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• Born: 17 November 1942
• Birthplace: Queens, New York
• Best Known As: The famed director of Taxi Driver and The Departed

Martin Scorsese's films about mobsters, mean streets and the violence of modern life made him one of America's most respected modern filmmakers. Scorsese studied film at New York University, and, like Francis Ford Coppola, got his start directing movies for producer Roger Corman. After directing Corman's Boxcar Bertha (1972), Scorsese was able to make the more personal Mean Streets the next year. That movie launched the careers of actors Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro and earned critical raves for Scorsese himself. He had further success with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974, starring Ellen Burstyn) and then Taxi Driver (1976, with DeNiro and Jodie Foster). Taxi Driver, with DeNiro as crazed assassin-wannabe Travis Bickle, became an iconic film of the 1970s and put DeNiro on the map for good. Following in the distant footsteps of Coppola's Godfather films, Scorsese has made a number of films exploring the rush and despair of organized crime, including Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995, with Sharon Stone), Gangs of New York (2002, with Leonardo DiCaprio), and the Boston undercover drama The Departed (2006, with Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon). His many other movies include Raging Bull (1980, with DeNiro as boxer Jake LaMotta), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988, starring Willem Dafoe as Jesus of Nazareth), The Color of Money (1986, with Paul Newman in a sequel to The Hustler), and The Aviator (2004, with DiCaprio as Howard Hughes). The Departed won the Academy Award as the best picture of 2006, with Scorsese also winning the Oscar as the year's best director.

Scorsese and DeNiro have made eight movies together... Scorsese's mother, Catherine, has appeared in several of his movies; she played Joe Pesci's mom in Goodfellas... Scorsese directed the Michael Jackson video "Bad."

• Born: Nov 17, 1942 in Flushing (Queens), New York City, New York
• Occupation: Director, Actor, Writer
• Active: '70s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Film, TV & Radio
• Career Highlights: The Grifters, GoodFellas, Raging Bull
• First Major Screen Credit: What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963)

Biography

The most renowned filmmaker of his era, Martin Scorsese virtually defined the state of modern American cinema during the 1970s and '80s. A consummate storyteller and visual stylist who lived and breathed movies, he won fame translating his passion and energy into a brand of filmmaking that crackled with kinetic excitement. Working well outside of the mainstream, Scorsese nevertheless emerged in the 1970s as a towering figure throughout the industry, achieving the kind of fame and universal recognition typically reserved for more commercially successful talents. A tireless supporter of film preservation, Scorsese has worked to bridge the gap between cinema's history and future like no other director. Channeling the lessons of his inspirations -- primarily classic Hollywood, the French New Wave, and the New York underground movement of the early '60s -- into an extraordinarily personal and singular vision, he has remained perennially positioned at the vanguard of the medium, always pushing the envelope of the film experience with an intensity and courage unmatched by any of his contemporaries.

Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942, in Flushing, NY. The second child of Charles and Catherine Scorsese -- both of whom frequently made cameo appearances in their son's films -- he suffered from severe asthma, and as a result was blocked from participating in sports and other common childhood activities. Consequently, Scorsese sought refuge in area movie houses, quickly becoming obsessed with the cinema, in particular the work of Michael Powell. Raised in a devoutly Catholic environment, he initially studied to become a priest. Ultimately, however, Scorsese opted out of the clergy to enroll in film school at New York University, helming his first student effort, What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?, a nine-minute short subject, in 1963. He mounted his second student picture, the 15-minute It's Not Just You, Murray!, in 1964, the year of his graduation. His next effort was 1967's brief The Big Shave; finally, in 1969 he completed his feature-length debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door?, a drama starring actor Harvey Keitel, who went on to appear in many of the director's most successful films. The feature also marked the beginning of Scorsese's long collaboration with editor Thelma Schoonmaker, a pivotal component in the evolution of his distinct visual sensibility.

