Al Pacino

Alfredo James Pacino (pronounced /paˈtʃiːno/) (New York, 25 April 1940), known as Al Pacino, is an American film, theater and television actor, having occasionally worked as a screenwriter, director and producer. His career spans seven decades, from his early days on the New York theater scene to his success on film, garnering numerous awards and honors, including Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, and Tony awards, making him one of the actors of the century XX that has received the most recognition. He is known for having played problematic characters and outsiders, with a presence intense and explosive, which led him to be listed by various media as one of the best actors of his generation and one of the most representative of American cinema of the 1970s.

After her parents' divorce, she spent her childhood in the South Bronx with her maternal family, of working class Italian origin. It was then that he began to go to the movies accompanied by his mother and to imitate scenes from movies. Although he had already started acting in school plays and in high school, during his youth he was forced to abandon his acting studies to work in jobs that allowed him to support himself. Still struggling to make ends meet, often unemployed and eventually finding himself homeless, Pacino continued his training as an actor, first at the HB Studio and later at the Actors Studio, where he honed "Method" acting techniques. His stage career began in the 1960s in off-off-Broadway productions and in addition to acting he went on to write revue shows and even perform as a stand-up comedian. After gaining some recognition for his performance in the play The Indian Wants the Bronx , his popularity in the theater continued to rise thanks to Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? , his Broadway debut. He also managed to capture the attention of the film industry and, after a fleeting debut in Me, Natalie (1969), he received several offers to continue working in that medium before playing a heroin addict in the drama The Panic in Needle Park (1971).

Already a staunch "method actor", he used to become deeply involved with his characters, to the point of exhibiting traits of their characters even offstage. His career took off and he gained international recognition for a string of roles leading roles in the films The Godfather (1972), Serpico (1973), Scarecrow (1973), The Godfather II (1974) and Dog Afternoon (1975). Despite Pacino's little previous film experience, director Francis Ford Coppola insisted on casting him as Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Although he failed to convince the executives at the start of filming, his performance as the head of the Corleone family earned him the first of several Oscar nominations and became a movie star. Frank Serpico in Serpico not only earned him the approval of critics but also earned him a Golden Globe. After the resounding success of the first installment, he played Michael Corleone in the second part of The godfather, with comparable results, finishing solidifying the prestige of his participation in the saga.

Pacino walked away from movies in the mid-1980s after poor results from some of his work, including the controversial Cruising (1980), the crime drama Scarface (1983) and the box office flop Revolution (1985). However, his portrayal of drug lord Tony Montana in Scarface managed to become a cultural icon and the work a cult film. He got his film career back on track with the thriller Sea of Love (1989) and during the following years he would stand out with other performances that would catapult him back to the top. With the first two installments of The Godfather to Often cited among the best films of all time, he completed the trilogy with The Godfather III (1990). Likewise, after being nominated for an Oscar for Dick Tracy (1990), he was nominated again for Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and finally won said award for embodying the retired military Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman (1992). His career on the big screen continued with roles such as Carlito Brigante in Carlito's Way (1993), Lieutenant Vincent Hanna in Heat (1995), "Lefty" Ruggiero in Donnie Brasco (1997), John Milton in The Devil's Advocate (1997), Lowell Bergman in The Insider (1999), Detective Will Dormer in Insomnia (2002) and Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman (2019).

Despite his popularity as a film actor, he never left the theater and at the same time continued to act on stage during certain periods of his career, most notably in works by David Mamet in the 1980s and revivals of renowned plays in the 1980s. later, including The Merchant of Venice (2010) as Shylock, a role he had already played in the 2004 film adaptation. After avoiding it for years, he turned to the small screen to successfully star in multiple HBO productions such as the miniseries Angels in America (2003) and the telefilm You Don't Know Jack (2010). Although Pacino does not consider himself a director, being a follower of Shakespeare, he debuted as a filmmaker with Looking for Richard (1996), a documentary about the work Ricardo III, and returned to work behind the scenes with the independent film Chinese Coffee (2000) and the docudrama Wilde Salomé (2011).

Early Years

Youth

Pacino was born on April 25, 1940 in the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York, the only child of Rose —Gerardi, née— and Salvatore Pacino, both of Italian origin. His father came from the Sicilian town of San Fratello, while his mother was the daughter of immigrants from Corleone, also in Sicily. Although mostly of Sicilian descent, Pacino has also claimed Neapolitan origin. After his parents divorced when he was two years old old, he moved with his mother to the South Bronx —at that time, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood—, near the Bronx Zoo, to live in his grandparents' apartment. For his part, his father moved to Covina (California) to work as an insurance broker and later open a restaurant. It was thus that his maternal grandfather, James Gerardi, became his father figure, but, although he was not close to his father, they used to see each other sporadically. He was raised mainly by his mother and maternal grandfather, although on occasion he shared the house with uncles and cousins, becoming nine people under one roof. A childhood friend noted that "he had a very close relationship with his mother and grandparents. His mother was very affectionate with him. He was poor, but he did not lack affection.” Although he had been baptized, his upbringing was not strictly Catholic.

His mother started taking him to the movies when he was around three years old and a couple of years later he used to act out a scene from the film Days Without a Trace at family gatherings. During the day he spent a lot of time alone and in the afternoon, when his mother returned from work, he often went to the movies with her. Being a shy and only child, he had to learn to defend himself and interact with other children when he started school at the age of six. During his youth he was considered a troublemaker at school and in his neighborhood; "Sonny"—as his friends called him—aspired to be a baseball player, although he was also nicknamed "The Actor". At nine years of age he started smoking cigarettes and at thirteen he drank alcoholic beverages occasionally, but he never used hard drugs. "I was never interested in drugs, because I saw what they did to most people," Pacino maintained, citing his mother as responsible for keeping him out of that environment. At that time he played third base for Police Athletic. League, in the team and "quasi-gang" Red Wings. Many of these "tough guys" with "high IQs and tragic endings" were to influence some of his characters. Two of his closest friends died as a result of drug abuse at the ages of nineteen and thirty. After participating in an incident in a building under construction where he risked his life to save a friend, the young Pacino was awarded in the television program Wheel of Fortune (1952-1953).

Training as an actor

While reading passages from the Bible at a middle school reunion, his drama teacher recognized the potential of the young Pacino and, from then on, would consider him to act in school plays. « The first time I did anything on stage, someone came up to me and said, 'You're a Marlon Brando.' And I said: 'Who is Marlon Brando?'", recalled Pacino, who was then going to familiarize himself with the performances of said actor and imitate them. At school he had his first approach to the work of William Shakespeare with the reading of Romeo and Juliet and saw Brando star in Julius Caesar. With a regular school level, after dropping out of Herman Ridder Junior High School, the only secondary school that accepted him was the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. This institution taught its students the acting techniques of "the Method" and the Stanislavski system, which at the time did not excite Pacino. His interest in acting increased at He was fourteen when he saw Anton Chekhov's The Seagull in a theater in the Bronx. Although he had received praise for his "natural" acting style, he had to drop out of high school to support himself and help his mother. His mother, now too sick to work, He turned to get a job, since "acting was for rich people". Thus, he worked in a variety of jobs: he was a postman, a shoe salesman, he worked in a greengrocer, in a supermarket, in a pharmacy and in the living room. courier for Commentary magazine for a couple of years, one of the few jobs from which he was not fired. He worked as an usher at an East Side movie theater and at Carnegie Hall. When he was fifteen, his grandparents left town, and later his mother, too, leaving Pacino living alone at seventeen.

