New York City · Born 1943

RobertDe Niro

The New York City actor who gained sixty pounds to play Jake LaMotta, drove a cab for a month to play Travis Bickle, learned the Sicilian dialect of Italian to play the young Vito Corleone, and established a standard of physical and psychological preparation for American screen acting that every subsequent actor has been measured against — whether or not they wanted to be.

2
Academy Awards
Won
8
Oscar
Nominations
60
Lbs Gained for
Raging Bull
Robert De NiroPortrait · Robert De Niro
Biography

From Little Italy to The Standard Itself

Born Robert Anthony De Niro Jr. on August 17, 1943, in Greenwich Village, New York — the son of two painters, raised in Little Italy after his parents' divorce, educated in the street environment that would inform every subsequent New York performance. He studied acting under Stella Adler and at the Actors Studio, developing the physical preparation and psychological research methodology that would define his career.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II (1974) — De Niro as the young Vito Corleone, the same character Marlon Brando had played as an old man in the original film — won him his first Oscar and required him to learn the Sicilian dialect of Italian from scratch, since the young Vito had not yet learned English. The performance had to simultaneously be its own thing and be recognisably the same person Brando had played. That it accomplished both is the most complete demonstration of the preparation's value in his filmography.

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) — De Niro as Travis Bickle, the Vietnam veteran turned New York cab driver whose alienation curdles into violence — is the film that established both the Scorsese-De Niro collaboration and the specific performance style: the body inhabited at the molecular level, the psychology built from the outside in and from the inside out simultaneously, the mirror scene improvised.

Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) — De Niro as Jake LaMotta, the middleweight champion whose self-destructive rage is the film's entire subject — required him to gain sixty pounds after filming the boxing sequences to play LaMotta in middle age. He won his second Oscar. The preparation is the most-cited example of physical commitment in American screen acting; the performance is the most-cited example of what the preparation produces when the material is equal to it.

1943
Born in Greenwich Village; Little Italy; Stella Adler; Actors Studio
1973
Mean Streets — Scorsese; the collaboration begins; the instrument visible
1974
Godfather Part II — young Vito; Sicilian dialect; first Oscar; the standard set
1976
Taxi Driver — Travis Bickle; "You talkin' to me"; the mirror improvised
1980
Raging Bull — LaMotta; sixty pounds gained; second Oscar; the career peak
1995
Heat — Neil McCauley; Mann; the diner scene with Pacino; the collaboration
2019
The Irishman — Scorsese again; Frank Sheeran; the final major statement
Filmography

From Vito's Silence to Jake's Rage

1980Sports Drama · Martin Scorsese · Joe Pesci
Raging Bull
Scorsese's LaMotta biography — De Niro as Jake LaMotta, the middleweight champion whose ferocious self-destructive rage is the film's entire subject. Filmed in black and white; the boxing sequences first, the middle-age sequences after sixty pounds were gained; the second Academy Award; and the performance that the American Film Institute placed at the fourth-greatest in cinema history. The preparation as the public event; the performance as what the preparation was for.
Oscar Won

LaMotta's quality — the man whose rage has no external cause and is therefore total — is played by De Niro with the specific physical reality of a man who has lived in that body for months. The later scenes — the fat LaMotta in the Catskills, the nightclub comedy act, the jail cell — are the performance's fullest expression: the rage with nowhere to go, contained in a body that has lost the form that gave it purpose, and still burning.

1976Crime Drama · Martin Scorsese · Jodie Foster · Harvey Keitel
Taxi Driver
Scorsese's New York drama — De Niro as Travis Bickle, the Vietnam veteran whose alienation from the city he drives through at night curdles into a vigilante violence he mistakes for moral clarity. The mirror scene improvised; the mohawk chosen by De Niro; the script by Paul Schratt; and the specific quality of a performance so interior that the camera can only circle it, never penetrate it.

Travis's quality — the man whose isolation is so complete it has become its own logic, a world in which he is both audience and hero — is played by De Niro with the specific flatness that makes the character's eventual explosion fully prepared and completely surprising. "You talkin' to me?" — the mirror scene, improvised by De Niro against his own reflection because the script said only "Travis talks to himself in the mirror" — is the most analysed improvisation in American screen acting and the performance's defining moment.

1974Crime Epic · Francis Ford Coppola · Al Pacino
The Godfather Part II
Coppola's sequel — De Niro as the young Vito Corleone in the Sicily and New York flashback sequences, the same character Marlon Brando had played as an old man. Learning Sicilian from scratch; finding the young version of what Brando had already established; and producing a performance that is recognisably the same person at a different age without imitating Brando's choices. The first Oscar; the most technically demanding performance of his career.
Oscar Won

The young Vito's quality — the specific silence of a man who has decided what he will do and is waiting for the right moment — is played by De Niro with the stillness that Brando's older Vito had earned through a lifetime of choices, here being chosen for the first time. His Italian-American audiences in 1974 could hear the Sicilian dialect and recognise it as authentic; the authenticity was the preparation; the preparation was the point.

