Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro (1943- ), American film actor, often hailed as one of the most brilliant of his generation. The son of two artists, he was born in New York and trained at two of the city’s institutions, the Stella Adler Conservatory and the American Workshop.

De Niro’s initial roles were in early films by the American director Brian De Palma, Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969), and Hi, Mom! (1970). De Niro first won acclaim in Hollywood for his performance as a slow-witted, dying baseball player in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), but his reputation thrived on volatile parts, such as his riveting portrayal of the reckless small-time crook Johnny Boy Civello in Mean Streets (1973), the film that marked the beginning of his sustained partnership with director Martin Scorsese.

De Niro earned an Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Supporting Actor for his almost entirely Italian-speaking role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II (1974; Francis Ford Coppola); and four Best Actor nominations for his performances as the disturbed loner Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976; Scorsese), which includes De Niro’s oft-quoted “Are you talking to me?” monologue; a Vietnam War veteran in The Deer Hunter (1978; Michael Cimino); and a patient roused from a catatonic state in Awakenings (1990); as well as his menacing reprisal of the 1962 Robert Mitchum role in Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake (1991). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his warts-and-all portrayal of boxing champion Jake LaMotta in Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), for which he famously gained 60 lb in weight. For Scorsese, De Niro also appeared in the musical New York, New York (1977), as the brutal saxophone player husband of a 1940s nightclub singer (Liza Minnelli); The King of Comedy (1983), as Rupert Pupkin, a wannabe standup comedian who resorts to kidnapping a talk show host (Jerry Lewis) to gain publicity; and in trademark gangster roles in Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). He also played the Jewish gangster Noodles Aaronson in the epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984) by Sergio Leone, and Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987; De Palma), and made a belated first on-screen appearance with his Godfather II co-star Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s crime drama Heat (1995). Among De Niro’s other notable early films are 1900 (1976, Bernardo Bertolucci), The Last Tycoon (1976, Elia Kazan), and True Confessions (1981).

Starting in the 1980s, De Niro took on more diverse roles: as an 18th-century slave trader-turned-Jesuit priest in The Mission (1986, Roland Joffé), the evil Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker), and the tragic figure of the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994, Kenneth Branagh), as well as romantic leads in Stanley & Iris (1990) and Falling in Love (1994). He also showed a hitherto little-seen aptitude for comedy in films such as Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam), Midnight Run (1988), We're No Angels (1989, Neil Jordan), and Mad Dog and Glory (1993); and knowingly played on his habitual casting in threatening and criminal roles with two recurring parts: as Paul Vitti, the gangster going through a mid-life crisis in Analyze This (1999) and Analyze That (2002), and the suspicious father in Meet the Parents (2000) and Meet the Fockers (2004).

Among De Niro’s other films are Guilty by Suspicion (1991), Backdraft (1991, Ron Howard), Night and the City (1992), This Boy's Life (1993), The Fan (1996, Tony Scott), Sleepers (1996, Barry Levinson), Marvin's Room (1996), Wag the Dog (1997, Levinson), Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino), Ronin (1998, John Frankenheimer), Great Expectations (1998), 15 Minutes (2001), The Score (2001), Godsend (2004), and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004). De Niro heads a production company, Tribeca Film Center—that has produced or co-produced most of the films in which he has starred in recent years—and was the director of A Bronx Tale (1993) and The Good Shepherd (2006).