Al Pacino

Al Pacino: The Voice, and What Hides Behind It

The Actors Studio rejected him as a teenager. He went instead to HB Studio, where he swept hallways and mopped dance floors in exchange for classes he could not pay for, and four years later auditioned again and got in. Lee Strasberg, who had seen everyone worth seeing, eventually delivered the verdict: "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."

Sonny Boy, South Bronx

Alfredo James Pacino was born on April 25, 1940, in East Harlem, the only child of Rose Gerardi and Salvatore Pacino, who had emigrated from San Fratello in Sicily. His parents divorced when he was two. He was raised in the South Bronx by his mother and her parents, Kate and James Gerardi, who had come from Corleone — a coincidence no screenwriter would dare invent. His mother nicknamed him Sonny Boy, after an Al Jolson song, and took him to the movies from the age of three, where he would silently rehearse the characters afterwards.

He effectively dropped out of Herman Ridder Junior High except for English, where a teacher named Blanche Rothstein put him in school plays and had him read scripture at assemblies — a turn he has called life-changing. He auditioned into the High School of Performing Arts. When his mother objected that "poor people don't do acting," he left home and worked as a messenger, busboy, janitor, usher, switchboard operator and mailroom clerk at *Commentary*. In 1962 his mother died at forty-three; his grandfather died the next year. "I was 22 and the two most influential people in my life had gone," he said, "so that sent me into a tailspin."

The Wire

The theatre came first and never left. *The Indian Wants the Bronx* ran 177 performances at the Astor Place Theatre from January 1968 and won him an Obie. *Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?* opened on Broadway in February 1969, ran thirty-nine performances, and won him a Tony for Best Featured Actor. He took a second Tony in 1977 for *The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel*. The producer Martin Bregman saw the first of these, became his manager, and pushed him toward the films that would define him.

Pacino has described the whole enterprise in one sentence: "Life's on the wire, man. That's my acting, my life. When I work, I'm on the wire... I want to take chances. I want to fly and fail."

Michael Corleone and the Decade That Followed

His feature lead debut was *The Panic in Needle Park* in 1971, as a heroin addict. Then Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Michael Corleone in *The Godfather* over the studio's preference for established stars — Nicholson, Redford and Beatty had all been in the conversation. Coppola's reason was not the obvious one: "His intelligence is what I noted first... He uses what he has, this striking magnetic quality, this smoldering ambiance."

What followed is arguably the strongest ten-year run any American screen actor has had. *Scarecrow* took the Palme d'Or in 1973. *Serpico* the same year, *The Godfather Part II* in 1974 — which *Newsweek* called "arguably cinema's greatest portrayal of the hardening of a heart" — Sidney Lumet's *Dog Day Afternoon* in 1975 and *...And Justice for All* in 1979 brought five Oscar nominations in a single decade, four of them for Best Actor. He won none of them.

Cruising, Collapse, and Tony Montana

The 1980s nearly ended him. *Cruising* in 1980 was savaged and drew protests; in his 2024 memoir *Sonny Boy* he called it "exploitative" and revealed he had anonymously placed his earnings from it in a charitable trust. *Author! Author!* followed and failed. He left film for four years and went back to the stage.

Brian De Palma's *Scarface* in 1983 was condemned for its violence on release and then slowly became one of the most quoted films ever made, its lead character adopted wholesale by American hip-hop. Pacino has never been shy about the arithmetic of survival: he took *Jack and Jill* in 2011, which won him a Razzie, because "my accountant was in prison, and I needed something quickly."

The Second Ascent

*Sea of Love* restarted him in 1989. In 1992 he became the first male actor nominated in two acting categories in the same year — supporting for *Glengarry Glen Ross*, lead for *Scent of a Woman* — and won for the latter, as the blind, bellowing Colonel Frank Slade. Michael Mann's *Heat* in 1995 put him opposite Robert De Niro on screen for the first time. Mann described his preparation in painterly terms: "Staring at an empty canvas for many hours in intense concentration... And then there's a series of brushstrokes." *Donnie Brasco* and *The Insider* followed, then *Insomnia* for Christopher Nolan in 2002. In 2019 Martin Scorsese directed him for the first time, as Jimmy Hoffa in *The Irishman*, bringing a ninth Oscar nomination.

Shakespeare, and the Films He Made Himself

He has been co-president of the Actors Studio since 1995 and describes it as "our place to go to have that feeling of belonging to something." His own films are all obsessions rather than products: *Looking for Richard* in 1996, a documentary interrogation of *Richard III* that won a Directors Guild Award; *Chinese Coffee* in 2000, self-funded over nearly three years; *Wilde Salomé* in 2011, which he called his most personal project. He played Shylock on film in 2004 and again on Broadway in 2010, and in 2026 Shakespeare's Globe gave him the Sam Wanamaker Award.

Why Al Is Called a Genius

The testimony here is unusually specific, and it comes from people qualified to give it. Sidney Lumet, who directed him twice: "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." Sydney Pollack: "Once he starts on the track of a character, it's like a dog picking up a scent." David Mamet compared his character work to Louis Armstrong's — "He's incapable of doing it the same way twice." The faculty they are all circling is improvisational: not the ability to inhabit a role but the ability to keep generating new, true behaviour inside it, take after take, without repeating.

Pacino's own account of the *Godfather* is the best evidence. "The secret is the giveaways," he said. "When the guy is shaking, and Michael just lights the cigarette, and he is aware enough to discover that he's not shaking." That is not intuition. It is a precise structural idea about how a character reveals himself through what he notices about his own body — and it explains a performance built almost entirely on withheld information.

The honest counter-case is that the same engine, unbraked, produces the caricature. The *Chicago Reader* called him "the outsize method actor who's never afraid to embarrass himself in pursuit of spontaneous expression" — admiring, but a double edge. He is the most imitated actor alive, and what gets imitated is the shouting. His single Oscar came not for Michael Corleone but for the loudest performance he ever gave. And the late filmography contains *Gigli*, *88 Minutes*, *Righteous Kill* and *The Ritual*. Genius is not the word his collaborators used; what they described was something stranger and harder to fake.

Hoo-ah, and After

He has the Triple Crown — Oscar, Emmy, Tony — plus the AFI Life Achievement Award, the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors and the Cecil B. DeMille. Four of his films sit in the National Film Registry and three of his lines sit on the AFI's list of the hundred greatest. His summary of the whole thing is characteristically unimpressed: "I hope the perception is that I'm an actor. I never intended to be a movie star."

Achievements

• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama — 1974
• BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role — 1976
• Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie
• Academy Award for Best Actor — 1993
• Worked as film producer, film actor and stage actor