Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro is an actor, born 1943.
Robert De Niro trained at HB Studio, with Stella Adler and at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, and his first credited screen role was in Brian De Palma's Greetings in 1968. The relationship that shaped everything began with Mean Streets in 1973, the first of many films with Martin Scorsese. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, taking a role Marlon Brando had already made famous and making it feel like a separate invention, then won Best Actor for Raging Bull in 1980, having trained as a boxer and then gained a great deal of weight to play the same man two decades older.
That decade set the standard for what film acting was supposed to cost. He was also, quietly, a very funny actor, which The King of Comedy demonstrated by handing him a delusional aspiring comedian and no laugh track of any kind. The nineties are the crime peak: GoodFellas, Cape Fear, Casino, and the coffee shop scene in Heat, two professionals calmly agreeing about how this is all going to go.
Then he discovered farce, and Meet the Parents made more money than most of the masterpieces combined. A long stretch of paycheque work followed and the criticism of it is fair. The late reclamation is real too: genuinely mournful in The Irishman, restrained and quietly monstrous in Killers of the Flower Moon, unnervingly still as a talk show host in Joker. His honours include two Oscars, the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honors, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award and an Honorary Palme d'Or.
Movies (136)
- The Godfather Part II (1974)
- GoodFellas (1990)
- Joker (2019)
- Heat (1995)
- Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
- Cape Fear (1991)
- Shark Tale (2004)
- Casino (1995)
- The Intern (2015)
- Sleepers (1996)
- Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
- Stardust (2007)
- A Bronx Tale (1993)
- A Bronx Tale (1993)
- Limitless (2011)
- The Irishman (2019)
- Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
- Meet the Fockers (2004)
- Men of Honor (2000)
- Arthur and the Invisibles (2006)
- The Deer Hunter (1978)
- The Untouchables (1987)
- Meet the Parents (2000)
- Dirty Grandpa (2016)
- Raging Bull (1980)
- Little Fockers (2010)
- Ronin (1998)
- The Score (2001)
- The Alto Knights (2025)
- Brazil (1985)
TV (11)
- The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015)
- Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (2009)
- Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (2016)
- Extras (2005)
- Zero Day (2025)
- 100 Years of Warner Bros. (2023)
- Faut Voir - L'Hebdo cinéma (2023)
- Mario Puzo's The Godfather: The Complete Novel for Television (1977)
- Some Good News (2020)
- Mr. Scorsese (2025)
- Nothing (2023)
Where to start with Robert De Niro
GoodFellas is the easiest way in, and note that he takes the quietest part in it. Jimmy Conway is all watchfulness while everyone around him performs, a deliberate choice from an actor who could have had either of the other two leads.
Raging Bull is the summit and the hardest sit, so go there second rather than first. The King of Comedy is the film to press on anyone who thinks he only does gangsters: a comedy about a man with no talent and no self-awareness, excruciating in the best possible way.
The Godfather Part II gives you the young Vito, Mean Streets the raw early version, and Heat the professional at his most controlled, hinged on one famous conversation in a coffee shop. Meet the Parents deserves respect rather than apology, since the comic timing is exact. For late work, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon are both about old men accounting for what they did.
The Scorsese collaborations, which are the argument
Nine films with one director, and the three in the middle are as good as screen acting gets. Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta and Jimmy Conway are completely different men. Raging Bull required him to gain sixty pounds, and the performance would survive without the stunt.
The seventies and eighties peak beyond Scorsese
The rest of the great run, and it is deep. The Godfather Part II won him the Oscar and he plays it almost entirely in Sicilian. The Deer Hunter is the heaviest, Once Upon a Time in America the strangest, and The Untouchables is him enjoying himself as Capone.
The comedies, where the persona became the joke
From the nineties he started playing on his own reputation, and Meet the Parents works precisely because the audience knows what he can do. Some of this run is lazy and some of it is genuinely funny, and Silver Linings Playbook shows he never lost the serious register.