77 Facts About Al Pacino

1.

Al Pacino has been honored with the Cecil B DeMille Award in 2001, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2007, the National Medal of Arts in 2011, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2016.

2.

Al Pacino went on to receive the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Scent of a Woman.

3.

On television, Al Pacino has acted in several productions for HBO, including Angels in America and the Jack Kevorkian biopic You Don't Know Jack, winning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for each.

4.

Al Pacino made his directing debut with the documentary Looking for Richard ; Al Pacino had played the lead role on stage in 1977.

5.

Al Pacino has acted as Shylock in a 2004 feature film adaptation and 2010 stage production of The Merchant of Venice.

6.

Al Pacino directed and starred in Chinese Coffee, Wilde Salome, and Salome.

7.

Alfredo James Al Pacino was born in the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on April 25,1940, the only child of Italian-American parents Rose and Salvatore Al Pacino.

8.

Al Pacino's parents divorced when he was two years old.

9.

Al Pacino then moved with his mother to the South Bronx to live with her parents, Kate and James Gerardi, who were Italian emigrants from Corleone.

10.

Al Pacino's father was from San Fratello and moved to work as an insurance salesman and restaurateur in Covina, California.

11.

Al Pacino had ambitions to become a baseball player and was nicknamed "The Actor".

12.

Al Pacino attended Herman Ridder Junior High School, but soon dropped out of most of his classes except for English.

13.

Al Pacino subsequently attended the High School of Performing Arts, after gaining admission by audition.

14.

Al Pacino's mother disagreed with his decision and, after an argument, he left home.

15.

Al Pacino began smoking and drinking at age nine, and used marijuana casually at age 13, but he abstained from hard drugs.

16.

Al Pacino acted in basement plays in New York's theatrical underground but was rejected as a teenager by the Actors Studio.

17.

Al Pacino joined the HB Studio, where he met acting teacher Charlie Laughton, who became his mentor and best friend.

18.

Al Pacino studied "method acting" under acting coach Lee Strasberg, who appeared with Al Pacino in the films The Godfather Part II and in.

19.

In 2000, Al Pacino was co-president, along with Ellen Burstyn and Harvey Keitel, of the Actors Studio.

20.

In 1968, Al Pacino starred in Israel Horovitz's The Indian Wants the Bronx at the Astor Place Theatre, playing Murph, a street punk.

21.

Al Pacino won an Obie Award for Best Actor for his role, with John Cazale winning for Best Supporting Actor and Horowitz for Best New Play.

22.

Al Pacino took the production of The Indian Wants the Bronx to Italy for a performance at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto.

23.

Al Pacino continued performing onstage in the 1970s, winning a second Tony Award for The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and performing the title role in Richard III.

24.

In 1983, Al Pacino became a major donor for The Mirror Theater Ltd, alongside Dustin Hoffman and Paul Newman, matching a grant from Laurence Rockefeller.

25.

In 1985, Al Pacino offered the company his production of Hughie by Eugene O'Neill, but the company was unable to do it at the time due to the small cast.

26.

In October 2002, Al Pacino starred in Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui for the National Actor's Theater and Complicite.

27.

Al Pacino is all brooding menace and crocodile grimace, butchering his way to the top with unnervingly sinister glee.

28.

Al Pacino returned to the stage in the summer of 2010, playing Shylock in the Shakespeare in the Park production, The Merchant of Venice.

29.

Al Pacino starred in the 30th-anniversary Broadway revival of David Mamet's play, Glengarry Glen Ross, which ran from October 2012 to January 20,2013.

30.

Al Pacino starred on Broadway in China Doll, a play written for him by Mamet, which opened on December 5,2015, and closed on January 21,2016, after 97 performances.

31.

Al Pacino found acting enjoyable and realized he had a gift for it while studying at The Actors Studio.

32.

In 1970, Al Pacino signed with the talent agency Creative Management Associates.

33.

Al Pacino's performance earned him an Academy Award nomination, and offered a prime example of his early acting style, described by Halliwell's Film Guide as "intense" and "tightly clenched".

34.

In 1973, Al Pacino co-starred in Scarecrow, with Gene Hackman, and won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

35.

That same year, Al Pacino was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor after starring in Serpico, based on the true story of New York City policeman Frank Serpico, who went undercover to expose the corruption of fellow officers.

36.

In 1974, Al Pacino reprised his role as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, which was the first sequel to win the Best Picture Oscar; Al Pacino was nominated a third time for an Oscar, this second nomination for the Corleone role being in the lead category.

37.

Al Pacino was lauded by critics for his wide range of acting abilities, and nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for a fourth time.

38.

Al Pacino earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role as Cuban drug lord Tony Montana.

39.

In 1985, Al Pacino worked on his personal project, The Local Stigmatic, a 1969 off-Broadway play by the English writer Heathcote Williams.

40.

