Alex Rocco, the gravelly-voiced actor whose gallery of memorable characters included Moe Greene, the cocky, bespectacled Las Vegas casino owner who made the mistake of talking back to Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” died on Saturday at his home in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 79.

The cause was cancer, his manager, Susan Zachary, said.

Mr. Rocco had fairly limited screen time in “The Godfather” (1972), but he emerged from that film with a collection of signature lines, including “You don’t buy me out. I buy you out” and “Do you know who I am?” (both spoken to the Godfather-in-waiting, played by Al Pacino), and a Hollywood reputation for stealing scenes with little more than a Boston attitude and his eyebrows.

In 1990 he won an Emmy Award for his role as a larger-than-life old-school talent agent in the well-reviewed but short-lived Jon Cryer sitcom “The Famous Teddy Z.”

Mr. Rocco’s other noteworthy films included “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973), with Robert Mitchum; “Freebie and the Bean” (1974), one of several projects he did with Alan Arkin; Tom Hanks’s “That Thing You Do!” (1996), as a fast-talking music executive; “The Wedding Planner” (2001), as Jennifer Lopez’s old-fashioned father; and “A Bug’s Life” (1998), as the voice of the grumpy grain-counting ant Thorny. (He once said of his voice work, which also included the role of a cynical cartoon producer on “The Simpsons,” “It’s like stealing money.”)