Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro is the rare movie star who became famous by making you forget him.
Robert De Niro is the rare movie star who became famous by making you forget him. Where other leading men built a persona and protected it, De Niro built a career out of vanishing: into a young Vito Corleone, into a taxi driver coming apart in New York, into a boxer who trained his body into a weapon and then let it go soft. His performances do not announce themselves. They accumulate, detail by detail, until the character feels less acted than inhabited.
Robert Anthony De Niro Jr. was born on August 17, 1943, in New York City, to two artists: his father, Robert De Niro Sr., was a painter, and his mother, Virginia Admiral, was also a painter and poet. He grew up in Greenwich Village and Little Italy, neighborhoods that would later become the geography of his greatest films. As a teenager he joined a street gang, dropped out of high school, and found his way to acting through the Stella Adler Conservatory and Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, where the Method approach — living inside a character’s psychology and physical life — became his foundation.
His early film work was promising but unformed: small roles in the late 1960s, including Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970) for Brian De Palma. The turning point came with Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), in which De Niro played Johnny Boy, a reckless small-time hustler whose charm and self-destruction were inseparable. The performance announced a new kind of screen actor: loose, funny, dangerous, and completely without vanity.
The following year he played the young Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), a role that required him to follow Marlon Brando without imitating him, and to speak much of his dialogue in Sicilian. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the performance remains a masterclass in restraint: a man becoming powerful by learning to be still.
Taxi Driver (1976), again with Scorsese, gave him Travis Bickle, the insomniac cab driver whose loneliness curdles into violence. De Niro prepared by driving a cab in New York for weeks, and the performance — the mohawk, the mirror monologue, the slow moral collapse — became one of the defining screen creations of the decade. It was also controversial, and De Niro never softened it: Travis is not a hero, and the film does not pretend otherwise.
The Deer Hunter (1978) cast him as Michael, a Pennsylvania steelworker whose life is broken by Vietnam. De Niro’s Michael is the moral center of a film about friendship under unbearable pressure, and his restraint — the way he holds back where another actor would emote — gives the film its devastating weight. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and De Niro was nominated for Best Actor.
Then came Raging Bull (1980), his most famous transformation. As boxer Jake LaMotta, De Niro trained until he could plausibly fight, then gained some sixty pounds to play LaMotta in decline. The black-and-white film, directed by Scorsese, is brutal and unsentimental, and De Niro’s performance won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. It is often cited as the greatest film performance of its era, and it set a standard for physical commitment that actors still measure themselves against.
The 1980s and beyond brought a different De Niro: the comic timing of Midnight Run (1988), the menace of Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995), the tenderness of Awakenings (1990), and later a long second act as a beloved comic presence in Meet the Parents (2000) and its sequels. Some critics argued that the later comedies diluted his legacy; audiences, by and large, disagreed, and the sheer range — from LaMotta to a nervous father-in-law — became its own argument for his greatness.
Beyond acting, De Niro co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002, helping to revive lower Manhattan after the September 11 attacks, and he has remained a fixture of New York cultural life. He has been married twice, has seven children, and has continued to work steadily into his eighties, including a return to Scorsese for The Irishman (2019) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
What endures about De Niro is not a catchphrase or a look. It is a method and an ethic: that a character is built from research, from accent and posture and habit, and from the willingness to be unlikable on screen. He never played himself. He played other people, completely, and then he disappeared — which is why, fifty years on, we still remember the characters more clearly than the man who played them.
Beyond the famous transformations, De Niro’s craft rested on research that bordered on obsession. For The Godfather Part II he spent months learning Sicilian and studying the mannerisms of immigrants of that era; for Taxi Driver he obtained a cab license and worked shifts in New York; for The Deer Hunter he joined steelworkers on the job. Directors who worked with him describe an actor who arrived knowing more about a character’s daily life than the script required — what the man ate, how he held a glass, what he did when no one was watching. That accumulation of small truths is what makes his performances feel less like acting than like evidence.
His later career also showed a producer’s and citizen’s instinct. In 1989 he co-founded Tribeca Productions, and after the September 11 attacks he helped create the Tribeca Film Festival, which became a major force in independent film and in the revival of lower Manhattan. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, honors that recognized not only the performances but the cultural footprint: a New York actor who never really left New York, and who helped rebuild a piece of it.