipowicz's partner. They soon became best friends; Andy was devastated when Simone died of a heart disease in 1998. In 1994, Andy began to date Assistant District Attorney Sylvia Costas, with whom he previously clashed due to professional differences (Andy called her a "pissy little bitch" in the premiere episode). They were married in 1995 and had a son Theo in 1996.
On his route to becoming a better man, Sipowicz struggled to overcome his bigotry with help of his black precinct chief, Lt. Arthur Fancy. He also came to terms with his dislike of homosexuals due to his initially-grudging friendship with precinct receptionist John Irvin. With the birth of his second son, Sipowicz's life seemed to be going well. Then came a series of personal tragedies over the next few years. Andy Jr., who was planning on entering the police academy, was shot and killed while trying to stop a robbery. In 1998, Bobby Simone died of a heart infection, and in 1999 Sylvia was killed by a mad gunman in a courtroom, followed by the disappearance and subsequently revealed murder of partner Danny Sorenson. He also survived a bout with prostate cancer in 1998.
Sipowicz came out of these tragedies stronger than ever, and continued to be a decent man, mostly due to his love for and responsibility to his son, Theo. In 2003 he married for the third time, a fellow detective named Connie McDowell, who had joined the squad. In 2004 Connie's pregnant sister was killed by her abusive husband. The baby survived, so Connie and Andy took custody of this child, naming her Michelle after her mother. Soon after, Connie, who had believed she could not have children due to scarring of her Fallopian tubes, became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy named Matthew. With two infants to raise, Connie resigned from the police force to be a stay-at-home mother. Later that year, Sipowicz, after overcoming a personality clash with new Lt. Thomas Bale, was promoted to the rank of sergeant, becoming the squad commander at the 15th as the series came to a quiet and dignified finale.
Sipowicz's blue-collar conservativism never changed, leading him to often mock President Bill Clinton, of whom he once said, "A guy gets over like that on your daughter, you'd give him the beating of his life. Here we got him running the country!" and whom he also referred to as a blowhard, which Simone did not agree with. He called New York Governor George Pataki "my hero" because of his support for capital punishment.[citation needed]
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