While still a teenager, he auditioned for the Actors Studio and after going through a preliminary stage he was rejected. This fact did not discourage Pacino who later joined the HB Studio (Herbert Berghof Studio), where he met acting coach Charlie Laughton, who became his mentor and best friend. During this period, he frequently found himself unemployed and homeless, sometimes having to sleep on the streets, in theaters, or at friends' houses. Working as movers, Pacino and Laughton considered starting their own moving company in hopes of improving financially, but the idea fell through because neither of them knew how to drive. With no money to go to the theater, the duo hung out in coffee shops and according to Laughton, "Al took some of his most interesting characters watching people on the subway and on the streets of New York." Through another of his temp jobs, as a bicycle messenger, she met the playwright Frank Biancamano for whom she was to act on one occasion. In 1962 her mother passed away at the age of forty-three. The following year his grandfather, James Gerardi, also passed away. Pacino described that period as "the lowest point of his life" and recalled, "I was twenty-two and the two most influential people in my life were gone, and that threw me off a cliff." Sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village with Martin Sheen, both aspiring actors began working as stagehands at The Living Theatre.

After four years at HB Studio, he successfully entered the Actors Studio, an organization of professional actors, theater directors, and playwrights from the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. There he studied "The Method" of acting and was student of Lee Strasberg. Pacino attached vital importance to his time at the Actors Studio and his preparation under Strasberg's guidance, stating that "along with Charlie [Laughton], he kind of boosted [his] career" and that "it was He was directly responsible for his quitting all those jobs and [taking] up acting." At the time, he made a living working as a janitor in a residential building where he occupied an apartment rent-free and earned fourteen dollars a week. Now I had my little home. I had no money, almost nothing to eat, but I had a roof over my head," Pacino recalled. The aspiring actor was finally fired after two years, due to persistent complaints from tenants about the lack of cleanliness in the building. or disturbing noises. The property owner recalled that Pacino rarely got home before 3 a.m. and “would leave his apartment bleary-eyed at 7 a.m. to vacuum the halls".

Career

Debut in the theater (1963-1968)

Pacino like Pavlo Hummel in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (Boston Theatre, 1971). In 1977 he won a Tony Award for the best lead actor for the theatre performance of this character on Broadway.

Pacino emerged as an actor on the New York theater scene, with roles in children's plays at venues such as Café Bizarre and Theater East. His off-off-Broadway theater debut took place at Caffe Cino in the play Hello Out There! by William Saroyan, directed by Charlie Laughton, in 1963. Pacino and Laughton would spend hours at the automat eating cheap food and observing the surroundings and their clientele to get material for his sketches. With the idea of helping his mother financially, he tried to break into the cinema and attended a call for America, America by Elia Kazan, but he was late for the casting and lost that opportunity. A key moment that helped establish Pacino on the stage was his participation in another 1965 off-off-Broadway play directed by Laughton, Creditors by August Strindberg. Around the middle of the decade, he tried his hand at directing and began writing comedic revues which he performed with a friend in Greenwich Village coffee shops, going so far as to test his skills as a stand-up comedian at Café La MaMa. At the same time, he was performing in warehouses and basements in plays such as Awake and Sing! and America Hurray. Pacino called that experience liberating, stating that he was able to "speak" for the first time. At the time his attitude towards acting was "just to keep doing it" and get better with practice, doing about sixteen shows per week. In 1966 the play Why Is a Crooked Letter earned him his first public recognition, an Obie Award nomination for Best Actor.

In early 1967, he surprised the Actors Studio by performing a monologue from playwright Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh that transitioned into one of Hamlet. After an ovation from the audience, the director of the institute Lee Strasberg asked him to interpret a character from O'Neill as Hamlet and vice versa. "The courage he has shown today is more exceptional than talent", Strasberg pronounced. Strasberg authorized a payment of fifty dollars through the James Dean Memorial Scholarship Fund so that Pacino could pay the rent on his Greenwich Village apartment. Penniless again and sleeping on the floor of Charlie Laughton's apartment on Grand Street, he borrowed fifty dollars to go to Boston to audition for David Wheeler's Theater Company. Pacino surprised Wheeler by reading a script for The Caucasian Chalk Circle, however, the playwright only had a small role available and the actor preferred to return to New York. Towards the end of the same year, returned to Boston and temporarily joined the Charles Playhouse Theater to star in Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! and Jean-Claude van Itallie's America Hurrah. There he began to receive a salary for acting for the first time —125 dollars a week— and met actress Jill Clayburgh with whom he had a five-year relationship. One of the first reviews mentioning his work as an actor highlighted the quality from Awake and Sing!, except for his acting.

Although he already felt acting as part of his identity, he still made a living as a construction superintendent for fourteen dollars a week. In 1968 he starred in his first off-Broadway play in New York, The Indian Wants the Bronx, at the Astor Place Theatre, playing Murph, a street hooligan. The play premiered on January 17 of that year and was performed 177 times; was presented in double features with another play, It's Called the Sugar Plum, starring Clayburgh. Pacino won the Obie Award for Best Actor for his role, John Cazale as best supporting actor and Israel Horovitz won the award for best new work. His name began to become more prominent among critics; a local critic predicted that Pacino was "a name we shall one day know very well" and a later review by Clive Barnes for The Times newspaper contributed to his notoriety as an actor. Martin Bregman saw the play and offered to be his manager, a partnership that proved fruitful over the next few years. "Martin Bregman discovered me on Broadway. I was 25 or 26 years old. He discovered me and became my representative. And that's why I'm here, I owe it to Marty, really," Pacino said. The Indian Wants the Bronx meant a big step in the life and career of Pacino, who traveled to Italy to perform at the Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto. This was her first trip to Italy and she later recalled that "performing for Italian audiences was a wonderful experience". Along with Clayburgh, she participated in "Deadly Circle of Violence", an episode of the television series N.Y.P.D. on ABC, premiered November 12, 1968. At the time, Clayburgh was also a guest on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow and Clayburgh's father sent them money every month to help them.

Arrival on Broadway and first film roles (1969-1971)

On February 25, 1969, he made his Broadway debut in the play Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? at the Belasco Theater; the production closed after thirty-nine performances. Pacino received rave reviews and won the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Play. He also won Drama Desk and Theater World Awards. His career received a positive boost thanks to reviews such as The New York Times which, while questioning his versatility, describing him as "an Italian Dustin Hoffman", commented that he was "the best young actor in town", while a critics' poll for Variety magazine > named him Broadway's "most promising new actor". Another review in The New York Times explained Pacino's character as "a clumsy, stoned psychotic with the mind of a thug and the soul of a poet", also described that way by Newsweek magazine. He was immediately offered an offer to act in another Broadway play, Zorba the Greek , but he turned down the offer. offer. Pacino's performance in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? also caught the attention of then-unknown director Francis Ford Coppola and convinced him to travel to San Francisco, where he offered her a role in a romantic film that ultimately failed to be produced.

