Sunday 25 April 2021

ALFREDO J. PACINO, SICILIAN ROOTS FROM CORLEONE

Alfredo James Pacino (born April 25, 1940) is an American actor and filmmaker. In a career spanning over five decades, he has received many awards and nominations, including an Academy Award, two Tony Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards.

He is one of the few performers to have received the Triple Crown of Acting. He has also been honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and the National Medal of Arts.

A method actor and former student of the HB Studio and the Actors Studio, where he was taught by Charlie Laughton and Lee Strasberg, Pacino's film debut came at the age of 29 with a minor role in Me, Natalie (1969). He gained favourable notice for his first lead role as a heroin addict in The Panic in Needle Park (1971). Wide acclaim and recognition came with his breakthrough role as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), for which he received his first Oscar nomination, and he would reprise the role in the sequels The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Godfather Part III (1990).

Pacino received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Serpico (1973), The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and ...And Justice for All (1979), ultimately winning it for playing a blind military veteran in Scent of a Woman (1992). For his performances in The Godfather, Dick Tracy (1990), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), and The Irishman (2019), he earned Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations.

Other notable portrayals include Tony Montana in Scarface (1983), Carlito Brigante in Carlito's Way (1993), Benjamin Ruggiero in Donnie Brasco (1997), and Lowell Bergman in The Insider (1999). He has also starred in the thrillers Heat (1995), The Devil's Advocate (1997), Insomnia (2002), and appeared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

On television, Pacino has acted in several productions for HBO, including Angels in America (2003) and the Jack Kevorkian biopic You Don't Know Jack (2010), winning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Film for each.

Pacino currently stars in the Amazon Video series Hunters (2020–present). He has also had an extensive career on stage. He is a two-time Tony Award winner, in 1969 and 1977, for his performances in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.

Pacino made his filmmaking debut with Looking for Richard (1996), directing and starring in this documentary about Richard III; Pacino had played the lead role on stage in 1977. He has also acted as Shylock in a 2004 feature film adaptation and 2010 stage production of The Merchant of Venice.

Pacino directed and starred in Chinese Coffee (2000), Wilde Salomé (2011), and Salomé (2013). Since 1994, he has been the joint president of the Actors Studio.

More information: The Talks

Alfredo James Pacino was born in the East Harlem neighbourhood of New York City on April 25, 1940. He is the son of Italian-American parents Rose Gerardi and Salvatore Pacino. His parents divorced when he was two years old. He then moved with his mother to the Bronx to live with her parents, Kate and James Gerardi, who were Italian immigrants from Corleone, Sicily. Pacino's father was from San Fratello, Sicily, and moved to work as an insurance salesman and restaurateur in Covina, California.

In his teenage years, Pacino was known as Sonny to his friends. He had ambitions to become a baseball player and was also nicknamed The Actor. He attended Herman Ridder Junior High School, but soon dropped out of most of his classes except for English. He subsequently attended the High School of Performing Arts, after gaining admission by audition. His mother disagreed with his decision and, after an argument, he left home. To finance his acting studies, Pacino took low-paying jobs as a messenger, bus boy, janitor, and postal clerk, as well as once working in the mailroom for Commentary magazine.

On February 25, 1969, Pacino made his Broadway debut in Don Petersen's Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? at the Belasco Theater, produced by A&P Heir Huntington Hartford. It closed after 39 performances on March 29, 1969, but Pacino received rave reviews and won the Tony Award on April 20, 1969.

Pacino found acting enjoyable and realized he had a gift for it while studying at The Actors Studio. However, his early work was not financially rewarding. After his success on stage, Pacino made his film debut in 1969 with a brief appearance in Me, Natalie, an independent film starring Patty Duke.

His role as a heroin addict in The Panic in Needle Park (1971) brought Pacino to the attention of director Francis Ford Coppola, who cast him as Michael Corleone in what became a blockbuster Mafia film, The Godfather (1972). Although Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, and the little-known Robert De Niro were tried out for the part, Coppola selected Pacino, to the dismay of studio executives who wanted someone better known.

During the 1970s, Pacino had four Oscar nominations for Best Actor, for his performances in Serpico, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and ...And Justice for All.

Pacino received an Academy Award nomination for playing Big Boy Caprice in the box office hit Dick Tracy in 1990, of which critic Roger Ebert described Pacino as the scene-stealer. Later in the year he followed this up in a return to one of his most famous characters, Michael Corleone, in The Godfather Part III (1990). The film received mixed reviews, and had problems in pre-production due to script rewrites and the withdrawal of actors shortly before production.

Pacino won three Golden Globes since 2000; the first being the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2001 for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.

In September 2012, Deadline reported that Pacino would play the former Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno in the television film Paterno based on a 2012 biography by sportswriter Joe Posnanski. Paterno premiered on HBO on April 7, 2018.

Pacino starred alongside Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino's comedy-drama Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was released on July 26, 2019. Later in 2019, Pacino played Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa, alongside Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, in Martin Scorsese's Netflix film The Irishman, based on the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt; this was the first time Pacino was directed by Scorsese, and he received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination.

In February 2020, Pacino starred as Meyer Offerman, a fictional Nazi hunter, in the Amazon Video series Hunters. This is Pacino's first television series since Angels in America (2003). Hunters was renewed for a second season in August 2020.

In Ridley Scott's forthcoming film, House of Gucci, Pacino, in the star role, plays Aldo Gucci.

More information: Interview Magazine


 The actor becomes an emotional athlete.
The process is painful -my personal life suffers.

Al Pacino

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