Al Pacino starred in the play, remounting it with director David Wheeler and the Theater Company of Boston in a 50-minute film version.

41.

Al Pacino's 1985 film Revolution about a fur trapper during the American Revolutionary War, was a commercial and critical failure, which Pacino blamed on a rushed production, resulting in a four-year hiatus from films.

42.

Al Pacino mounted workshop productions of Crystal Clear, National Anthems and other plays; he appeared in Julius Caesar in 1988 in producer Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival.

43.

In 1991, Al Pacino starred in Frankie and Johnny with Michelle Pfeiffer, who co-starred with Al Pacino in Scarface.

44.

Al Pacino portrays a recently paroled cook who begins a relationship with a waitress in the diner where they work.

45.

The film received mixed reviews, although Al Pacino later said he enjoyed playing the part.

46.

Al Pacino won the Academy Award for Best Actor next year.

47.

Al Pacino starred in Michael Mann's Heat, in which he and Robert De Niro appeared on-screen together for the first time.

48.

In 1996, Al Pacino starred in his theatrical docudrama Looking for Richard, a performance of selected scenes of William Shakespeare's Richard III and a broader examination of Shakespeare's continuing role and relevance in popular culture.

49.

Al Pacino played Satan in the supernatural thriller The Devil's Advocate which co-starred Keanu Reeves.

50.

In 1997's Donnie Brasco, Al Pacino played gangster "Lefty" in the true story of undercover FBI agent Donnie Brasco and his work in bringing down the Mafia from the inside.

51.

In 1999, Al Pacino starred as 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman in the multi-Oscar nominated The Insider opposite Russell Crowe, and in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday.

52.

In 2000, Al Pacino starred alongside Jerry Orbach in a low-budget film adaptation of Ira Lewis' play Chinese Coffee, which was released to film festivals.

53.

Al Pacino produced prologues and epilogues for the discs containing the films.

54.

Al Pacino turned down an offer to reprise his role as Michael Corleone in the computer game version of The Godfather.

55.

Al Pacino did allow his likeness to appear in the video game adaptation of 1983's Scarface, the quasi-sequel Scarface: The World is Yours.

56.

The film and Al Pacino's performance were well received, gaining a favorable rating of 93 percent on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.

57.

Al Pacino played a publicist in People I Know, a small film that received little attention despite Pacino's well-received performance.

58.

Al Pacino next starred as lawyer Roy Cohn in the 2003 HBO miniseries Angels in America, an adaptation of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same name.

59.

Al Pacino starred as Shylock in Michael Radford's 2004 film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice.

60.

In Two for the Money, Al Pacino portrays a sports gambling agent and mentor for Matthew McConaughey, alongside Rene Russo.

61.

Al Pacino starred in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen, alongside George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Elliott Gould and Andy Garcia, as the villain Willy Bank, a casino tycoon targeted by Danny Ocean and his crew.

62.

Al Pacino played Jack Kevorkian in an HBO Films biopic titled You Don't Know Jack, which premiered April 2010.

63.

Al Pacino co-starred as himself in the 2011 comedy film Jack and Jill.

64.

The film was panned by critics, and Al Pacino "won" the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor at the 32nd ceremony.

65.

Al Pacino was presented with Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker Award on September 4,2011, prior to the premiere of Wilde Salome, a 2011 American documentary-drama film written, directed by and starring Pacino.

66.

Al Pacino, who plays the role of Herod in the film, describes it as his "most personal project ever".

67.

Al Pacino starred in a 2013 HBO biographical picture about record producer Phil Spector's murder trial, titled Phil Spector.

68.

Al Pacino took the title role in the comedy-drama Danny Collins.

69.

Al Pacino starred alongside Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino's comedy-drama Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was released on July 26,2019.

70.

Later in 2019, Al Pacino played Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa, alongside Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, in Martin Scorsese's Netflix film The Irishman, based on the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt; this was the first time Al Pacino was directed by Scorsese, and he received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination.

71.

In February 2020, Al Pacino starred as Meyer Offerman, a fictional Nazi hunter, in the Amazon Video series Hunters.

72.

In 2021, Al Pacino played Aldo Gucci in Ridley Scott's House of Gucci.

73.

The film received mixed to positive reviews, with Al Pacino's performance being highlighted as a standout, along with Lady Gaga's and Jared Leto's.

74.

Al Pacino had a relationship with his The Godfather Trilogy co-star Diane Keaton.

75.

Al Pacino had a ten-year relationship with Argentine actress Lucila Polak from 2008 to 2018.

76.

Al Pacino has admitted to abusing drugs and alcohol early in his career, partly because he found his sudden fame after The Godfather difficult to cope with.

77.

Al Pacino has won and been nominated for many awards during his acting career, including nine Oscar nominations, 18 Golden Globe nominations, five BAFTA nominations, two Primetime Emmy Awards for his work on television, and two Tony Awards for his stage work.