Actors - Al Pacino

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	Actors - Al Pacino

Alfredo James "Al" Pacino (born April 25, 1940) is an Academy Award-winning Italian-American actor.

Early life

Pacino was born in The Bronx, New York to Italian American parents Salvatore Pacino (who was born in the Italian town of Corleone) and Rose Gerard (the daughter of an Italian-born father and a New York-born mother of Italian descent). His parents divorced while Pacino was still a child. His grandparents originate from Corleone, Sicily. In 1961 he was arrested in Rhode Island for carrying a concealed weapon, a .38 caliber pistol.

Career

In 1966, Pacino studied under legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg (who he would later feature alongside in the 1974 film The Godfather Part II), finding acting a therapeutic outlet in a youth which saw him depressed and so impoverished he could barely afford the bus fares required to get him to his next audition. Yet by the end of the decade, he had won an Obie award for his stage work in The Indian Wants the Bronx and a Tony award for Does the Tiger Wear a Necktie? His movie debut came in 1969's Me, Natalie but it was the 1971 film The Panic in Needle Park
, in which he played a heroin addict, that would showcase his talents and bring him to the attention of director Francis Ford Coppola.

Pacino's rise to fame came after portraying Michael Corleone in Coppola's blockbuster 1972 Mafia film The Godfather
. Although numerous established actors, including Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, and a then unknown Robert De Niro, were vying for the part, Coppola selected the relatively unknown Pacino. His performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and, by the end of the 1970s he would have three more nominations, all for Best Actor. Despite further nominations, it wasn't until 1992 that Pacino would win an Oscar, for Best Actor, for his portrayal of the irascible, retired and blind Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in Martin Brest's Scent of a Woman
.

That year, he was also up for the supporting award for his role in Glengarry Glen Ross
, making Pacino the first male actor ever to receive two acting nominations for two different movies in the same year, and the first actor of either gender to achieve that feat and win for the lead acting nomination. (Jamie Foxx did the same in 2005.) Pacino has not received another nomination from the Academy since those two, but has won two Golden Globes since the turn of the century, the first being the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion picture, and the second for his role in the HBO miniseries Angels in America.

Pacino's career took a downturn in the early 1980s and his appearances in the controversial Cruising
and the comedy-drama Author! Author!
saw him critically panned. 1983's Scarface proved to be both a career highlight and a defining role, earning Pacino a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as a Cuban drug lord who cries out the now infamous line, punctuated by an automatic rifle blast, "You wanna play rough? Okay! Say hello to my little friend!".

However, 1985's Revolution was a commercial and a critical dud, and Pacino returned to stage work for four years. He mounted workshop productions of Crystal Clear, National Anthems and other plays; appeared in Julius Caesar in 1988 for producer Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival; and worked on his most personal project, The Local Stigmatic
, a play he had starred in Off Broadway in 1969 then re-mounted in 1985 with director David Wheeler and the Theater Company of Boston in order to film a 50-minute movie version unreleased as of 2005.

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Actors - Al Pacino

Early life

Career

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