Andy Sipowicz

Andy Sipowicz
NYPD Blue character
Dennis Franz as Det. Andy Sipowicz Season 2 Promotional Photo
First appearance	"Pilot"
Last appearance	"Moving Day"
Portrayed by	Dennis Franz
Information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Policeman
Title	Sergeant
Spouse(s)	Katie Sipowicz (ex-wife) Sylvia Costas (wife, deceased) Connie McDowell (wife)
Children	Andy Sipowicz, Jr. (son, deceased) Theo Sipowicz (son) Matthew Sipowicz (son) Michelle McDowell (adopted daughter)
Nationality	American

Andrew "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 the detective squad of the fictitious 15th Precinct of the NYPD, 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.) He is from 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. His father was an alcoholic whose frequent drunkenness cost him his job as a meter reader. He defiantly returned to finish his route after dark, but was stabbed in the eye by a black man who mistook him for a robber. He claimed that the black man had tried to rob him; Andy grew up hearing the story, which was the basis for his racism. In season 6, however, he realizes that his father was lying, and begins to question the values he was raised with.

Before becoming a policeman, Sipowicz served in the U.S Army, serving an 18-month tour in Vietnam that he did not talk much about, however it is an underlying theme in the show. He once became incensed when an obnoxious fellow cop named Sgt. Ray Collins lied about being a combat veteran in the Vietnam War, and told the man that he could lie to his heart's content about anything else, but he would not let anyone lie about serving in the Vietnam War. Although it is unclear at what point he joined the NYPD, it is most likely in the early 1970s. One of his early police assignments was infiltrating the Black Panthers organization and posing as a white leftist radical (this is probably derived from real-life experiences of NYPD Blue writer Bill Clark, a retired NYPD detective). These events accentuated his already-developing racist tendencies.