Legendary Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro has starred in such films as 'Taxi Driver,' 'The Godfather: Part II,' 'Raging Bull,' 'Awakenings' and 'The Intern.'
Who Is Robert De Niro?
Born in New York City on August 17, 1943, actor Robert De Niro left school at age 16 to study acting with Stella Adler. He then worked with many acclaimed film directors, including Brian DePalma, Elia Kazan and, most importantly, Martin Scorsese. De Niro's role in The Godfather: Part II (1974) brought him his first Academy Award. He went on to make several other critically acclaimed films, including The Deer Hunter (1978), and scored his second Academy Award for Raging Bull (1980). In the 1990s, De Niro saw continued success with such films as Goodfellas and Analyze This. He more recently won acclaim for his work on Silver Linings Playbook (2012), garnering the seventh Oscar nod of his career.
Background and Early Life
Robert De Niro Jr. was born on August 17, 1943, in New York City. His parents were both respected artists who had met while attending Hans Hoffman's famed Provincetown painting classes. His mother, Virginia Admiral, was a cerebral and gifted painter, a Berkeley graduate who made a significant name for herself in the 1940s and '50s New York art scene. His father, Robert De Niro Sr., was a painter, sculptor and poet whose work received high critical acclaim. Known as the "golden couple" of the New York art circle, Virginia and Robert Sr. nevertheless split ways in 1945, when young Robert was only 2 years old. As his father remained singularly devoted to his art, De Niro was raised primarily by his mother, who took on work as a typesetter and printer in order to support her son.
A bright and energetic child, Robert De Niro was incredibly fond of attending movies with his father when they spent time together. He was especially taken with films starring Swedish actress Greta Garbo. De Niro's mother worked part-time as a typist and copyeditor for Maria Picator's Dramatic Workshop, and as part of her compensation, De Niro was allowed to take children's acting classes for free.
At the age of 10, De Niro made his stage debut as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Soon after, he was accepted at New York's prestigious High School of Music and Art, an institution specializing in visual and performance arts. However, feeling overwhelmed and unprepared for the intense and competitive atmosphere, he dropped out to attend public school after only a few days.
Not long after beginning courses at P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village, De Niro proved to be uninterested in school altogether and, as a teenager, joined a rather tame Italian street gang that gave him the nickname "Bobby Milk," in reference to his pale complexion. While De Niro was by all accounts only a very modest troublemaker, the gang provided him with experience to skillfully portray Italian mobsters as an actor.
Career Beginnings
In 1960, after a soul searching cross-country trip to visit relatives in California, Robert De Niro decided to drop out of high school to study acting. Once asked in an interview why he decided to take up the profession, De Niro responded, "Acting is a cheap way to do things that you would never dare to do yourself." He enrolled at the Stella Adler Conservatory (later renamed the Stella Adler Studio of Acting), and though he continued to take high school classes at night, he never graduated. Stella Adler was a strong proponent of the Stanislavski method of acting, involving deep psychological character investigation. An intense teacher, Adler was once described by The New York Times as someone who would "curse, cajole, rage, roar and, from time to time, even compliment her students." Adler, who had taught the likes of Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger, would later remember De Niro as one of her best students.
With his mother's permission, De Niro took the money she had saved for his college education and put it toward his acting career. He studied briefly with Lee Strasberg at the Actor's Studio in New York City, and then began auditioning. As actress Sally Kirkland once recalled, instead of traditional headshots, De Niro showed up to auditions with "a portfolio of about 25 pictures of himself in various disguises to prove that he wasn't just an ethnic actor."
After a momentary cameo in the 1965 French film Three Rooms in Manhattan, De Niro's real debut came in the 1968 film Greetings. His breakthrough performances came five years later in a pair of highly acclaimed 1973 films: Bang the Drum Slowly, in which he played a terminally ill catcher on a baseball team, and Mean Streets, his first of many collaborations with director Martin Scorsese, in which he played a street thug opposite Harvey Keitel.
Oscars: 'Godfather: Part II' and 'Raging Bull'
In 1974, De Niro established himself as one the nation's finest actors with his Academy Award-winning portrayal of Vito Corleone in The Godfather: Part II, a role for which he learned to speak Sicilian. Two years later, De Niro delivered perhaps the most chilling performance of his career, playing vengeful cabbie Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976) alongside Jodie Foster. He continued to show his tremendous skill as a dramatic actor in 1978's The Deer Hunter. The film follows a group of friends haunted by their Vietnam War experiences.
De Niro later portrayed middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta in the commercially unsuccessful but critically adored film Raging Bull (1980), again helmed by Scorsese. The previously skinny De Niro had put on 60 pounds of muscle for his riveting turn as LaMotta and was rewarded for his dedication with the 1981 Academy Award for best actor. After 1981's True Confessions, his next roles were that of an aspiring standup comedian in Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1983) and as a Jewish mobster in the sprawling historical epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
Other notable projects on the actor's diverse roster for the '80s included sci-fi art film Brazil (1985) and the historically inspired The Mission (1986), followed by fare like the crime drama The Untouchables (1987, in which De Niro portrayed gangster Al Capone opposite Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness) and the action comedy Midnight Run (1988).
Acclaim for 'Goodfellas' and 'Awakenings'
De Niro opened the 1990s with Goodfellas, yet another acclaimed gangster film from Scorsese that saw the actor teaming up with Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci. De Niro next starred in a project that earned him another Oscar nod, portraying a catatonic patient brought back to awareness in Awakenings (1990), directed by Penny Marshall and co-starring Robin Williams as a character based on physician Oliver Sacks. Dramas continued to be the genre of choice for De Niro, as he played a blacklisted director in Guilty by Suspicion and a fire chief in Ron Howard's Backdraft, both from 1991.
Soon afterwards, the actor was once again front and center and reunited with Scorsese in a terrifying way, bulking up to become a tattooed rapist who stalks a family in the 1991 remake of Cape Fear. The film was originally a 1962 thriller starring Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Polly Bergen and Lori Martin, and was recast with Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis. (Peck and Mitchum made appearances in the remake as well.) De Niro received his sixth Academy Award nomination for Fear, with the film becoming the highest grossing collaboration between the actor and Scorsese, earning more than $182 million worldwide.
'Casino' and Comedic Fare
After somewhat edgy, comedic outings like Night and the City (1992) and Mad Dog and Glory (1993), another drama followed in the form of This Boy's Life (1993), in which De Niro portrayed an abusive father opposite a young Leonardo DiCaprio. That same year, De Niro made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale, a film adaptation of a one-man play written and performed by Chazz Palminteri. In 1994, De Niro was practically unrecognizable as the monster in actor/director Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein. 