Robert De Niro¶
At a glance¶
- Born
- August 17, 1943, Greenwich Village, New York
- Parents
- Robert De Niro Sr. (abstract expressionist painter) and Virginia Admiral (painter)
- Trained
- Stella Adler Conservatory; briefly the Actors Studio
- Academy Awards
- 2 — Supporting Actor, The Godfather Part II (1975); Actor, Raging Bull (1981)
- Godfather role
- Young Vito Corleone, Part II
The near-miss¶
De Niro auditioned for the first film. He read for Sonny, for Michael, and for Carlo, and was cast as Paulie Gatto — Vito's driver, who calls in sick on the day of the shooting and is shot in the back of the head in a New Jersey marsh.
Then Pacino's casting as Michael freed a role in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, and De Niro left to take it. Which is the only reason he was available, three years later, to play the man Paulie Gatto worked for.
His screen test survives in the disc supplements and is worth seeking out — it is recognizably the same actor and not remotely the same performance.
Young Vito¶
The hardest assignment in the trilogy: play Brando's character at half the age, in a different language, without doing an impression, in a film where the audience will be checking every frame against a performance they already love.
His solution was to take almost nothing from Brando's voice and everything from his economy. What carries over is the watchfulness, the refusal to fill silence, and the sense of a man who has already decided what he is going to do while everyone else is still talking. The Fanucci killing is played almost entirely in the eyes.
He learned Sicilian for it, spending time in Sicily beforehand, and speaks almost no English in the film — which is startling for a lead performance in an American studio picture and was, at the time, essentially unheard of.
He won Best Supporting Actor and did not attend the ceremony.
He and Brando are the only two actors ever to win Academy Awards for playing the same character. They never appear on screen together in the trilogy, and the closest they came was The Score (2001), twenty-seven years later.
The rest¶
The Scorsese partnership is one of the defining collaborations in film: Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980) — for which he won Best Actor and gained roughly sixty pounds — The King of Comedy (1982), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Casino (1995), The Irishman (2019), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
Elsewhere: The Deer Hunter (1978), where he reportedly paid John Cazale's insurance so the dying actor could finish the film; The Untouchables (1987); Awakenings (1990); Heat (1995), his first on-screen scene with Pacino; Jackie Brown (1997); and then a long, lucrative comic second act — Analyze This, Meet the Parents — that a certain kind of critic has never forgiven him for and that he has never apologized for.
Eight Academy Award nominations across five decades. He co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002, in part as a response to 9/11 and to the state of Lower Manhattan afterward.
The Part IV that wasn't¶
The unmade fourth film would have brought him back as Vito in the 1930s, running against Andy García's Vincent in the 1980s, with Leonardo DiCaprio discussed for young Sonny. Puzo's death in 1999 ended it. The 1930s material survives as Ed Falco's The Family Corleone.