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• Born: 25 April 1940
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Best Known As: Star of The Godfather and Scent of a Woman

Al Pacino went from success on the New York stage to almost instant stardom in the movies, thanks to his Oscar-nominated role as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972, also starring Marlon Brando). Pacino was a critical and popular hit during the '70s, appearing in several gritty dramas, including as real-life cop Serpico (1973, Oscar nomination), The Godfather, Part II (1974, Oscar nomination), and in Dog Day Afternoon, (1975, Oscar nomination) and ...And Justice for All (1979, Oscar nomination). In the 1980s he made only a handful of films, but in the '90s he made more than a dozen movies, including 1992's Scent of a Woman, for which he won an Oscar, and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992, Oscar nomination), Heat (1995, co-starring Robert DeNiro) and The Insider (1999, with Russell Crowe). One of the most celebrated actors in movie history and still going strong, Pacino appeared with Robin Williams in 2002's Insomnia and with Colin Farrell in The Recruit (2003).

Pacino, Al (b. 1940), actor. The brooding, dynamic movie star who specializes in playing antiheroes began in the New York theatre and has returned much more often than most film stars of his stature. A native New Yorker, he briefly attended the High School of the Performing Arts before studying at the Herbert Berghof Studio and at the Actors Studio, then made a provocative debut Off Broadway in 1968 as the drunk prankster Murph in The Indian Wants the Bronx. He was further praised the next year for his Broadway performance as the drug addict Bickham in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (1969). Pacino's film career began in 1971, but he managed to find time for such riveting stage performances as the boxing champ Kilroy in Camino Real (1970); the gullible, doomed recruit Hummel in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1977); a fierce Richard III (1979); the small‐time crook Walter Cole with a big‐time ego in American Buffalo (1981); the talkative salesman Erie Smith in Hughie (1996); and the Hitler‐like gangster Arturo Ui in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (2002).

• Born: Apr 25, 1940 in New York City, New York
• Occupation: Actor, Director, Writer
• Active: '70s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Crime
• Career Highlights: The Godfather Part II, Serpico, The Godfather
• First Major Screen Credit: The Panic in Needle Park (1971)

Biography

Brooding and intense, Al Pacino has remained one of Hollywood's premier actors throughout his lengthy career, a popular and critical favorite whose list of credits includes many of the finest films of his era. Pacino was born April 25, 1940, in East Harlem, NY. Raised in the Bronx, he attended the legendary High School for Performing Arts, but dropped out at the age of 17. He spent the next several years drifting from job to job, continuing to study acting and occasionally appearing in off-off-Broadway productions. In 1966, Pacino was accepted to train at the Actors' Studio, and after working with James Earl Jones in The Peace Creeps, he starred as a brutal street youth in the off-Broadway social drama The Indian Wants the Bronx, earning an Obie Award as Best Actor for the 1967-1968 theatrical season. A year later, he made his Broadway debut in Does the Tiger Wear a Necktie? Although the play itself closed after less than 40 performances, Pacino was universally praised for his potent portrayal of a sociopathic drug addict, and he won a Tony Award for his performance.

Pacino made his film debut in the 1969 flop Me, Natalie. After making his theatrical directorial debut with 1970's Rats, he returned to the screen a year later in Panic in Needle Park, again appearing as a junkie. (To prepare for the role, he and co-star Kitty Winn conducted extensive research in known drug-dealer haunts as well as methadone clinics.) While the picture was not a success, Pacino again earned critical raves. Next came Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 Mafia epic The Godfather. As Michael Corleone, the son of an infamous crime lord reluctantly thrust into the family business, Pacino shot to stardom, earning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his soulful performance. While the follow-up, 1973's Scarecrow, was received far less warmly, the police drama Serpico was a smash, as was 1974's The Godfather Part II for which he earned his third Academy Award nomination. The 1975 fact-based Dog Day Afternoon, in which Pacino starred as a robber attempting to stick up a bank in order to finance his gay lover's sex-change operation, was yet another staggering success.