After a tenure teaching film at N.Y.U. (where among his students were aspiring directors Oliver Stone and Jonathan Kaplan), Scorsese released Street Scenes, a documentary account of the May 1970 student demonstrations opposing the American military invasion of Cambodia. He soon left New York for Hollywood, working as an editor on films ranging from Woodstock to Medicine Ball Caravan to Elvis on Tour and earning himself the nickname "The Butcher." For Roger Corman's American International Pictures, Scorsese also directed his first film to receive any kind of widespread distribution, 1972's low-budget Boxcar Bertha, starring Barbara Hershey and David Carradine. With the same technical crew, he soon returned to New York to begin working on his first acknowledged masterpiece, the 1973 drama Mean Streets. A deeply autobiographical tale exploring the interpersonal and spiritual conflicts facing the same group of characters first glimpsed in Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets established many of the thematic stylistic hallmarks of the Scorsese oeuvre: his use of outsider antiheroes, unusual camera and editing techniques, dueling obsessions with religion and gangster life, and the evocative use of popular music. It was this film that launched him to the forefront of a new generation of American cinematic talent. The film also established Scorsese's relationship with actor Robert De Niro, who quickly emerged as the central onscreen figure throughout the majority of his work. For his follow-up, Scorsese traveled to Arizona to begin shooting 1974's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, a response to criticism that he couldn't direct a "women's film." The end result brought star Ellen Burstyn a Best Actress Oscar at that year's Academy Awards ceremony, as well as a Best Supporting Actress nomination for co-star Diane Ladd. Next up was 1974's Italianamerican, a film Scorsese often claimed as his personal favorite among his own work. A documentary look at the experience of Italian immigrants as well as life in New York's Little Italy, it starred the director's parents, and even included Catherine Scorsese's secret tomato sauce recipe.

Upon his return to New York, Scorsese began work on the legendary Taxi Driver in the summer of 1974. Based on a screenplay by Paul Schrader, the film explored the nature of violence in modern American society, and starred De Niro as Travis Bickle, a cabbie thoroughly alienated from humanity who begins harboring delusions of assassinating a Presidential candidate and saving a young prostitute (Jodie Foster) from the grip of the streets. Lavishly acclaimed upon its initial release, Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival. Five years later, it became the subject of intense scrutiny when it was revealed that the movie was the inspiration behind the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, who had become obsessed with the film as well as Foster herself. Scorsese's next feature was New York, New York, an extravagant 1977 musical starring De Niro and Liza Minnelli. The first of his major films to receive less-than-glowing critical acclaim, it was widely considered a failure by the Hollywood establishment. Despite doubts about his artistry, Scorsese forged on and continued work on his documentary of the farewell performance of the Band, shot on Thanksgiving Day of 1976. Complete with guest appearances from luminaries ranging from Muddy Waters to Bob Dylan to Van Morrison, the concert film The Last Waltz bowed in 1978, and won raves on the festival circuit as well as from pop music fans. American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, a look at the raconteur who appeared as the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, followed later that same year.

In April 1979, after years of preparation, Scorsese began work on Raging Bull, a film based on the autobiography of boxer Jake LaMotta. Filmed in black-and-white, the feature was his most ambitious work to date, and is widely regarded as the greatest movie of the 1980s. De Niro won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of LaMotta, while newcomer Cathy Moriarty won a Best Actress nomination for her work as LaMotta's second wife. (Additionally, Thelma Schoonmaker won an Academy Award for editing.) De Niro again reunited with Scorsese for the follow-up, 1983's The King of Comedy, a bitter satire exploring the nature of celebrity and fame. Since the age of ten, Scorsese had dreamed of mounting a filmed account of the life of Jesus; finally, in 1983 it appeared that his adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel The Last Temptation of Christ was about to come to fruition. Ultimately, just four weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin, funding for the project fell through. Scorsese was forced to enter a kind of work-for-hire survival period, accepting an offer to direct the 1985 downtown New York comedy After Hours. In the spring of 1986, he began filming The Color of Money, the long-awaited sequel to Robert Rossen's 1961 classic The Hustler. Star Paul Newman, reprising his role as pool shark "Fast" Eddie Felson, won his first Academy Award for his work, while co-star Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio scored a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

The Color of Money was Scorsese's first true box-office hit; thanks to its success, he was finally able to film The Last Temptation of Christ. Starring Willem Dafoe in the title role, the feature appeared in 1988 to considerable controversy over what many considered to be a blasphemous portrayal of the life and crucifixion of Christ. Ironically, the protests helped win the film a greater foothold at the box office, while making its director a household name. After contributing (along with Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen) to the 1989 triptych New York Stories, Scorsese teamed with De Niro for the first time since The King of Comedy and began working on his next masterpiece, 1990's Goodfellas. Based on author Nicholas Pileggi's true crime account Wiseguy, the film dissected the New York criminal underworld in absorbing detail, helping actor Joe Pesci earn an Oscar for his supporting role as a crazed mob hitman.