Impressed by Pacino's performance in the play The Indian Wants the Bronx, casting director Marion Dougherty offered him a role in the dramatic comedy Me, Natalie (1969), a brief appearance that was to mark her feature film debut. The film was shot in New York and Pacino spent an entire day filming its only scene, set on a dance floor where he proposes to have sex with the protagonist, played by Patty Duke. Preparing for his debut on the big screen, in front of the typical New York brownstone houses, the actor repeated the few dialogues of his character over and over again in different ways. His participation did not go completely unnoticed and It was well appreciated by some critics, including Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. Pacino was going to comment on that first film experience: "The only thing I remember about that movie is that Patty Duke was very Be nice to me." In 1970, he signed with the Creative Management Associates (CMA) agency. His performance in the theater attracted the attention of the film industry, and Pacino received eleven offers to act in films before choosing The Panic in Needle Park (1971), where he played a heroin addict from Manhattan. It was his first film as a leading man and the first in which he displayed his particular style of acting. According to the producer of the film, Dominick Dunne, the list of candidates to star in The Panic in Needle Park was ultimately shortened to "two strangers": Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, adding that the latter "knelt on the ground, really knelt down" begging him not to give the part to Pacino. Distributor 20th Century Fox also did not want Pacino for the role, considering him "too ethnic".

Film success and rise to fame (1972-1979)

Francis Ford Coppola was still thinking about Pacino's performance in the play Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? and decided on him to play Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972). However, the producers at Paramount Pictures wanted a movie "star" instead and pressured Coppola to consider other actors such as Robert Redford, James Caan, Martin Sheen, Jack Nicholson, or Warren Beatty. Dissatisfied with Pacino's auditions, executive producer Robert Evans referred to him as "the midget," deeming the actor's 5'7" height insufficient to embody the future Corleone family don. Even Pacino himself felt inadequate for the character, thinking that he would be better off sticking with the role of Sonny Corleone. Eventually, Coppola's insistence, Diane Keaton's approval, and eight dramatic minutes of footage from The Panic in Needle Park managed to get the executives to relent and the relatively unknown Pacino landed the role. However, even as filming began, the producers continued to doubt the actor and tried to fire him three times. From the moment Coppola read the novel on which the film is based, Pacino became his first and only choice for the cast. role, which is why he did not relent to the executives. "Michael was a difficult character because he starts out one way and transitions into another," Pacino recalled. To finish convincing the executives, Coppola brought forward the filming of one of the scenes: the meeting with Virgil Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey in the restaurant, a scene that was to become famous.

Pacino with James Caan around 1972.

His performance in The Godfather was a smash hit with critics, with his manager stating, "People may have come to see Brando, but they'll walk away talking about Pacino." the critic Larry Cohen sentenced: «The Godfather belongs to Al Pacino. Everyone else does very well, even the smallest roles, but it's Pacino who is great." This performance earned him an Oscar nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category - despite being the lead in the plot. —. The film was also well received at the box office, considered one of the best ever and one of the defining roles of Pacino's career. The actor earned $35,000 and had to invest part of that amount in legal matters. By the time he was finally offered the role of Michael Corleone, Pacino had already signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to star in another mob film, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. , so he had to resort to the help of lawyers to solve the problem. He later revealed that he was "broken" financially after that dispute with MGM.

The director of The Panic in Needle Park, Jerry Schatzberg, selected him to co-star with Gene Hackman in his next film, Scarecrow (1973). Hackman and Pacino played two drifters who travel from California to Pittsburgh with the intention of starting a business. Preparing for their roles prior to filming, Hackman and Pacino dressed in rags and went begging on the streets of San Francisco. The contrast between the two actors in their approach to their respective characters brought dynamism to the screen, but their relationship on the set was not ideal and Pacino was going to declare that "working with Hackman was not the easiest thing". According to Pacino, although Scarecrow was "the best script I had ever read", he considered this film "the saddest experience" of his career, believing that it was an example of "negligence" and since Because the executives wanted to spend less than the budget, they ended up sacrificing the quality of the film. According to Schatzberg's account, the actor was not satisfied with the number of minutes he appeared on the screen and wanted the film to be reissued, to which the director refused, causing the duo to stop speaking for almost three years. Once released, the film had a mixed reception: Although it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the box office results were negative and divided the opinion of film critics. Later it would gain adherents, to the point of becoming a cult film, being re-released at some film festivals and special screenings and improving its critical rating.

Pacino in an advertising portrait Serpic.

Pacino scene like the covert agent Frank Serpico.

At the same time, he starred in Serpico, directed by Sidney Lumet, based on Peter Maas's biography of the incorruptible New York police officer, Frank Serpico, who worked several years on the streets undercover and exposed the corruption that existed in the police department of that city. At first, the project did not attract much attention to the actor, apparently "just another crime movie", but his decision was influenced after reading the written script by Waldo Salt and—mainly—after his encounter with Frank Serpico. Passionate about Serpico's conviction to reform the NYPD, he became more committed to the project. As a way of getting into character, the actor met Serpico on several occasions. times and for one night he walked the streets alongside police officers. Playing Serpico, Pacino often walked through dangerous areas of the city at the time, even going as far as attempting to arrest a trucker. Serpico was his first film as a leading man and catapulted him to movie star status, earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Drama. Pacino was widely praised for his portrayal of Serpico, admirers of his work included critic and writer Charles Champlin who called him "one of the few genuine star actors of American cinema". The popularity of the film also helped to increase the fame of Frank Serpico and his name remained associated with Pacino's image.

Although hesitant at first, he reprized his role as Michael Corleone in the second part of The Godfather (1974), set in 1958 with Michael as the new don of the Corleone family. An offer of $600,000 and the enthusiasm of Francis Ford Coppola convinced Pacino to star in the second part. It enjoyed the same critical and commercial success as the first installment, and went on to be part of numerous best-of-history lists., as was Pacino's performance. It was the first sequel to win the Best Picture Oscar, while Pacino received his third Oscar nomination. Newsweek magazine described his performance as "the greatest representation in the cinema of the hardening of a heart"; thus, Pacino became one of the main attractions at the box office of that year. During the twenty weeks of intense shooting, the actor - who was leading a life lonely—had difficulties distancing himself from his character, which ended up affecting him physically and psychologically, leading him to be admitted to the hospital due to exhaustion. As a consequence, he abandoned his next project, Dog Afternoon (19 75) and there was talk of Dustin Hoffman as his replacement. Pacino explained:

I'd finished doing the second part. The godfather And I was tired of the films. I didn't want to make a movie. It was a nuisance. There were years of theater and I thought it was one of those actors that could not adapt to the cinema, because it was too laborious. I guess I was really tough on myself. I was working on a medium I didn't know and felt unsafe.