The 1977 auto-racing drama Bobby Deerfield, on the other hand, was a disaster. Pacino then retreated to Broadway, winning a second Tony for his performance in the title role in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. Upon returning to Hollywood, he starred in ...And Justice for All, which did not appease reviewers but restored him to moviegoers' good graces. Pacino next starred in William Friedkin's controversial Cruising, portraying a New York City cop on the trail of a serial killer targeting homosexuals; it was not a hit, nor was the 1982 comedy Author! Author! Brian DePalma's violent 1983 remake of Scarface followed; while moderately successful during its initial release, the movie later became a major cult favorite. Still, its lukewarm initial reception further tarnished Pacino's star. However, no one was fully prepared for the fate which befell 1985's historical epic Revolution; made for over $28 million, the film failed to gross even $1 million dollars at the box office. Pacino subsequently vanished from the public eye, directing his own film, The Local Stigmatic, which outside of a handful of 1990 showings at the Museum of Modern Art was never screened publicly. While his name was attached to a number of projects during this time period, none came to fruition, and he disappeared from cinema for over four years.

Finally, in 1989, Pacino returned with the stylish thriller Sea of Love; the picture was a hit, and suddenly he was a star all over again. A virtually unrecognizable turn as a garish gangster in 1990's Dick Tracy earned him a sixth Oscar nomination, but The Godfather Part III was not the financial blockbuster many anticipated it to be. The 1991 romantic comedy Frankie and Johnny was a success, however, and a year later Pacino starred in the highly regarded Glengarry Glen Ross as well as Scent of a Woman, at last earning an Oscar for his performance in the latter film. He reunited with DePalma for 1993's stylish crime drama Carlito's Way, to which he'd first been slated to star in several years prior. Remaining in the underworld, he starred as a cop opposite master thief Robert De Niro in 1995's superb Heat, written and directed by Michael Mann. Pacino next starred in the 1996 political drama City Hall, but earned more notice that year for writing, directing, producing, and starring in Looking for Richard, a documentary exploration of Shakespeare's Richard III shot with an all-star cast. In 1997, he appeared with two of Hollywood's most notable young stars, first shooting Donnie Brasco opposite Johnny Depp, and then acting alongside Keanu Reeves in The Devil's Advocate. Following roles in The Insider and Any Given Sunday two-years later, Pacino would appear in the film version of the stage play Chinese Coffee (2000) before a two-year periods in which the actor was curiously absent from the screen.

Any speculation on the workhorse actor's slowing down ended when in 2002 Pacino returned with the quadruple-threat of Insomnia, Simone, People I Know and The Recruit. With roles ranging from that of a troubled detective investigating a murder in the land of the midnight sun, to a film producer who builds the worlds first virtual actress, Pacino reenforced his image as a versatile, energetic and adventurous an actor. The films struck uneven chords, however; Insomnia hit a zenith, critically and commercially, while Pacino scraped bottom with Simone.

Pacino fared better at the box and in the press with Michael Radford's December 2004 Merchant of Venice but dodged critical bullets with the D.J. Caruso-helmed 2005 gambling drama Two for the Money. Circa 2006, Pacino starred as Jack Gramm in 88 Minutes, the gripping tale of a college prof who moonlights as a forensics expert for the feds. He also announced plans, that year, to join the cast of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen and a remake of Jules Dassin's seminal Rififi, to reunite him with City Hall helmer Harold Becker. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

The Recruit Buy this Movie	Gigli Buy this Movie	Insomnia Buy this Movie	Simone Buy this Movie
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Al Pacino (born 1940) has been called one of the best actors in film history. He established himself as a Hollywood icon when he burst onto the scene in "The Godfather" and followed that critically acclaimed performance with eight Academy Award nominations and more than 20 movies over 30 years. Through it all, Pacino stayed grounded in his first love: theater. But despite three decades of fame and success, the man behind the actor, who cherished his privacy, remained something of a mystery.

The Young Actor

Pacino was born April 25, 1940, in New York City to Salvatore and Rose Pacino. Pacino's father left the family when Al was a baby and although Pacino visited his father in East Harlem, he was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents in a bilingual Italian American three-room household. Rose Pacino was ill throughout his childhood, as well as mentally troubled and poor, and died of a heart attack when Pacino was 22. He was under strict rule at home but had a happy, sheltered childhood. He was bored and unmotivated in school. He found his place in school plays and dreamed of a career in acting.

Pacino's first acting lessons were at the Dover Theater, where he would go with his mother or grandmother to watch movies. After imitating the action on the screen for his grandmother, he was often asked to do the "looking for the bottle scene" from The Lost Weekend. Pacino found he could get positive attention with his acting antics. He won admission into Manhattan's prestigious High School of the Performing Arts but dropped out at age 17. As a teenager, Pacino took acting lessons from Charlie Laughton, who became a friend. Pacino held odd jobs to support the family.

Broadway

Pacino moved to Greenwich Village and started to audition. Once on the theater scene, Pacino entered a period of depression and poverty. There were days when he could not afford bus fare or even lunch. He lived for awhile off the pay of his soap-opera-actor girlfriend and future movie star, Jill Clayburgh. He found work where he could, in a coffeehouse, a workshop, a mailroom, a theater, and elsewhere.

Finally, in 1966, he entered the prestigious Actors Studio and studied under Lee Strasberg, known for his Method Approach to acting. In 1967, Pacino won an Obie for his performance in The Indian Wants the Bronx, an off-Broadway, one-act play that ran for 204 performances. In 1969, he won the Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for the Broadway play Does the Tiger Wear a Necktie? The play had only a brief run, but Pacino's work in Tiger got him noticed by film director Dominick Dunne.

Hit It Big with Godfather

In 1969 Pacino debuted on screen in Me, Natalie. But he felt awkward away from the stage and had such a bad experience that he did not return to film for a couple of years. He said to Jimmy Breslin of Esquire, "I was used to working on a tightrope onstage. A movie is just a line painted on the floor." In 1971 he played a junkie in Panic in Needle Park, directed by Dunne.

In the early 1970s, such actors as Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Robert De Niro sought the role of Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. But Coppola wanted Pacino, who had given solid performances in Panic in Needle Park and on Broadway. After a series of disastrous screen tests, no one - from the producers to fellow actors - wanted Pacino in the film, except for Coppola. Coppola stuck to his guns, and Pacino earned his first Academy Award nomination.

Pacino decided not to ride a wave of Hollywood success into lightweight blockbusters. Instead, he took a series of difficult, important film roles that highlighted his genuine acting abilities. 1973's Serpico was a crime drama spotlighting the mental struggles of a New York cop. Pacino was nominated for an Oscar for Serpico and for his portrayal of Michael Corleone in The Godfather II in 1974. In 1975, Pacino was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Dog Day Afternoon, the story of a man trying to get money for his gay lover's sex change operation by holding up a bank and taking hostages. In 1977, Bobby Deerfield foreshadowed a downturn in his career, but Pacino received another Oscar nomination for best actor for the hard-hitting legal drama … And Justice for All.

A Decade Without a Blockbuster

Pacino's career turned south with the controversial Cruising, a look at the gay netherworld, in 1980, and Author! Author! in 1982. 1983's Scarface met with some criticism, partially for Pacino's Cuban accent and incessant cursing, but it would later become a cult classic.

Revolution - an epic war movie on the Revolutionary War released in 1985 - has been called by some critics the worst film of all time. Pacino was in the starring role. Revolution had a cursed shoot full of rewrites, Pacino became sick with pneumonia, and upon release the film was savagely attacked by critics. They were Pacino's first truly awful reviews, and he was criticized again for his accent. He stayed out of Hollywood for the next several years.

Caught the Limelight Again

Pacino's return to Hollywood came in the film Sea of Love in 1989, an erotic-romantic film that cast him as a hard-drinking cop. In 1990, Pacino reprised his role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III, earning praise for his acting amid mixed reviews for the film. Dick Tracy was also released in 1990, and Pacino got rave reviews for his comedic spoof on a gangster, a type of character he usually played seriously. He was nominated for another Oscar for best supporting actor for Dick Tracy.

Pacino teamed up with Michelle Pfieffer for a romantic role in Frankie and Johnny in 1991. Two years later, Pacino was nominated for Oscars for two roles: a shark-like real estate agent in Glengary Glen Ross and a bitter, blind former army colonel in Scent of a Woman. Pacino was awarded a best actor Oscar for Scent of a Woman. In subsequent years, Pacino turned out many films that were box-office successes. Between 1993 and 2003, Pacino appeared in such hits as Carlito's Way, Heat, City Hall, Donnie Brasco, Devil's Advocate, The Insider, Any Given Sunday, Insomnia, and The Recruit. As of 2002, his average salary was $10 million a picture.

Theatre Always His First Love

Even as Pacino's star was rising in Hollywood, he continued to act in the theater. In 1970 he appeared in Camino Real, and in 1972 he began playing the lead in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel in Boston. That story of a Vietnam War recruit began a stint in New York in 1977, with Pacino in the lead, and he won his second Tony.

During his self-imposed exile from film in the 1980s, Pacino immersed himself in theater. According to Breslin, "He stepped back and went to where he always felt at home - three flights up in a drafty place where they can put down enough chairs to call it a theater." He performed in Julius Caesar and gave readings at colleges and small theaters. He directed The Local Stigmatic and filmed it starring himself. It remains unreleased to the public. Stigmatic is a movie adaptation of a Heathcote Williams play that Pacino performed during his early days on the stage in 1968. In the 1990s, Pacino produced, directed, and starred in Looking for Richard, a marriage of theater (William Shakespeare's Richard III ) and film documentary that Pacino devoted himself and his money to for over four years. More than one reporter noted that while Pacino remained characteristically tight-lipped about most of his movies and his private life, he would enthusiastically talk about Looking for Richard.

Pacino often turned down potential hit movies to do theater, he took long breaks between films, and he was constantly involved in independent ventures. Breslin points out, "There is no other recorded case like this in the history of American movie stars. Sure, some big movie actor or actress will occasionally find a spare week or two to throw at Shakespeare… . But no movie star has ever created his own work of artistic obsession, let alone two of them. Only this guy." In 2000, he became involved in the Actors Studio in New York's Oedipus Rex. In 2002, Pacino was off-Broadway with The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and in Oscar Wilde's Salome opposite Marissa Tomei.

The Personal Pacino

Pacino was an enduring bachelor, one of the few Hollywood men never to marry despite romances with Diane Keaton and other high-profile actresses. Despite his aversion to matrimony, Pacino had a daughter, Julie Marie, by acting teacher Jan Tarrant, and a set of twins-Anton and Olivia-with long-time girlfriend Beverly D'Angelo. Breslin wrote, "Pacino is famous mostly because of his extreme, unique, and undeniable talents as an actor and movie star during the past twenty-five of his fifty-five years. But he is also well-known for being hard to figure… . He is reluctant to talk to reporters, for example." Pacino has never been comfortable with fame.

When he attained fame in his early 30s, he was un-equipped to handle it. He started drinking heavily and became reclusive and unstable. But his friends convinced him to join Alcoholics Anonymous, and in two years he quit both drinking and smoking.

Pacino is a living legend. He "can play small as rivetingly as he can play big… . he can implode as well as explode," according to Jeff Giles in Newsweek. Pacino told Bronwen Hruska of Entertainment Weekly, "For me it's always been the character - 'the play's the thing' - not my personality. When one overshadows the other, you become more a celebrity than an actor. I hope the perception is that I'm an act."

Books

American Decades, Gale Research, 1998.

Complete Marquis Who's Who, Marquis Who's Who, 2001.

Contemporary Theatre, Film and Television, Volume 23, Gale Group, 1999.

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 3: Actors and Actresses, St. James Press, 1996.

Newsmakers 1993, Issue 4, Gale Research, 1993.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, St. James Press, 2000.

Periodicals

Daily Variety, October 30, 2002; January 8, 2003.

Entertainment Weekly, November 12, 1993.

Esquire, February 1996.

Newsweek, June 3, 2002.

Rolling Stone, February 2, 1984.

US Weekly, January 29, 2001.

Online

"Pacino's Biography," http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/exorcist/665/biography.htm. (February 10, 2003).

For more information on Alfredo James Pacino, visit Britannica.com.

(Alberto Pacino) (pəchē'nō), 1940–, American actor, b. New York City, studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio and the Actors Studio, New York City. Known for his intense, finely tuned performances, he achieved his first successes on the New York stage, winning an Obie for his work in the off-Broadway The Indian Wants the Bronx (1968) and a Tony for his Broadway debut in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (1969). Moving to Hollywood, Pacino became a major star with his portrayal of Mafia heir Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972) and its 1974 and 1990 sequels. He returned to Broadway (1977) to star in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, for which he was awarded a second Tony. Dark, wiry, and high-strung, the actor has won acclaim and occasional criticism for the forceful expressiveness, sometimes bordering on flamboyance, of his many performances. Other significant films include The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Cruising (1980), Scarface (1983), Sea of Love (1989), Scent of a Woman (1993; Academy Award), City Hall (1996), The Insider (1999), and Insomnia (2002).

Quotes:

"The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful -- my personal life suffers."