As part of the deal with Universal Pictures which allowed him to make Last Temptation, Scorsese had also agreed to direct a more "commercial" film. The result was 1991's Cape Fear, an update of the classic Hollywood thriller. The follow-up, 1993's The Age of Innocence, was a dramatic change of pace; based on the novel by Edith Wharton, the film looked at the New York social mores of the 1870s, and starred Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer. In 1995, Scorsese resurfaced with two new films. The first, Casino, documented the rise and decline of mob rule in the Las Vegas of the 1970s, while A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies examined the evolution of the Hollywood filmmaking process. In 1997, he completed Kundun, a meditation on the formative years of the exiled Dalai Lama. That same year he received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement honor. In 1998, he participated in the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, once again doing his part to help bridge the films of the past with those of the future.

Scorsese returned to the director's chair in 1999 with Bringing Out the Dead. A medical drama starring Nicolas Cage as an emotionally exhausted paramedic, it marked the director's return to New York's contemporary gritty milieu. Scorsese began the new century making his first film for Miramax. Gangs of New York, a drama about New York gangs set during the Civil War, had been on the auteur's mind for over a quarter century by the time it finally was released in December of 2002. The film garnered multiple Oscar nominations including Best Picture and another Best Director nod for Scorsese, but the film went home without any hardware. Gangs of New York was co-scripted by Kenneth Lonergan, leading to Scorsese acting as an executive producer on his directorial debut, You Can Count on Me. Scorsese followed up his historical epic with yet another period piece. The Aviator was a biopic of multi-millionaire Howard Hughes that focused on his younger days as a Hollywood mogul and playboy. Both Gangs and The Aviator found Scorsese casting Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role after his most famous collaborator, Robert De Niro, recommended the Titanic star to the director. 2004 saw the release of Shark Tale, an animated film for which Scorsese voiced one of the characters.

In 2005 Scorsese garnered outstanding reviews as the director of the Peabody Award-winning No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, a nearly four-hour documentary about Bob Dylan that charted his life and artistic development up through his historic U.K. concerts where the crowd revolted against his using electric instruments. The next year, Scorsese teamed with DiCaprio for a third time in The Departed, an adaptation of Infernal Affairs. The film, about an undercover cop, featured an impressive cast that included Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon. It opened to strong reviews, and went on to become one of the biggest box-office hits of Scorsese's career, earning the beloved director many industry and critics awards including the Golden Globe for Best Director and finally his long deserved Oscar for Best Director. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

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Martin Scorsese (born 1942) is a director and writer of highly personal films about intense loners who struggle against their own inner demons and the violence of their urban environments. While many of his works reflect his experience as an Italian-American growing up in New York City, he has also made highly regarded movies of great works of literature and other stories.

Film director Martin Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942, in Flushing, New York to Charles, a clothes presser, and Catherine, a seamstress. They raised their son in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York City. Plagued by severe asthma as a child, Scorsese was fascinated with movies. He watched films on television and attended local theaters frequently while his healthier peers engaged in sports and more social activities. After initially pursuing a career in the priesthood, Scorsese dropped out of the seminary after a year and entered the prestigious Film School at New York University. Scorsese's It's Not Just You Murray! won the Producer's Guild Award for best student film in 1964, and he also received awards for other film shorts that he made as an undergraduate.

Drew from Own Urban Experience

After graduating, Scorsese remained at New York University as an instructor in basic film technique and criticism while at the same time beginning his career as a director. His 1968 short film, The Big Shave, won Le Prix de L'Age d'Or at Ledoux's Festival of Experimental Cinema. Scorsese's first feature film, Who's That Knocking at My Door, was first screened in 1969. It was produced by Haig Moonigan, one of Scorsese's teachers at New York University. This strongly autobiographical film about an Italian-American youth also introduced the actor Harvey Keitel, who became a frequent participant in Scorsese's works. The director also frequently casts his mother, Catherine, in his films, and Scorsese himself has acted in some of his own films and those made by others.

