Al Pacino

• 1. Introduction

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  Al Pacino was born Alfredo James Pacino on the 25th of April 1940, in East Harlem, Manhattan, to Sicilian Italian-American parents. His father emigrated from San Fratello, his mother's family from Corleone. By the time he was two, his parents had divorced. His mother moved with him to the South Bronx, where they lived in his grandparents' tenement apartment.

  His mother had a nickname for him: Sonny Boy, taken from the Al Jolson song she often sang. She would take him to the movies from the age of three or four, and he would silently run the characters' lines through his head. She also told him that poor people don't do acting. She died in 1962 at the age of 43, when Pacino was 22 and in the middle of a tailspin. His maternal grandfather died the following year. He called it the lowest point of his life.

  What took a kid from the South Bronx, sleeping on streets and in theaters, working as a busboy, a janitor, a postal clerk, and practicing Shakespeare soliloquies alone at night, to nine Oscar nominations, the Triple Crown of Acting, and an enduring place in the American imagination? That question leads through the Actors Studio, through Francis Ford Coppola's casting table, through a string of roles so indelible that their lines entered the language. The answers are not simple, and they are not quick.

• 2. The Formation

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  Blanche Rothstein, his junior high school teacher, saw it before almost anyone else. She cast him in school plays, had him read Bible passages at student assemblies, and then did something unusual: she visited the family's tenement apartment to tell his grandmother that he was "made to do this." Pacino has credited that visit as the turning point in his life.

  He attended the High School of Performing Arts after gaining admission by audition. After an argument with his mother over the decision, he left home. To support himself, he worked as a messenger, busboy, janitor, switchboard operator, usher, postal clerk, and once in the mailroom at Commentary. He acted in basement plays in the theatrical underground. He tried to join the Actors Studio as a teenager but was rejected.

  Instead he joined HB Studio, where Charlie Laughton became his mentor and closest friend. The studio let him attend classes for free in exchange for cleaning the hallways and dance studios. After four years there, Pacino successfully auditioned for the Actors Studio and studied under Lee Strasberg. Later he said: "The Actors Studio meant so much to me in my life. Lee Strasberg hasn't been given the credit he deserves. Next to Charlie, it sort of launched me. It really did."

  Strasberg would eventually appear with Pacino in The Godfather Part II and in ...And Justice for All. His assessment of what made Pacino different was direct: "Some actors play characters. Al Pacino becomes them. He assumes their identity so completely that he continues to live a role long after a play or movie is over."

• 3. The Stage Years

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  In 1967, Pacino spent a season at the Charles Playhouse in Boston, where his first major paycheck was US$125 a week for performing in Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! It was also where he met actress Jill Clayburgh, with whom he had a five-year romance.

  Israel Horovitz's The Indian Wants the Bronx opened at the Astor Place Theatre on the 17th of January 1968, and ran for 177 performances. Pacino played Murph, a street punk, and won an Obie Award for Best Actor. John Cazale won for Best Supporting Actor. In the audience was Martin Bregman, who became Pacino's manager. Pacino later said: "Martin Bregman discovered me. I was 26, 25. He discovered me and became my manager. And that's why I'm here."

  On the 25th of February 1969, Pacino made his Broadway debut in Don Petersen's Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? at the Belasco Theater. The run lasted only 39 performances, closing on the 29th of March 1969. Still, Pacino received rave reviews and won the Tony Award on the 20th of April 1969, for Best Featured Actor in a Play. His second Tony came in 1977 for The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, for Best Actor in a Play. He would receive a third nomination in 2011 for The Merchant of Venice.

  The theater was never merely a fallback. During a four-year hiatus from films in the mid-1980s, Pacino returned to the stage. He mounted workshop productions, appeared in Julius Caesar in 1988 at Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, and eventually came back to film only with 1989's Sea of Love. He once remarked on how theater was perceived: "The reason I'd gone back to the stage was that my movie career was waning. That's been the kind of ethos, the way in which theater's perceived, unfortunately."

• 4. The Godfather and the Rise

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  Francis Ford Coppola wanted Pacino to play Michael Corleone. Studio executives did not. Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, and the then little-known Robert De Niro had all tried out for the part, and the studio wanted someone better known. Coppola selected Pacino anyway.

  The Godfather opened in 1972, and Pacino earned his first Academy Award nomination. Halliwell's Film Guide described his early acting style as "intense" and "tightly clenched." A longstanding rumor held that Pacino boycotted the Academy Award ceremony after being nominated in the supporting category despite having more screen time than co-star Marlon Brando, who won Best Actor and also boycotted for unrelated reasons. In his 2024 memoir, Pacino said it was appalling to learn about the rumor and clarified that he skipped the ceremony because he was terrified of fame and was working in a Boston theater.

