The Full Biography
Robert De Niro. Actor. The New York kid who made a silence into a method, then spent the second half of the career as a city that would not stop hiring him.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a man in a mirror asking someone if they are talking to him, or a boxer who would not be pretty, or an old hitman in a nursing-home light. What the still cannot show is Robert Anthony De Niro Jr. of Manhattan and the Village, a painter’s son, a Stella Adler student, a collaborator who made a decade with Martin Scorsese into an American grammar, and a living man who still works at a volume the method never asked him to explain.
He was born on August 17, 1943, in New York, to Virginia Admiral and Robert De Niro Sr., both painters. The household broke. He grew up in Greenwich Village and in a Little Italy weather that was not a tourist map. He left school at sixteen. He studied with Stella Adler and, after that, at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. The training was not a brand. It was a way of disappearing. The door was not a studio contract. It was Brian De Palma: The Wedding Party, Greetings (1968), Hi, Mom! (1970). Then Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama. Then Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), a dying catcher, a baseball picture that is also a friendship. Then Mean Streets (1973), Johnny Boy, a loose cannon in Harvey Keitel’s church of a neighborhood. Scorsese had found the instrument. The instrument had found the director.
The Godfather Part II (1974) made him Vito Corleone as a young man, in Sicilian, a silence that is also a will. He went to Sicily. He learned the language. He did not treat the accent as a garnish. He won Best Supporting Actor. He was thirty-one. He did not become a talker. Francis Ford Coppola had hired a young man to play the ghost of Brando’s don and had received, instead, a second origin story. The statue did not make him a leading-man brand. It made him a man the serious pictures could trust with a silence.
Taxi Driver (1976) is the civic object: Travis Bickle, a cab, a mohawk, a sentence the culture will not stop quoting and should not mistake for a memoir. Paul Schrader wrote it. Scorsese shot it. De Niro drove a real cab to learn the night. The “You talkin’ to me?” in the mirror is improvisation inside a written loneliness. It is not a confession. It is a performance of a man who has no one to confess to. He was nominated. He did not win. The picture became a grammar other lonely men would steal, sometimes in ways the picture did not intend. He has never confused the character with a self-portrait. The sentence is Schrader and Scorsese and a man who played it.
Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976). Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), a musical that is also a marriage coming apart, opposite Liza Minnelli. Then The Deer Hunter (1978), Michael Cimino, a Pennsylvania steel town, Vietnam, a game of Russian roulette the picture made into an American wound. He was nominated again. The run that lasts is already visible: he would ruin a body if the part required it, and he would not explain the ruin at a junket.
Raging Bull (1980), Jake LaMotta, is the monument of the instrument. He trained as a boxer. He fought. Then he gained some sixty pounds to play the man after the ring. Best Actor. A performance that is also an argument about what a man will do to a woman and to himself. Scorsese shot it in black and white because the life was not a color souvenir. He was, for a stretch, the most complete American actor the serious pictures had hired: the silence, the weight, a face that could be a neighborhood. True Confessions (1981) with Robert Duvall. The King of Comedy (1982), Rupert Pupkin, a vacancy that is also a threat, a fame-hunger the culture would spend the next forty years confirming. Once Upon a Time in America (1984) for Sergio Leone, a Jewish gangster epic the studio cut and that time restored. Falling in Love with Meryl Streep. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), a plumber in a nightmare. The Mission (1986). Angel Heart (1987). The Untouchables (1987), as Al Capone for De Palma, a baseball bat, a dinner, a monster the picture can afford because the man inside it is specific.
Midnight Run (1988) with Charles Grodin proved he could carry a comedy without asking permission: a bounty hunter, a cross-country car, a partnership that is also an argument. Then the 1990s grammar: Awakenings (1990) with Robin Williams, a catatonic patient, another nomination. Goodfellas (1990), Jimmy Conway, a mid-level wisdom that is also a trap. He is not the narrator. He is the man the narrator wants to be. Cape Fear (1991), Max Cady, a body he built into a threat, tattoos, a legal smile, another nomination. He directed A Bronx Tale (1993), from Chazz Palminteri’s play, a neighborhood picture about a boy between a father and a gangster — the first time the actor sat in the chair and told a New York story as a director. He also played the father. The chair and the mark in the same picture. Casino (1995), Ace Rothstein, a precision in the desert, a man who can run a count and cannot run a marriage. Heat (1995), Michael Mann, opposite Al Pacino, a night in a diner that is a civic object for people who love crime pictures. Two instruments, one table, no shooting. The scene is the syllabus. Sleepers. Marvin’s Room. He was not protecting the 1970s. He was using them.
He also made Analyze This (1999) and Meet the Parents (2000), because a living is a living and because he can be funny without asking the monument decade for a pass. The town sometimes sneered at the comedies. The town still hired the silence. Wag the Dog. Jackie Brown for Tarantino, a quiet man in a Pam Grier picture. Ronin, a driver in France, a professional who does not explain the past. The Score with Brando and Edward Norton, three generations of the method in a Montreal vault. He directed The Good Shepherd (2006), a CIA origin picture, Matt Damon, a second long sit in the chair. Silver Linings Playbook (2012) brought another nomination, a father with a ritual, a Philadelphia house. American Hustle. The Intern. Joker (2019) as a talk-show host. The volume never became a retirement.