Outraged by the killing of four Kent State Student protesters and the Vietnam War in general, Scorsese and some of his students formed the New York Cinetracts Collective in 1969 as a means to film student protests against the conflict. The result was Street Scenes, screened at the 1970 New York Film Festival, which called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam as well as an end to military ROTC activities on all U.S. college campuses.

Scorsese worked as a film editor before his directing career was established, most notably as a co-supervising editor of the documentary Woodstockin 1970. (Many years later his interest in music would lead him to direct a music video for pop legend Michael Jackson's "Bad.") He also had a brief stint with the CBS television unit covering Hubert Humphrey during the 1972 presidential election. In the early 1970s he moved to Hollywood and met the producer/ director Roger Corman, who asked him to direct a sequel to his Bloody Mama. Instead, Scorsese directed Corman's Boxcar Bertha, a 1972 gangster film somewhat resembling Bonnie and Clyde. According to Ephraim Katz in The Film Encyclopedia, Boxcar Bertha "gave the young director [Scorsese] the opportunity to work within the Hollywood system and paved the way to his phenomenal rise in the coming years."

Began Successful Collaboration with De Niro

Next on the filmmaker's career path was a return to familiar turf in Mean Streets, a 1973 release about a young Italian-American trying to get by in a low-life environment. Emphasizing character development over plot, Mean Streets featured a jumpy cinematic style of quick cuts that foreshad-owed Scorsese's later work Taxi Driver. It also marked the director's first creative pairing with the actor Robert De Niro, whom Scorsese had grown up with in Little Italy. Their partnership evolved into one of the most successful director/ actor collaborations in modern film. Years later in 1981, Taxi Driver gained some notoriety when John Hinckley, Jr. claimed that Jodie Foster's role in the film was his inspiration for trying to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.

Scorsese also began directing documentaries in the 1970s. These included Italianamerican, a profile of his parents released in 1974, and American Boy, a 1978 account of a friend who had immersed himself in the drug culture of the 1960s. He veered away from his usual movie themes with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore in 1975, a film about a recently widowed mother trying to find herself. According to Leslie Halliwell in Halliwell's Film Guide, the New Yorker claimed the movie was "full of funny malice and breakneck vitality." Scorsese followed with his major hit, Taxi Driver, in which he returned to his usual urban setting. Halliwell called it an "unlovely but brilliant made film" that "haunts the mind and paints a most vivid picture of a hell on earth." Taxi Driver was awarded the International Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

The director's nostalgic look at his city after World War II called New York, New York proved a critical failure in 1977, despite having the star power of Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. Halliwell said that it was "hampered by gross overlength, unattractive characters and a pessimistic plot." Scorsese became depressed as well as physically ill and required hospitalization following the making of this film. A failed marriage and drug problems further debilitated him. He returned to documentaries in the late 1970s by directing a film of The Band's final concert entitled The Last Waltz. Then he got back on track in feature films after De Niro convinced him to direct Raging Bull, a saga of the boxer Jake LaMotta. The movie earned Scorsese the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director, as well as his first Academy Award nomination. Raging Bull was later named the best film of the decade in a movie critics' poll.

King of Comedy, a 1983 film about a failed comic who kidnaps a famous talk-show host, was one of Scorsese's less successful efforts. In Partisan Review, Morris Dickstein called it "a pointless and irritating film with a few brilliant touches." Accolades came his way again, though, for his direction of After Hours, an unusual black comedy about a mild-mannered New York City resident who gets involved in a series of late-night mishaps. "A film so original, so particular, that one is uncertain from moment to moment exactly how to respond to it," said film critic Roger Ebert about the 1985 release, according to Halliwell's Film Guide. Scorsese was honored with the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival for this effort.

