Trivia

Lou Reed saw the movie Flesh (1968) and that's where he got the idea for the third verse of the song "Walk on the Wild Side", which is about "Little Joe". Paul Morrissey told Lou to watch the movie and write about the characters in the film. The song is the end result.

His image from Andy Warhol's Flesh (1968) appears on cover of The Smiths' debut album "The Smiths". He also appears on The Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers" album (his crotch does, anyway). Andy Warhol picked through a drawer of Polaroids and photos and picked out the image for the cover.

Has a son, Mike, with whom he posed for a portrait by Greg Gorman in 1996.

Five roles in a row, from Flesh (1968) to Heat (1972), all of his characters were named Joe or Joey.

At age 15, Dallesandro drove a stolen car through the Holland Tunnel without paying the toll. He was stopped by a police roadblock and was shot once in the leg by police who mistakenly thought he was armed. Dallessandro managed to escape being caught by police, but was later arrested when his father took him to the hospital for his gunshot wound. He was sentenced to Camp Cass Rehabilitation Center for Boys in the Catskills in 1964.

He met pop artist Andy Warhol and film director Paul Morrissey while they were shooting Four Stars (1967) in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, and they cast him in the film on the spot. Dallesandro began working at the Factory as Warhol's bodyguard, general factotum, and occasional actor.

He was married at the age of eighteen, and he was hustling around Times Square to pay for his drug habit.

According to Dallesandro, Francis Ford Coppola wanted him to screen test for the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972). However, the offer fell through when Warhol told Coppola's entourage that Dallesandro was a drug addict.

Norwegian pop band Briskeby had a 2005 single called "Joe Dallesandro".

A biography, Little Joe: Superstar by Michael Ferguson was released earlier in 2001, and a filmed documentary, Little Joe (2009), was released with Dallesandro serving as writer and producer. His adopted daughter, Vedra Mehagian, also served as a producer of the film.

Aged 18, he married his first wife, Leslie, the daughter of his father's girlfriend, in 1967.

He was expelled from school for punching the school principal.

By the time Dallessandro was five years old, his mother was serving fifteen years in a U.S. federal penitentiary for interstate auto theft.

Rolling Stone magazine declared Dallesandro's second starring film Trash (1970) as the "Best Film of the Year", making him a star of the youth culture, sexual revolution, and subcultural New York City art collective in the early 1970s.

He was a sex symbol of gay subculture in the 1960s and 1970s, and of several American underground films before going mainstream.

Semi-retired from acting, as of 2009 Dallesandro managed a residential hotel building in Los Angeles.

Dallesandro's younger brother Robert Dallesandro died in 1977. He had worked for Warhol as a chauffeur, also appeared in the films Flesh and Trash.

He appeared in the Dandy Warhols' official video for "You are Killing Me" in 2016.

In February 2009, Dallesandro received the Teddy Award, an honor recognizing those filmmakers and artists who have contributed to the further acceptance of LGBT people, culture and artistic vision.

Joe Dallesandro is an American actor and Warhol superstar.