However, the producer of Dog Afternoon and still Pacino's manager, Martin Bregman, was of the opinion that the role could only be played by Pacino. Pierson managed to convince him. Sidney Lumet directed the production based on a true story whose plot co-starred Pacino and John Cazale as the assailants in—according to biographer William Schoell—"one of the most peculiar" and "most pathetic" attempted bank robbery. "It takes an enormous amount of courage, because he's a leading man, not a supporting actor, and he had been asked to play a homosexual. It was a big risk," Bregman recalled. And he explained: "When you play a character, you become that character, especially when you're Al, and that could have been a world that he didn't want to explore. You have to remember that at that time no movie star had ever played a homosexual; he was the first."

Pacino as the assailant Sonny Wortzik in Dog's late.

Although at first Pacino had trouble "finding the character", he proposed some changes during filming and improvised some of the dialogue, avoiding stereotypes and creating a character as "human and complicated" as possible. Early post-release reviews were mixed; while the film satisfied Vincent Canby of The New York Times, Rolling Stone critic Jon Landau called it "a bore" and added that "its almost complete Failure rests on the shoulders of Al Pacino." However, the film's prestige was to increase thanks to the appreciation of other critics and numerous awards, including Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Pacino. Both the Golden Globe Jack Nicholson ended up taking the Oscar for best actor for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

At the peak of his career and not knowing how to continue, Pacino turned down the next roles he was offered and spent almost a year without working. Feeling identified with him and experiencing a similar situation, he agreed to play Bobby Deerfield, a famous and reclusive race car driver obsessed with his profession, in the romantic drama of the same name (1977) directed by Sydney Pollack. "I felt very lost in life", recalled Pacino, who had given up drinking and his previous success in movies had alienated him from the world he knew. Filming took place in Europe and during his four months of For the duration, Pacino underwent a strict regimen of fitness under the guidance of trainer Al Silvani. This work marked a departure from his previous films, and although he felt "connected" to his character, felt that his acting skills were limited for that role. In addition, although he recognized Pollack's abilities, he confessed to having had creative differences during filming, stating that at times he could not understand the director's point of view., Pollack noted that Pacino asked extremely detailed questions about scenes and characters, commenting that it was "like a dog tracking a scent", and the actor's slowness and time spent "getting into" character made the actor impatient. director. Bobby Deerfield was a disappointment at the box office and did not excite critics either, although Pacino earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Drama. For the first time his salary exceeded a million dollars.

During the 1970s, alongside his success in film, the actor continued to work on stage, associated with plays produced by the Theater Company of Boston. One of them was The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1972, 1977), where he played the title character, and for which he later won the Tony Award for Best Lead Actor for his Broadway version. The author of the work, David Rabe, noted the number of varied performances that Pacino developed during rehearsals and even moments before the premiere. Rabe stated that in one of the rehearsals she saw him play the character in "twenty different ways", it was like "trying on suits". Other works included the controversial Ricardo III (1972, 1979), playing the character of the same name. The result generated mixed reactions from critics, some considering that a work by William Shakespeare was not suitable terrain for a New York actor like Pacino, alluding to its "ethnic" aspect or its working-class diction. Referring to a review of Walter Kerr where he affirmed that Pacino did not belong to the world of Shakespeare, the actor assured: "Shakespeare is one of the reasons why I kept acting".

By 1977, Pacino had agreed to star in an early version of Born on the Fourth of July with William Friedkin directing. After two weeks of rehearsals, the funding was withdrawn and the actor and director left the project. Following this, the professional relationship between Pacino and his manager, Martin Bregman, was dissolved. The actor subsequently turned down proposals for star in the tapes Kramer vs. Kramer, Apocalypse Now and Star Wars. He instead starred in the legal drama Justice for All (1979). From director Norman Jewison, the story of a lawyer fighting corruption in the judicial system. A reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter magazine wrote that this was the role Pacino played best, "the scruffy rebel, strong but vulnerable, discreet but easily explosive, fighting for simple rights and a fair deal." fair in a corrupt society." According to The Epoch Times, Justice For All "sadly marked the end of Pacino's 'golden era.'" His performance earned him a fifth Oscar nomination, an award that ended up taking Dustin Hoffman for Kramer vs. Kramer. After filming Justice for All , he returned to Broadway to star again in Richard III.

Career ups and downs (1980-1988)

Graffiti Pacino like Tony Montana. His character in Scarface became an icon of popular culture.

Immediately after his Broadway stint, Pacino returned to film to star in director William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), his most controversial film, about an undercover cop investigating a series of murders. occurred within the homosexual community of the New York neighborhood of West Village. Since the beginning of filming in New York, homosexual activists protested against the production of the film, trying to sabotage the filming, encouraged by part of the press. Those who protested accused the plot of being "anti-homosexual" and portraying homosexuals as one-dimensional stereotypes, partly due to the presence of scenes of sadomasochism. "It's just a piece of the gay community, in the same way that the mob is a piece of Italian-American life", Pacino opined before the release. The director omitted essential scenes from the original script, and once the film was released, Pacino felt that that was not the film he had agreed to make. Despite the attention it received from the media, Cruising did not do well in theaters and critical reaction was negative., although during the following decades some would rescue aspects of the film.

His film career continued with a turnaround playing a single father of five in the dramatic comedy Author! Author! (1982) They're supposed to meet meet for a brief time", Pacino said, adding that the film "shouldn't have happened". Disinterested in the film, critic Roger Ebert wondered: "What is Pacino doing in this chaos? What's happening to his career?” Also, Author! Author! was another disappointment at the box office. During this decade there were periods in which Pacino moved away from cinema, dedicating that time to theater and polishing details of a personal production, the film The Local Stigmatic, which was not to see the light of day until years later. His greatest success on stage was David Mamet's American Buffalo (1980-1984), for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award..

Pacino en Scarface.

Pacino returned to gangster movies with Scarface (1983), directed by Brian De Palma and written by Oliver Stone. After seeing the original 1932 film, Pacino pitched the project to Martin Bregman, who saw it as an opportunity for the actor to play a role he hadn't played before. De Palma devised the operatic style of the character and the film. For the role of Cuban drug lord Tony Montana, Pacino drew inspiration primarily from Paul Muni's original performance and temporarily relocated to Miami to familiarize himself with the customs and language patterns of its residents. Pacino prioritized the character's accent and once perfected, he often used it both on and off the set. In addition to working with a dialect expert, he also trained with a physical trainer and a knife combat expert. Although met with negative reviews, the film was to re-emerge as a cult film and be widely referenced in film. popular culture, as well as becoming one of Pacino's most popular roles.

His leading role in Scarface was followed by another in Revolution (1985), about a hunter during the American War of Independence. The film was a failure both commercially and critically. Costing $28 million to produce, the film grossed only $359,000, making it one of the films with the biggest grossing deficits. Writing for New York magazine, David Denby criticized Pacino's accent, describing him as "Kid Marx with a cold", and regarding his expression he said it was like "Anne Bancroft trying to be serious". greatest" of his career, opining that the material had potential, but that it was affected by the lack of production and rushed release.