There is a certain combination of anarchy and discipline in the way I work.Robert De Niro
The turn is the decision to keep working after the monument decade, and to build a neighborhood around the work. Tribeca Productions with Jane Rosenthal. The Tribeca Film Festival after 2001, with Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, a downtown that needed a reason to come back. Restaurants. A citizen of a specific few blocks who happened to be Travis and Jake. He married Diahnne Abbott; then Grace Hightower. Children, including Drena and Raphael from the first marriage, twins with Toukie Smith, Elliot and Helen with Hightower, and a seventh child, Gia, with Tiffany Chen in 2023. The private life has been in the papers when the papers wanted a divorce. The work did not stop.
Six things most people never knew
- Both parents were painters. The Village is the first studio. The silence sits on a household of looking.
- Johnny Boy is the door, not Vito. Mean Streets, 1973. Scorsese. A loose cannon before the statue.
- Vito’s Sicilian is a choice, not a garnish. He went. He learned. The silence is a language.
- Travis is a picture, not a memoir. The sentence in the mirror is Schrader and Scorsese and a man who played it. It is not a confession.
- The comedies are a living, not a fall. Analyze This. Meet the Parents. He can be funny. The sneer is the town’s, not a verdict on the instrument.
- Tribeca after 2001 is civic work. A festival as a reason to come downtown. The neighborhood is a second occupation.
The children have had to share a father who is a mirror and a diner and a festival. Friends from the Scorsese sets describe a professional who is first in the gym and last to leave a take. He drove the cab. He learned the Sicilian. He put on the sixty pounds and took them off. The De Niro in a comedy is the same first-and-last without the mohawk. Both are the life. Grace Hightower and he announced a split in 2018. Tiffany Chen is the companion of this decade. Seven children is a house, not a headline, except when the headline wants it.
The later years
He is in his eighties and still taking parts. The Irishman (2019), Scorsese again, Frank Sheeran, an old man’s picture about men who outlived their usefulness, opposite Pacino and Joe Pesci, a digital youth that the picture uses and then discards so the last reels can be a body that has actually aged. He produced it. He was nominated as a producer. The picture is a reunion and a will. The Wizard of Lies (2017), on HBO, as Bernie Madoff, opposite Michelle Pfeiffer, a Golden Globe nomination, a monster who is also a husband. He does not only play the neighborhood anymore. He plays the men who stole from the neighborhood.
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) made him William Hale, a smiling uncle who is also a murder, in Scorsese’s Osage picture opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone. Another nomination. The collaboration that began with Johnny Boy in 1973 is now a fifty-year conversation. He has said that with Leo and Marty the room is a perfect situation. He does not give a classroom more than that. The method talk around him is mostly other people’s. The combination of anarchy and discipline is as close as he has come to a syllabus. The pictures are the rest of the syllabus.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom came in 2016. A Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2019. He has been a public Democrat in a town that already knew, and he has been willing to say so at awards dinners when the year required it. He has been a grandfather. He has not become a recluse and he has not become a talk-show habit. He has become, instead, a working New Yorker whose face is also a grammar. Nobu and the Tribeca Grill still seat the neighborhood. The festival still brings pictures downtown every spring, two decades on from the first program after the towers. Jane Rosenthal is still the partner in that civic work. The blocks south of Canal are a second occupation that does not require a close-up.
New pictures keep arriving. The War with Grandpa. About My Father. Ezra, a father and a son and a diagnosis, a small picture he treated as a job. Alto Knights, two old New York men, a return to the neighborhood grammar the 1970s taught him. He takes the ones that interest the instrument and the ones that pay the house, and he does not apologize for either column. A seventh child in 2023, Gia, at seventy-nine, is a fact the columns treated as a surprise and the man treated as a family. He is not performing a last lap. He is working. That is the whole late style. The silence is still available. The diner is still in the syllabus. The festival is still on the calendar. The city still hires him because the city is the subject and the workplace. He has said he does not feel he has done his best work yet. Whether that is discipline or restlessness does not matter. The call time is the same either way.
What he will not do is retire into a chair that only remembers Travis. He will play Hale. He will play a grandfather. He will produce. He will open the festival. He will sit for the few interviews that do not require a theory of his own face. Then he will go back to the set. The 1970s made him a grammar. The decades since have made him a New York institution that still takes a call time. Both are the life, and the second is the one he is living.
After the spotlight moved
It did not move far. It moved to whoever the next Scorsese hired and then came back every time a young actor needed a silence to steal. Pacino still arrives in the same sentence. The sentence is the right diner. Little Italy still claims the weather. Tribeca claims the festival. The mirror still claims the night. The children remain. The city remains.
He came out of a painters’ household, played a loose cannon, played a young don, played a cabbie the culture will not stop quoting, ruined a body for a boxer, built a downtown festival, made comedies the town sneered at and rented, and kept working. If you only remember the mirror, you have the still. If you remember Johnny Boy, Jake, the diner, and Tribeca, you have him.
Portrait: Harald Krichel · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons