Robert De Niro

Robert Anthony De Niro (/də ˈnɪəroʊ/ də NEER-roh, Italian: [de ˈniːro]; born August 17, 1943) is an American actor and film producer. He is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential actors of his generation. De Niro is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards and a Golden Globe Award as well as nominations for eight BAFTA Awards and four Emmy Awards. He was honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2003, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2011, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2019. De Niro was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. president Barack Obama in 2016.

De Niro studied acting at HB Studio, Stella Adler Conservatory, and Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. His first credited screen role was in Brian de Palma's Greetings (1968). De Niro's first collaboration with Martin Scorsese was with the crime drama film Mean Streets (1973). De Niro has earned two Academy Awards: one for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II (1974) and the other for Best Actor portraying Jake LaMotta in Scorsese's drama Raging Bull (1980). De Niro was also Oscar-nominated for Taxi Driver (1976), The Deer Hunter (1978), Awakenings (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

He is also known for his film roles in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), 1900 (1976), The King of Comedy (1982), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Brazil (1985), The Mission (1986), Angel Heart (1987), The Untouchables (1987), Goodfellas (1990), This Boy's Life (1993), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), Heat (1995), Casino (1995), Jackie Brown (1997), Joker (2019), and The Irishman (2019). He directed and acted in both A Bronx Tale (1993) and The Good Shepherd (2006). His comedic roles include Hi, Mom! (1970), Midnight Run (1988), Wag the Dog (1997), Analyze This (1999) and its sequel, Analyze That (2002), the Meet the Parents films (2000–2010), and The Intern (2015).

Also known for his television roles, De Niro portrayed Bernie Madoff in the HBO film The Wizard of Lies (2017), earning a nomination for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie. He received further Emmy Award nominations for producing the Netflix limited series When They See Us (2019), and for portraying Robert Mueller on Saturday Night Live.

De Niro and producer Jane Rosenthal founded the film and television production company TriBeCa Productions in 1989, which has produced several films alongside his own. Also with Rosenthal, he founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002. Many of De Niro's films are considered classics of American cinema. Six of De Niro's films have been inducted into the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" as of 2023. Five films are featured on the American Film Institute's (AFI) list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. Timeout magazine's list of 100 best movies included seven of De Niro's films, as chosen by actors in the industry.

Robert Anthony De Niro was born in the Manhattan borough of New York City on August 17, 1943, the only child of painters Virginia Admiral and Robert De Niro Sr. His father was of Irish and Italian descent, while his mother had Dutch, English, French, and German ancestry. His parents, who had met at the painting classes of Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts, separated when he was two years old after his father announced that he was gay. De Niro was raised by his mother in the Greenwich Village and Little Italy neighborhoods of Manhattan. His father lived nearby, and remained close with De Niro during his childhood. Nicknamed "Bobby Milk" because of his pale complexion, De Niro befriended many street kids in Little Italy, much to the disapproval of his father. Some, however, have remained his lifelong friends. His mother was raised Presbyterian but became an atheist as an adult, while his father had been a lapsed Catholic since the age of 12. Against his parents' wishes, his grandparents had De Niro secretly baptized into the Catholic Church while he was staying with them during his parents' divorce.

De Niro attended PS 41, a public elementary school in Manhattan, through the sixth grade. He began acting classes at the Dramatic Workshop and made his stage debut in school at age 10, playing the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. He later went to Elisabeth Irwin High School, the upper school of the Little Red School House, for the seventh and eighth grades. He was then accepted into the High School of Music & Art for the ninth grade, but attended for only a short time before transferring to a public junior high school: IS 71, Charles Evans Hughes Junior High School. De Niro attended high school at McBurney School and later, Rhodes Preparatory School. He found performing as a way to relieve his shyness, and became fascinated by cinema, so he dropped out of high school at 16 to pursue acting. He later said, "When I was around 18, I was looking at a TV show and I said, 'If these actors are making a living at it, and they're not really that good, I can't do any worse than them.'" He studied acting at HB Studio and Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. De Niro also studied with Stella Adler, of the Stella Adler Conservatory, where he was exposed to the techniques of the Stanislavski system. As a young actor, De Niro was inspired by the work of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Greta Garbo, Geraldine Page, and Kim Stanley.

De Niro had minor film roles in Encounter, Three Rooms in Manhattan (both released in 1965) and Les Jeunes Loups (1968). Shortly afterwards, De Niro landed a major role in Greetings (1968), a satirical film about men avoiding the Vietnam War draft. The film marked the first of a series of early collaborations between De Niro and director Brian De Palma. A year later, De Niro appeared in the drama Sam's Song in which he portrays a New York City filmmaker. Also in 1969, he appeared in De Palma's comedy The Wedding Party; although it was filmed in 1963, it was kept unreleased for six years. De Niro, who was still unknown at the time, gained a favorable review from The New York Times' Howard Thompson: "This farcical comedy, modestly produced by a trio of young people and utilizing some unfamiliar faces, is great fun".

He then appeared in Roger Corman's low-budget crime drama Bloody Mama (1970), a loose adaptation of Ma Barker's life, who was the mother of four American criminals, of which De Niro portrayed one: Lloyd Barker. Thompson praised the film and thought the cast gave "fine performances". Next, De Niro starred in De Palma's comedy Hi, Mom! (1970), a sequel to Greetings. Writing for The New Yorker, Richard Brody opined that De Niro "brings unhinged spontaneity" to his character. He also had a small role in Jennifer on My Mind (1971) and in Ivan Passer's Born to Win (1971). His last film appearance of 1971 was in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, a crime-comedy based on the 1969 novel by Jimmy Breslin.

In 1972, De Niro starred in two performances at The American Place Theatre, directed by Charles Maryan. He then returned to the big screen with Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), in which he played the lead role as Bruce Pearson, a Major League Baseball player with Hodgkin disease. His co-stars were Michael Moriarty and Vincent Gardenia. Adapted from the 1956 novel of the same name by Mark Harris, the film received critical acclaim and helped De Niro gain further recognition. The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "De Niro proves himself to be one of the best and most likable young character actors in movies with this performance". Variety magazine's Alex Belth also took note of De Niro's "touching" portrayal, while Gardenia was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Harris later wrote about De Niro, "He learned only as much baseball as he needed for his role [...] I doubt that he ever cared to touch a baseball again".

In 1973, De Niro began collaborating with Martin Scorsese when he appeared in the crime film Mean Streets (1973), co-starring Harvey Keitel. Although De Niro was offered a choice of roles, Scorsese wanted De Niro to play "Johnny Boy" Civello, a small time criminal working his way up into a local mob. While De Niro and Keitel were given freedom to improvise certain scenes, assistant director Ron Satlof recalls De Niro was "extremely serious, extremely involved in his role and preparation", and became isolated from the rest of the cast and crew. Mean Streets debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by the New York Film Festival five months later, to a generally warm response. Film critic Roger Ebert thought De Niro gave a "marvelous performance, filled with urgency and restless desperation". Pauline Kael of The New York Times was equally impressed by De Niro, writing he is "a bravura actor, and those who have registered him only as the grinning, tobacco-chewing dolt of that hunk of inept whimsey Bang the Drum Slowly will be unprepared for his volatile performance. De Niro does something like what Dustin Hoffman was doing in Midnight Cowboy, but wilder; this kid doesn't just act – he takes off into the vapors". In 1997, Mean Streets was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

De Niro had a pivotal role in Francis Ford Coppola's crime epic The Godfather Part II (1974), playing the young Vito Corleone. De Niro had previously auditioned for the first installment, The Godfather (1972), but quit the project in favor of doing The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Coppola, having remembered him, gave De Niro a role in Part II instead. To portray his character, De Niro spoke mainly in several Sicilian dialects, although he delivered a few lines in English. The film was a commercial success and grossed $48 million at the worldwide box office. The Godfather Part II received eleven nominations at the 47th Academy Awards, winning six, including one for De Niro as Best Supporting Actor. It was De Niro's first Academy win; Coppola accepted the award on his behalf as he did not attend the ceremony. De Niro and Marlon Brando, who played the older Vito Corleone in the first film, were the first pair of actors to win Academy Awards for portraying the same fictional character.