The negative reviews of Scarface and the resounding failure of Revolution disoriented Pacino, who as a result retired from filmmaking for four years. Still upset with his Out of Born on the Fourth of July , Oliver Stone declared: “Pacino is an idiot. His career went down the drain". Meanwhile, he turned his attention to the realization of his project as a producer, the medium-length film The Local Stigmatic. At the same time, he took refuge in the theater, he acted in the production Joseph Papp's Julius Caesar (1986), as well as acting in other plays including Crystal Clear (1987) and National Anthems (1988). Pacino recalled that in the 1970s, the media claimed, in his words: "That the reason I returned to the stage was that my film career was waning! That's been the kind of mindset, the way theater is perceived, unfortunately.” The actor recalled those years away from movies as one of the best periods of his adult life.

Resurgence (1989-1999)

His investment in the production of the independent film The Local Stigmatic brought him down financially, for which reason he had to return to film acting. With the help of Diane Keaton, his partner in At that time, he returned to the big screen at the hands of director Harold Becker with the neo-noir thriller Sea of Love (1989), where Pacino played a detective in search of a serial killer who finds her victims through advertisements in the newspaper. Sea of Love not only meant his return to the cinema but to familiar territory, playing the role of a New York police. The film fulfilled the expectations generated by his return; it had a positive reception from critics and generated interest in the public, positioning itself at number one at the box office at the time of its premiere and raising more of one hundred and ten million dollars, on a budget of nineteen million. This helped bring the actor back to the With the mainstream scene and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Drama, Becker's film not only relaunched Pacino's career but also that of his co-star, Ellen Barkin.

Pacino in 1994.

In 1990 Pacino screened The Local Stigmatic at MoMA. About fifty minutes long, it is an adaptation of the play of the same name in which Pacino had performed for the first time in 1969 and for which he had been booed. The Local Stigmatic deals with themes such as fame and violence and stars two low-life cockneys, one of them played by Pacino. The film was never released in theaters, he only had private showings. Also in 1990, he appeared in an antagonistic supporting role as gangster "Big Boy" Caprice in the crime comedy Dick Tracy, directed by and starring Warren Beatty. Pacino spent months designing his character's look, experimenting with various combinations of prosthetics and makeup. His histrionic performance earned him critical acclaim; Roger Ebert wrote that the actor was a "scene stealer" and magazine Time opined that Pacino "gives the Jack Nicholson of B atman a lesson or two in playing a comic book villain: as part psychotic ideologue and part Hollywood dance director, a Bugsy Siegel who wants to be Busby Berkeley". Pacino went on to be nominated for the Oscar for best supporting actor, a candidacy that set a precedent in the history of the "Academy Awards", by breaking with the custom of ignoring performances of comic book film adaptations.

Towards the end of that year, the third part of The Godfather hit theaters with Pacino reprising his role as Michael Corleone. Although without reaching the prestige of the previous installments of the saga, the long-awaited third part was valued positively by film critics, who praised Pacino's performance. Variety magazine and Janet Maslin of The New York Times called her performance "magnificent" and "fascinating", respectively, while David Denby called her "brilliant". "detailed" and "moving", although he did not express himself in the same way regarding the film in general. In Pacino's opinion, the film fell short of its potential due in part to the absence of Robert Duvall in the cast and because "no one he wanted to see Michael take revenge and feel guilty. He was not like that" and added that it was not wise to abandon his codes to "start crying over coffins, confess and feel remorse". most anticipated movie of the last decade according to the Los Angeles Times— helped catapult her career back to the top.

Director Garry Marshall, who had not been able to cast Pacino for Pretty Woman, managed to cast him as a co-star in the romantic drama Frankie and Johnny (1991), alongside his Scarface's partner, Michelle Pfeiffer. Pacino played a cook recently released from prison who begins a relationship with a waitress (Pfeiffer) at the diner where he works. It was a scripted adaptation by Terrence McNally of his own off-Broadway play entitled Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1987). While the director noted that the acting methods of his two leads were at odds, he noted that Pacino and Pfeiffer had "wonderful chemistry". Mr. Pacino hasn't been this handsome since his Dog Day Afternoon days, and he makes the never-ending pursuit of wooing Frankie a joy. The scenes of him and Pfeiffer have a precision and honesty that keep the maudlin aspects of the film at bay."

She then co-starred in the drama Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), based on the play of the same name written by David Mamet. It was an adaptation that had been years in the making with Pacino's name attached to the project; director James Foley eventually sent the script to the actor, whom he had wanted to work with for years. Other big-name actors had expressed interest in it. participate in the project, despite its modest budget —12.5 million dollars—; for example, Pacino's income went from the six million he had been earning per film to one and a half million at Glengarry Glen Ross. arrival of a facilitator who announces that after a week, only the top two salespeople will keep their jobs. The cast led by Pacino was described by critic Philip French as "one of the greatest American casts ever assembled".

For Glengarry Glen Ross, Pacino was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 65th Academy Awards, but the award went to his former Scarecrow partner. i>, Gene Hackman. However, Pacino would go on to win the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of blind retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in the blockbuster Scent of a Woman (1992). In this way, he became the first male actor to win the Best Actor award, having also been a candidate for Best Supporting Actor in the same edition of the awards. Being an example of acting by method, he received instructions from a school for the blind and although at first his character was going to wear glasses that would help the actor appear blind, Pacino decided not to use them. He was still "in" character even on set walking with a cane without looking at people. Critic David Denby of New York magazine called his performance "the most The biggest, most theatrical and emotional" of Pacino's film career, calling his career "in the midst of a fabulous second life". Some media have referred to 1992 as "the year of Al Pacino". At the same time, he continued to work in the theater with works such as Salomé by Oscar Wilde and Chinese Coffee on Broadway, whose results were irregular, but his performance was praised.

The following year, he starred in the crime drama Carlito's Way (1993), where he played a Puerto Rican gangster who has just been released from prison and is trying to get away from the world of crime. Partially based on two novels written by judge Edwin Torres, whom Pacino had met while working on Serpico, the actor became interested in the project and especially in the lead, Carlito Brigante. Pacino accompanied Torres on his tour of East Harlem to be inspired by the atmosphere of the place and the aesthetics of its inhabitants. The producers selected Brian De Palma as director, who thus met with Pacino after Scarface. The director expressed doubts regarding filming another gangster film of Hispanic origin, and planned a more conventional film without the excesses of Scarface, based on classic film noir. Coinciding with the forecasts, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly magazine compared Carlito's Way to Scarface, writing that it was "a work of filmmaking." finer", but noting the lack of a leading man as memorable as Tony Montana, saying that with Carlito Brigante "Pacino tries something quieter and more emotional". Pacino "smeared" the critical reception of Carlito's Way, which nonetheless delivered the actor in a "riveting performance that is mostly understated" with "some of the best scenes in virtuosity of his career".

Pacino at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1996.

After being inspired by his own grandfather's image to play an old man during his last days in James Foley's low-budget drama Two Bits (1995), he continued his role as Lieutenant Vincent Hanna in the crime drama Heat (1995) by director Michael Mann. Pacino's character is a Los Angeles homicide detective who tracks down a gang of bank robbers led by Robert De Niro's character. The film created expectations for being the first time that Pacino and De Niro appeared together on screen, the meeting of "the two most respected actors of their generation", according to The List magazine. Manohla Dargis wrote that Pacino "is a one-man riot, a dynamo charging a crime scene like a demented cross between the Mad Hatter and Hercule Poirot, all fury and turmoil of gray substance. But even though Hanna is inordinate, she's never out of control." Years later, Pacino explained some of his character's behavior, revealing that—although not shown on screen—he was under the influence of cocaine. The film was also going to be remembered for the antagonistic encounter between Pacino and De Niro in a cafeteria—filmed without having been rehearsed before—or the final scene. Collider considered the cafeteria scene "one of the most emblematic scenes of the history of cinema".

Later, he received the call from director Harold Becker to co-star with John Cusack in the political thriller City Hall (1996). "Although he has fewer screen minutes, Pacino takes over each of his scenes," critic Bob Thomas wrote for the Associated Press of the actor as the mayor of New York, calling his monologue in one of the scenes as "the best movie speeches of all time". Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly called the same scene "a grotesque parody of leftist sympathy", although he praised Pacino's performance in the film. rest of the film. Although the actor met the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Ed Koch and David Dinkins prior to playing the role of the charismatic mayor, he declared his role to be "a generic description of a populist mayor". years of work, that same year he released his directorial debut, Looking for Richard —also produced, starred and financed by himself—, a docudrama with selected scenes from Ricardo III of William Shakespeare and an extensive analysis of the current and relevant role cultural influence of the author, with a cast that included Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey and Winona Ryder, among others. Looking for Richard earned Pacino a Directors Guild Award for Best Directing in a Documentary.

Pacino in 1999.

His next film appearance was in Donnie Brasco (1997), directed by Mike Newell and based on the true story of undercover FBI agent Donnie Brasco and his work to bring down the mob from inside. Pacino played "Lefty" Ruggiero, a veteran hitman whose authority within organized crime is on the wane. Referring to "Lefty", Janet Maslin of The New York Times said: "This Pacino is different: Aged, tired, monotonous, down on his luck, yet desperately eager for approval." David Denby rated this performance by Pacino as "the most melancholy of his career" and the "most convincingly fatalistic." In that sense, the Former Colombo crime family caporegime Michael Franzese noted the authenticity of Donnie Brasco and cited it as Pacino's best work in a gangster movie, commenting that his character "wasn't considered one of the sophisticated types." of that world and [Pacino] portrays it very, very well".

After turning down three times to act in the film adaptation of Andrew Neiderman's supernatural novel The Devil's Advocate, considering the character stereotypical, he accepted the role after that Tony Gilroy rewrote the script. The film premiered in October 1997 with Keanu Reeves as an ambitious lawyer who comes to Manhattan to work at the prestigious company of the omnipotent "John Milton", played by Pacino. To create the character, described by the Los Angeles Times as "confident, seductive, cunning, flamboyant, lewd, intelligent, corrupt, playful and full of rage," the actor looked to the work of Walter Huston in the fantasy film The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) and read Dante Alighieri's Hell and John Milton's Paradise Lost. The film was a success at the box office, grossing over $150 million worldwide.

Later, he returned to work under the direction of Michael Mann in the multi-nominated Oscar drama The Insider (1999), opposite Russell Crowe. The plot was based on the efforts of whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Crowe) and television producer Lowell Bergman (Pacino) to expose harmful practices carried out by the tobacco industry, particularly Brown & Williamson. The Dallas Observer newspaper stated: "Pacino has begun to realize the importance of his legacy and wants to remind us that when push comes to shove, he can still deliver as he did as a young man." he played the coach of a failing American football team in the sports drama An Given Sunday (1999), by director Oliver Stone. In preparation for the role, Pacino met with figures from the sport such as Mike Shanahan, Bill Parcells and Steve Mariucci; In addition, his character shared the last name with boxing trainer Cus D & # 39; Amato. The director declared that he took advantage of the image of Pacino —the protagonist of Scarface, a film that Stone had scripted— to imply that a good trainer is, in part, a gangster. Once again, one of his monologues—in this case, the one that takes place in the pregame locker room—gained notoriety and transcended the big screen, serving as an inspiration to real-life sports teams.

Other roles and foray into television (2000-2006)

Pacino premiered his second directorial effort, Chinese Coffee, at the Telluride and Toronto festivals in 2000. The project was filmed towards the end of the previous decade over a period of three years and it was financed entirely by Pacino. Based on the play of the same name in which he had performed in the early 1990s, the film is almost exclusively about a conversation between two characters: an unsuccessful writer (Pacino) and his Mentor (Jerry Orbach). In the words of Pacino: «I am not adapting a work to the cinema. I am making a work like a film». The actor-director explained, "You try to keep the spirit of the play [...] by fitting into the film medium." In a review for Variety Todd McCarthy opined that Chinese Coffee "It's a little acting exercise that only an actor would think of making into a movie" and it "will no doubt join Two Bits as the least-watched films of the actor's remarkable career." McCarthy predicted that the film would have no commercial potential beyond the name of its director and, like his debut feature, it was never shown in movie theaters. Pacino, who acknowledged having "fallen in love with the idea of making a movie", he pointed out about his future behind the scenes:

I don't see myself as a real director. I look like an actor who's running this. A real director is someone who sees the world that way, who says, "Hey, I just saw something. I just read something. I have to direct it." Not me. I see something and say, "Wow, I have to act." Big difference. Sometimes I feel that maybe when I die and go to Heaven, I will lead.

The then emerging director Christopher Nolan enlisted Pacino to co-star in the psychological thriller Insomnia (2002), opposite Robin Williams and Hilary Swank, a remake of the Norwegian film of the same name. The actor accepted the role and recognized Nolan's talents after seeing Memento, the director's previous feature film. The plot of Insomnia revolves around two Los Angeles detectives investigating a murder in Nightmute, Alaska, an area with twenty-three hours of daylight. Critics widely praised Pacino's performance, including Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, who commented that it had been years since the actor did not have such a "powerful and nuanced" performance, while The Guardian credited his performance as the main draw of the film. Nolan noted the acting chemistry between Pacino and Williams, whom according to the The New York Post showed their "meatiest performances" in years. In the same review, it was noted that in Insomnia "[Pacino] is never allowed to explode into the kind of euphoric performance that has characterized much of the actor's work since Scent of a Woman". In that sense, other authors noted the more subdued tone compared to Pacino's classic performances. Insomnia was also well received in theaters, grossing $113 million. worldwide. Decades later, the National Review would go on to name Insomnia the best Pacino film of that decade and /Film mentioned that it was "one of Pacino's last great performances".

Her next film was the sci-fi comedy-drama Simone (2002), directed by Andrew Niccol. The plot centers on a forgotten film director who creates a virtual actress to star in her next film and her attempts to keep it a secret as her fame increases. Although Niccol's screenplay appealed to Pacino for its treatment of themes of fame, fiction, success, and failure, the film failed to garner great critical or commercial results. The same year, he played Eli Wurman, a fading publicist addicted to to drugs who becomes involved in a crime in the low-budget drama People I Know (2002). The film suffered from rushed production and poor distribution. Filming had wrapped just ten days before the September 11, 2001 attacks, and although some scenes were reshot, the film was not due for release until October. the following year in Italy and another six months later in the United States with a limited release. One of the critics who supported the film was Roger Ebert, who screened it at Ebertfest. New York magazine observed, "You can see why Pacino got into this role: it's flowery, sleazy, and princely all at the same time." Due to the tone of her characters in Insomnia, Simone and People I Know, PopMatters magazine referred to these films as a "trilogy of exhaustion".

Pacino's career as an actor showed no signs of abating, working on both stage and film and alternating between low-budget and high-budget productions. Released in 2003, the spy thriller i>The Recruit cast Colin Farrell as an aspiring CIA agent and Pacino as his recruiter, a duo described by Entertainment Weekly as "a darker version of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt in Spy Game, only The Recruit is more about mind games". he made a one-scene cameo appearance as a mob boss in the comedy Gigli (2003) by Scent of a Woman director Martin Brest. The film was a flop box office to the point of becoming one of the films with the greatest deficits in collections and the response from critics was also negative, being considered one of the worst films in history and they collapsed his directorial career. After avoiding the small screen for years, he made his television debut as gay lawyer Roy Cohn in the HBO miniseries Angels in America (2003), an adaptation of the play of the same name. For that performance, Pacino won the Golden Globe, Primetime Emmy, and SAG Awards for Outstanding Actor in a Limited Series.

Pacino at the Rome Film Festival in 2008.

In 2004 The Merchant of Venice was released, a film adaptation of Shakespeare's play of the same name, where Pacino played the Jewish usurer Shylock. Under the direction of Michael Radford, Pacino brought depth to a character traditionally portrayed as a villain. Notably, when producer Barry Navidi contacted Marlon Brando about the project, the latter told him that Pacino was the only person who could play Shylock. This version of the character was described by Ron Rosenbaum of The Observer newspaper as a "harmless, weakened and politically correct Shylock". from several critics, including Peter Travers, who commented that Pacino "raises the bar in a riveting acting triumph". Although it was poorly promoted, the film had large showings in New York theaters and generated box office returns. In another of his roles as a mentor, he played a sports betting agent in the drama Two for the Money (2005), alongside Matthew McConaughey and Rene Russo. you from criticism; an exception was Roger Ebert, who praised Pacino's involvement and his recent career. Empire magazine agreed with Ebert on Pacino's performance, but rated the film negatively overall, while other outlets such as the Chicago Tribune noted that the actor's character "may be a familiar face in Pacino's gallery of explosive personalities".

Decline in film and success on television (2007-2018)

Pacino joined George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Andy Garcia in the crime comedy Ocean's Thirteen (2007), the third and final installment in the saga directed by Steven soderbergh. The main antagonist of the plot is his character, Willy Bank, a hotel tycoon who is targeted by Ocean's gang. The film grossed more than $311 million worldwide. At the same time, he starred in the psychological thriller 88 Minutes (2007), where he played a forensic psychologist and University professor, responsible for the conviction of a serial killer, who has eighty-eight minutes left to save his life. The film was mistreated by critics; for Richard Roeper it was the worst of the year and outlets such as the New York Post and Variety considered it 88 minutes as one of Pacino's worst films. The director of 88 Minutes, Jon Avnet, cast him again to co-star with Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill (2008), a buddy cop where the actors play two New York detectives in search of a serial killer. Although the box office results were acceptable, Righteous Kill was another critical flop. Writing for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis described the film as "a mess of recycled crime movies and serial killer movie clichés", while Lou Lumenick of the New York Post commented: "Al Pacino and Robert De Niro collect inflated checks with the intention of boring Righteous Kill, a slow and ridiculous police thriller that would have been sent straight to the Blockbuster dumpster if it had been starred by someone else". Actors Studio, along with Ellen Burstyn and Harvey Keitel.

Pacino in 2015.

The turn of a new decade saw a decline in Pacino's commercial potential as a big-screen leading man, who reappeared on television to star in the HBO biopic You Don't Know Jack (2010), which narrates the life and work of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, an advocate of assisted suicide. His work earned him Primetime Emmy, Golden Globe, and SAG Awards for Outstanding Actor on Television. Having regretted not playing pawnbroker Shylock on stage before doing so on the big screen, he finally returned to the stage in July. in an off-Broadway production of The Merchant of Venice in 2010. This reinterpretation of Shakespeare's play was brought to Broadway's Broadhurst Theater in October, grossing $1 million in its first week. For his performance, Pacino earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Lead Actor in a Play.

In early 2011, the police drama The Son of No One premiered at the Sundance Film Festival with Pacino in a small role playing a detective. his third feature film as a director at the Venice Festival, the dramatic documentary Wilde Salomé. Pacino, who defined this film as his "most personal project to date", received the Glory to the Filmmaker award in Venice for his contribution to contemporary cinema. The film examines the work Salomé by Oscar Wilde mixing documentary elements with fiction and Pacino, in addition to his role as director and screenwriter, plays Herod Antipas. At the same time, he appeared playing himself in the comedy starring Adam Sandler Jack and Jill, which garnered negative reviews and came to be considered one of the worst films in history, breaking the record as the winningest at the Razzie Awards and pushing Pacino to get the Razzie for Worst for the first time. supporting actor. His fictionalization of himself, defined by The Guardian as "a sellout and unpleasant, mocking the roles that made him famous", was "extraordinary" for said newspaper. Karina Longworth, author of Al Pacino: Anatomy of an Actor, opined that Pacino's Al Pacino "is nothing more than a direct and public attempt by the actor to confront his image, as a representative of serious acting, as a symbol of the honesty and integrity of 1970s New Hollywood in contrast to the corporate cynicism of today's industry and as a somewhat eccentric star, and the burden that public image places on the acting process." According to the account of Dennis Dugan, the director of the failed film, Pacino "was just as dedicated playing Al Pacino in our film as he would be if he were at The Globe playing Macbeth".

