The more widely seen introduction came two years later, with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Released in 1992, the film was a heist movie told almost entirely in the aftermath of a robbery gone wrong, and it made Tarantino an instant cultural phenomenon. Buscemi played Mr. Pink, a member of the criminal crew who is distinguished by his insistence on professional detachment and his refusal to tip waitresses. In a film populated by vivid, quotable performances, Buscemi’s was among the most distinctive — Mr. Pink was simultaneously funny and unsettling, a man whose surface cynicism concealed a genuine anxiety. The role established him in the public consciousness.
He followed Reservoir Dogs with more Coen Brothers work — Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Fargo (1996), and The Big Lebowski (1998) — each time bringing the same quality of concentrated character work to roles that ranged from minor to substantial. He appeared in Pulp Fiction, Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado, Trees Lounge (1996, which he also wrote and directed), Con Air (1997), Armageddon (1998), and the animated Monsters, Inc. (2001). By the time the twentieth century ended, Steve Buscemi was one of the most recognizable faces in American cinema, even if most audiences would have had difficulty placing his name before they placed his face.
His personal life during these years was grounded in a relationship with Jo Andres, an artist and choreographer and filmmaker whom he had met at Engine 55 — she was visiting the firehouse for reasons that various accounts describe differently, but the setting was significant. They married in 1987 and had a son, Lucian. Andres maintained her own artistic career throughout their marriage, and the couple appears to have inhabited the same creative downtown New York world that had shaped Buscemi’s artistic identity. She died in January 2019, after a long illness. He remained in New York throughout his career, which was itself a statement of a kind: he was not a person who relocated to Los Angeles when the offers arrived.