1995Crime Drama · Michael Mann · Al Pacino
Heat
Michael Mann's Los Angeles crime film — De Niro as Neil McCauley, the professional thief whose discipline is also his isolation, opposite Al Pacino's detective. The first scene in which De Niro and Pacino appeared on screen together; the diner scene; and the performance of a man whose professionalism has made him so capable that the only worthy opponent is the detective who is his mirror image.

McCauley's quality — the professional so complete that nothing remains of the person the profession was built on — is played by De Niro with the specific coldness of someone who has resolved all ambivalence in favour of the work. The diner scene with Pacino — two actors who had been compared for twenty years finally sharing a table — is played as a conversation between two equals who recognise each other and know that recognition changes nothing about what they will do when they leave the restaurant.

"

The talent is in the choices.

— Robert De Niro
Honors

Two Oscars — Eight Nominations — The Standard He Set

Academy Award — Best Actor
1981
Raging Bull
Won for Jake LaMotta — sixty pounds gained, a career in boxing studied at professional depth, the middle-age sequences filmed after the boxing sequences were complete. The Academy's recognition that the preparation and the performance together constituted something the standard categories could not adequately describe. The American Film Institute ranked it the fourth-greatest performance in cinema history.
Oscar Won
Academy Award — Best Supporting Actor
1975
The Godfather Part II
Won for the young Vito Corleone — learning Sicilian from scratch, finding the young version of what Brando had already established, producing a performance recognisably continuous with Brando's without imitating his choices. The first Oscar; the demonstration that the preparation methodology was not a gimmick but a technique that produced results the craft recognised as excellent.
Oscar Won
The Scorsese Collaboration
1973 – 2019
Nine Films Together
Nine films with Martin Scorsese across forty-six years — Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York New York, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, The Irishman. The most sustained director-actor collaboration in American cinema; each film finding a different aspect of the same specific quality: the New York man whose capacity for violence is the shadow of his capacity for loyalty.
Nine Films · 46 Years
The Preparation Standard
1974 – Present
The Benchmark for American Acting
Sixty pounds gained for Raging Bull. A month driving New York cabs for Taxi Driver. Sicilian dialect learned for Godfather II. The preparation methodology — borrowed from method acting, taken further than most method actors were willing to go — became the benchmark against which American screen preparation has been measured ever since. Whether the preparation always justifies itself is a critical question; that it produced Raging Bull is the answer.
The Preparation Standard
Identity

The Preparation — The Scorsese Years — "You Talkin' to Me"

The Preparation
The sixty pounds; the cab driving; the Sicilian dialect; the boxing training to professional level — the preparation is the public narrative of the De Niro career, and it has become so well-known that it risks obscuring what the preparation produced: Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Godfather II. The preparation is the instrument maintenance; the films are the music.
The Scorsese Films
Nine films with Martin Scorsese — the most sustained collaboration in American cinema. Each film found a different aspect of the same quality: the Little Italy street knowledge, the capacity for violence, the loyalty that makes the violence comprehensible, the rage that makes the loyalty dangerous. The collaboration is the career's centre; the other films are the circumference.
The Mirror Scene
"You talkin' to me?" — improvised against his own reflection in a mirror, because the script said only "Travis talks to himself." The improvisation produced the most quoted line in American cinema and the performance's defining moment. The moment when the instrument, prepared to maximum specification, found its expression without the script's help: the preparation meeting the opportunity.
The Later Career
The comedies — Meet the Parents, Analyze This, The Intern — have generated significant critical debate about the choices made with a career built on Raging Bull. The debate misses the point: the same freedom that produced the preparation was always the freedom to choose the Focker franchise. The talent is in the choices; some choices are different from others; the instrument remains.
Legacy

Jake's Weight — Travis's Mirror — The Standard Itself

Robert De Niro's legacy is the standard — the preparation methodology and what it produced in nine Scorsese films and The Godfather Part II and Heat, and the way those productions redefined what American screen acting was expected to be. Two Oscars, eight nominations, sixty pounds gained for one role, a month in a New York cab for another, a dialect learned from scratch for a third — and "You talkin' to me?" improvised in a mirror when the script ran out of words.

Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, the young Vito Corleone, Neil McCauley — four characters from four films, all built by the same methodology, all doing things the preparation made possible and that the performance made necessary. The standard he set is the standard the next generation of American actors trained against: the question every preparation asks is how far you are willing to go, and the answer De Niro gave was: as far as the character requires, and then a little further.

Academy Awards Won
Godfather II · Raging Bull
2
Oscar Nominations
Across five decades
8
Pounds Gained for Raging Bull
After filming the boxing sequences
60
Scorsese Collaborations
1973 to 2019
9