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Andy Sipowicz

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Added by: patrickthekid

Read more about Andy Sipowicz at: Wikipedia

Official Site: 20th Century Fox Television

Andy Sipowicz is a fictional character and protagonist on the popular ABC television series NYPD Blue. Dennis Franz portrayed the character for its entire run.

Sipowicz was a New York City police detective working in a fictionalized version of the NYPD 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 was "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.

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.

Andy Sipowicz has not been a contender in any CBUB matches.