  In 1973, Scarecrow, his collaboration with Gene Hackman, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Serpico that same year brought his second Oscar nomination. The Godfather Part II in 1974 earned him a third, with Newsweek eventually calling that performance "arguably cinema's greatest portrayal of the hardening of a heart." Dog Day Afternoon in 1975 brought a fourth nomination. ...And Justice for All in 1979 brought a fifth. By the end of the 1970s, Pacino had five Oscar nominations in a single decade, including four for Best Actor alone.

  Bregman had encouraged him toward The Godfather, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon. The pattern of that decade, across those films, suggested that Pacino's signature was not heroism but complication: cops who break rules, criminals with conscience, men under pressure who do not hold together neatly.

• 5. Scarface and the Career Shift

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  Cruising in 1980 provoked protests from New York's gay community and was critically panned. Author! Author! was also panned. Pacino's career entered a slump in the early 1980s.

  Brian De Palma's Scarface in 1983 changed the trajectory. On initial release, critics panned it for violent content. At the box office, however, it grossed over US$45 million domestically. Pacino received a Golden Globe nomination for his role as Cuban drug lord Tony Montana. The film later received critical acclaim, and three of the most repeated lines in American cinema history trace to Pacino's roles: Tony Montana's "Say 'hello' to my little friend!", Michael Corleone's "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," and Sonny Wortzik's "Attica! Attica!" from Dog Day Afternoon, all cited by the American Film Institute among the top 100 quotations in American cinema.

  Also in 1983, Pacino became a major donor for The Mirror Theater Ltd alongside Dustin Hoffman and Paul Newman, matching a grant from Laurance Rockefeller. The connection was Lee Strasberg: Strasberg's daughter-in-law Sabra Jones was the founder and Producing Artistic Director. Two years later, in 1985, Pacino offered the company his production of Eugene O'Neill's Hughie, but the company was unable to stage it at the time due to the small cast.

  The early 1980s had also produced something more personal: a 50-minute film version of The Local Stigmatic, a 1969 off-Broadway play by English writer Heathcote Williams, which Pacino remounted with director David Wheeler. The film was not released theatrically but eventually appeared in the 2007 box set Pacino: An Actor's Vision.

• 6. The Oscar and the Craft

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  Martin Brest's Scent of a Woman in 1992 brought Pacino the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his portrayal of blind U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade. That same year, Pacino was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Glengarry Glen Ross, making him the first male actor ever to receive two acting nominations for two movies in the same year and to win for the lead role.

  Heat in 1995 brought Pacino and Robert De Niro on screen together for the first time in shared scenes, despite both having appeared in The Godfather Part II years earlier without a single scene together. The Devil's Advocate in 1997, in which Pacino played Satan opposite Keanu Reeves, took US$150 million worldwide. Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that Pacino played the character "with relish bordering on glee."

  Directors who worked with Pacino returned to a consistent description of his process. Heat director Michael Mann compared him to Picasso: staring at an empty canvas in intense concentration, then a series of brushstrokes, and a piece of the character alive. Sidney Lumet, who directed Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, said: "Everything stems from some incredible core inside of him. I wouldn't think of trying to get near it, because it would be like getting somewhere near the center of the earth." David Mamet compared his excavation of characters to the way Louis Armstrong played jazz: "He's incapable of doing it the same way twice."

  Pacino himself resisted the pure method label. He believed that words should be "an extension of his emotional state" and engaged in off-script improvisational exercises. Francis Ford Coppola noted a different quality: "His intelligence is what I noted first. He knows how to use his gifts. He uses what he has, this striking magnetic quality, this smoldering ambiance."

• 7. Television, Legacy, and Later Work

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  Angels in America, the 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, cast Pacino as lawyer Roy Cohn. He won his third Golden Globe and first Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie. His second Emmy came in 2010 for You Don't Know Jack, the HBO biopic about physician-assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian.

  In 2010, Pacino played Shylock in Shakespeare in the Park's The Merchant of Venice, a production that moved to the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway and earned US$1 million at the box office in its first week. He had already played Shylock in Michael Radford's 2004 film adaptation; critics praised him for bringing compassion and depth to a character traditionally played as a villainous caricature.

  The Irishman in 2019, Martin Scorsese's Netflix film, gave Pacino his ninth Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, playing Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa alongside Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. It was the first time Scorsese directed Pacino. Justin Chang wrote: "De Niro, Pesci and Pacino are at the top of their game, in part because they aren't simply rehashing the iconic gangster types they've played before."

  Four of Pacino's films, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and Scarface, have been selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. In 2024, he published his memoir Sonny Boy with Penguin Press, the title taken from the Al Jolson song his mother used to sing to him in the South Bronx. Kennedy Center's citation, read at his 2016 honors ceremony, included this line: "Al Pacino calls the theater his flashlight. It's how he finds himself, where he sees truth."