Box-office success greeted Scorsese's The Color of Money in 1986, a sequel to The Hustler starring Paul Newman. It represented one of Scorsese's few big-budget productions up to that time. Certain religious groups were outraged by his next release, 1988's The Last Temptation of Christ, which dealt with an alternative interpretation of Jesus' acceptance of his role on earth. Although Variety as cited by Halliwell called Last Temptation "a film of challenging ideas," its pre-release notoriety and long running time hampered its success at the box office. Scorsese returned to more comfortable cinematic ground in 1990 with Goodfellas, a violent tale of Mafia hoodlums in New York City that earned him Best Director Awards from the National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics, and Los Angeles Film Critics.

Showed Versatility with Period Piece

After the 1991 release of his remake of Cape Fear, Scorsese surprised the film community by his filming of Age of Innocence, the Edith Wharton novel set in nineteenth-century New York City. "I had the script in my mind for two years and wrote it in two and half weeks, with Jay Cocks," Scorsese told Interview about the film in 1993. Lavishly produced and slowly paced, it resembled nothing in Scorsese's directorial past. It proved not to be a trend, however, as Scorsese jumped back to modern times with a tale of greed and deception in Las Vegas with his 1995 release, Casino.

Scorsese showed his support of film history in 1990 by becoming president of the Film Foundation, an organization dedicated to film preservation. He has also been very active in promoting independent film makers, and in 1994 became a member of the advisory board for the Independent Film Channel on cable television. On October 9, 1996, the American Film Institute announced that Scorsese would be awarded its 1997 Life Achievement Award, which he accepted on February 21, 1997. In addition, he received the prestigious Wexner Prize in March 1997, for originality in the arts. His next film, Kundun, the story of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, was released in September 1997. A director of 20 feature films and documentaries, he has also written a number of screenplays since his first film was released in 1968. His steady output as a filmmaker is expected to continue into the twenty-first century.

Further Reading

Katz, Ephraim, The Film Encyclopedia, Harper & Row, 1979, p. 1028.

Halliwell, Leslie, Halliwell's Film Guide, 7th ed., Harper & Row, 1989, pp. 22, 135, 560, 584, 665, 723, 994-995.

Interview, October 1993, pp. 62-63, 135.

Los Angeles Times, February 22, 1997, p. F1.

New York Times, March 8, 1997, p. A13.

Partisan Review, 1994, pp. 658-664.

"http://www.msstate.edu/Movies/search.html," in Internet Movie Database, 1996.

For more information on Martin Scorsese, visit Britannica.com.

(skôrsā'zē, –sĕz'ē) , 1942–, American film director; b. Queens, N.Y. A major figure in contemporary cinema, he grew up in Manhattan's Little Italy, attended film school at New York Univ., made his first feature-length film in 1968, and scored his first success with Mean Streets (1973). Often dealing with violent and obsessive aspects of modern America and focusing on Italian-American characters, Scorsese's films frequently feature a struggling hero and themes of sin and redemption. His major movies include Taxi Driver (1976), a harrowing urban morality tale; Raging Bull (1979), a look into the savage world of boxing; Goodfellas (1990), an exploration of the brutalities of Mob life; and Gangs of New York (2002), a violent epic of life in Manhattan's 19th-century slums. Among Scorsese's other films are Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), New York, New York (1977), The King of Comedy (1983), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995), Kundun (1998), The Aviator (2004), and The Departed (2006, Academy Award). His documentaries, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (1995) and Il Mio Viaggio in Italia [my journey in Italy] (2001), reflections on great filmmaking in the United States and Italy, provide revealing glimpses into the influences that have shaped his art. He has also made documentaries on The Band (The Last Waltz, 1978), the Delta blues (Feel like Going Home, 2003), and Bob Dylan (No Direction Home, 2005).

Bibliography

See D. Thompson and I. Christie, ed., Scorsese on Scorsese (rev. ed. 2004); P. Brunette, ed., Martin Scorsese: Interviews (rev. ed. 2006); studies by M. Weiss (1987), D. Ehrenstein (1992), L. Keyser (1992), M. K. Connelly (1993), M. Bliss (1985 and 1995), L. Stern (1995), L. S. Friedman (1997), A. Dougan (1998), L. Grist (2000), G. Seesslen (2003), M. T. Miliora (2004), M. Nicholls (2004), B. Nyce (2004), and P. A. Woods, ed. (2005).

Quotes:

"I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest."