That contrast — between what celebrity culture expects of famous people and what a former firefighter expected of himself — is what has made the story resonate in the two-plus decades since. It is not really a story about celebrity transcendence; it is a story about identity persistence. Buscemi became a famous actor, but he did not stop being the person who had worked at Engine 55. When the department he had served was in crisis, both selves responded. The famous actor’s resources and visibility became, over the following years, tools in service of the community that the firefighter identity had connected him to.
## Jo Andres and the Private Center
Any account of Steve Buscemi’s life and commitments is incomplete without some acknowledgment of Jo Andres, though the documentary record of her life and their relationship is limited in ways that make detailed description appropriate to limit.
Andres was an artist, a choreographer, and a filmmaker who maintained her own creative work throughout the years of their marriage. She directed the film Black Kite, a dance film, in 1992, among other projects. She and Buscemi met at Engine 55 — the accounts of the circumstances vary in small details, but the firehouse setting is consistent. They married in 1987. They had a son, Lucian.
She died in January 2019 after a long illness. The nature of the illness has not been publicly specified, and it would be inappropriate to speculate. She was sixty-three.
Buscemi spoke briefly and carefully about her loss in subsequent interviews, maintaining the privacy about his personal life that has been consistent throughout his career. He gave what he gave in public: the work, the civic commitments, the interviews about firefighting and September 11. The private interior of his life has remained largely private, which is not a failure of transparency but a choice about where the line falls.