Movie star’s roots go back to Holland
GENERATIONS of the Van Duyn family from Nieuwerkerk on the Dutch Schouwen-Duiveland island loved the names Gerrit and Kees. If your name was Cornelis, you’d name your son Gerrit, and vice versa. There were no Stevens. The Van der Hoevens from Beesd in Gelderland did something similar, with Kees and Gijs. Time and again they used the same first names. Even after they emigrated to America, as the Van Duyns did. But no one was named Steven.
Both families were early immigrants, which is why their last names changed their spelling gradually, to please English preferences. Van Duyn became VanDine, and the Van der Hoeven family was re-spelled Vanderhoof. Eventually both families intermarried, that was a matter of time. At that point it took only two generations. There was a Jon, a Ken, a Mike. And a Steve.
Steven Vincent Buscemi.
HE THOUGHT all his life that he was mostly Italian, even went to Sicily to learn how to pronounce his last name correctly, Bushemmi instead of Busemmi, but a TV show delved into his background twelve years ago, and discovered grandmother Amanda Vanderhoof.
He’s a great actor, and what’s more, a truly great guy. Refused all offers from dentists to straighten his teeth, because “then I will be out of work tomorrow.” He worked as a firefighter in Manhattan for four years, coming to the rescue of his old buddies in the aftermath of 9/11 by digging in the rubble for survivors, and got himself arrested protesting the closure of his old station. Intervened when two locals in a bar started beating up his friends, a fight about a woman: stabbing wounds all over his face, still visible today. All that, and also married to his wife Jo for thirty years, until her death five years ago.
STEVE Buscemi you recognize immediately, even if you have only seen him once somewhere, for example in The Sopranos, or more recently, in Miracle Workers with Daniel Ratcliffe. He has won a Golden Globe and an Emmy, and Screen Actors Guild awards four times. You look at him and you go, that’s Nucky from the Boardwalk, or, Tony Soprano’s cousin Tony. Not: hey, Zeeland, Gelderland! Yet that’s where he is from, from the home base of the Van Duyns and Van der Hoevens.
Photo caption:
Steve Buscemi, second from the right, stepping in as a firefighter during the search for survivors in the rubble of the World Trade Center, September 2001.