In October 2012, he starred in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's classic play Glengarry Glen Ross for its 30th anniversary, and it ran until January of the following year. Chicago International Film Festival crime comedy Stand Up Guys with Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin as three veteran criminals who reunite for one last job. Several of the negative reviews received by the film remarked that the director had wasted the potential of the leading trio. He later starred in another biographical telefilm for HBO, titled Phil Spector (2013), about the trial for the murder of music producer Phil Spector, under the direction of David Mamet. In 2002, Spector had stated that his lifelong dream was to be played by Pacino—his favorite actor of his—in a film about his life. The Daily Telegraph noted the irony in the fact that the actor ended up playing Spector, not in a film about his career but in one about his murder trial. Pacino's performances as Spector and Helen Mirren as the producer's defense attorney did not go unnoticed, and both were nominated for Primetime Emmy, Golden Globe, SAG, and Satellite Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively. Karina Longworth wondered, "What? Is Pacino hopelessly "part of the past" or can he find his way back to the center of culture?". In parallel, Pacino edited Wilde Salomé, his previous behind-the-scenes work, keeping only the narrative elements. and premiered the new cut, titled Salomé, in August 2013 in the United States and a year later in the United Kingdom.

While the actor had found success with his work for HBO in recent years, critical reaction to his performances on the big screen was mixed. He returned to film to star in the independent drama Manglehorn, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2014 and opened in US theaters in the middle of the following year. The site The A.V. Club stated that Pacino deserved better material than the role of the eccentric and reclusive locksmith obsessed with an ex-partner in Manglehorn and other outlets such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post reviewed the film negatively, but appreciated the joint work of Pacino and Holly Hunter. Also in Venice, The Humbling, another independent film with Barry Levinson, was screened as a director and Pacino playing an aging actor suffering from dementia. The film was described by The New York Observer as "appalling" and by Time Out as "an irredeemable mess", though the performances were praised. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone commented that it was "the best performance in years for Pacino in the movies" and Lou Lumenick of the New York Post went further, saying that it could be "the best than Al Pacino has done in this century". Pacino expressed his tendency to spend more and more time with his children and compared the way of working from his beginnings in acting with the contemporary one:

In the movies you don't have that much time, you're facing the clock all the time and that can be hard because you have to make something work within the limits of your six weeks of filming. And usually it's not enough time, so the job reflects it. You wish to have more time, even if it's just to meet the actors you're with or talk to the director about your character. In the old days, Lumet also made films in six weeks, but he had three weeks or a month to rehearse. That's not the case anymore. You rarely find a film of a serious nature that has time to gather the actors to rehearse. It's not the priority.

Changes in the industry were also reflected in his salary; while at the peak of his career he received about fourteen million dollars per film, now his salary was about five million, sometimes reaching seven. In 2016 he was nominated for the Golden Globe Awards again, this time in Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy category for playing a fading rock star trying to rediscover the meaning of his life in Danny Collins (2015). as Variety and Toronto Sun highlighted his comedic role and other critics held him responsible for "saving" the film. He was later cast in the thriller Misconduct (2016), a failure both commercially and critically which, according to The Daily Telegraph, "could be the worst film in which Anthony Hopkins and Al Pacino have ever acted". The fate of Hangman (2017) was no different. It was a police thriller starring Pacino as a detective looking for a serial killer, whose crimes are inspired by the game of hangman. Hangman was one of the worst-reviewed films in the actor's philomography.Referring to the failure of several of his latest films, Pacinó reflected:

You know what? Maybe he's embarrassing me. I think I'm starting to get a little bit. obstinate. I'm starting to want to make movies that aren't really very good and try to improve them. And that has become my challenge. I don't think I'm thinking they're not going to be very good, but it's like Bob [De Niro] said: Sometimes they offer you money to do something wrong. And you agree to do it. And somewhere inside you, you know that thing's gonna be a scrap.

He also acknowledged that in the last twenty years he was less selective when it came to accepting roles. The newspaper The Independent questioned his contemporary career saying that "at some point, Pacino took a wrong turn and entered the twilight zone of the thriller directly to DVD or on demand". For its part, Slant Magazine published that "the actor, like most artists culturally prominent in either medium, he does not simply and unequivocally alternate between personal films and films for checks, as there is an inevitable overlap between the two, as well as countless other extenuating circumstances that cannot be fully known." He again starred in a telefilm HBO's biographical drama Paterno (2018), about the resignation of college football coach Joe Paterno following a years-silent child sex abuse scandal at the university where he worked. With Paterno already deceased, Pacino used the same work methodology that he had been using, that is, assimilate as much information as possible about the character and "let the unconscious do the rest", as he had already done with Jack Kevorkian and Phil Spector.

Back to the top (2019-2022)

Pacino and De Niro during the 2019 Film Critics Awards.

Director Quentin Tarantino next wrote a role for Pacino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), a Hollywood agent portraying Leonardo DiCaprio's character. Despite his experience, Tarantino revealed that he felt nervous before directing the actor. Pacino's resurgence came thanks to his role in the gangster film The Irishman (2019), being directed for the first time by Martin Scorsese and accompanying Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in the cast. The actor played Jimmy Hoffa, a leader of the teamsters' union with ties to organized crime. The project had been in development limbo for years and in 2012 the actors had met to read the script, but production did not take place. it ran until Netflix agreed to finance it—the budget was estimated at $225 million. The Irishman was a hit with film critics, as was Pacino's performance, for Owen Gleiberman of Variety, "Most Extraordinary in Film". In addition to being a Golden Globe, SAG, and BAFTA Award nominee, Pacino received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, his first since his win. for Scent of a Woman (1993). In 2021, he was nominated for the Golden Globe again for his participation in Hunters, a web television series that received mixed reactions from the press.

Later, he traveled to Italy to shoot the crime drama The Gucci House (2021), directed by Ridley Scott, whose plot narrates the murder of Maurizio Gucci. Shortly after the first images of Pacino impersonating Aldo Gucci, Maurizio's cousin, began to circulate, the casting choice was heavily criticized by Patrizia Gucci, Maurizio's second cousin, for "not looking anything like » to real-life Aldo Gucci. The film received mixed reviews, but the performances, including Pacino's, stood out. The same year Pacino joined the cast of Sniff, from the director of The Devil's Advocate Taylor Hackford, a neo-noir film that chronicles the investigations of two detectives into the mysterious death of a couple of residents of a retirement community luxury controlled by Harvey Stride (Pacino) and his femme fatale The Spider (Helen Mirren). After unsuccessfully trying to adapt a story by the painter Amedeo Modigliani alongside Scorsese in the 1980s, in 2022 it was announced that Pacino and Johnny Depp were going to co-produce a film based on the artist's life.

Features

Style

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Pacino's intense style on the screen is characterized by a "disturbing seriousness and explosive rage". Playwright David Mamet stated that Pacino "is incapable of doing it the same way twice", referring to the construction of his character. "Some actors play characters. Al Pacino becomes them", said Lee Strasberg. It was under Strasberg's tutelage that Pacino perfected himself in a set of techniques known in the United States as "the Method", based on the Stanislavski system, which emphasized the naturalistic acting and trained actors to realistically feel and portray the emotions of their characters. Method acting was successfully brought to the big screen by Marlon Brando, later influencing Pacino with his style, who would come to be called "the method actor of method actors". >Chicago Reader, he is a "huge method actor who is never afraid of embarrassing himself in pursuit of spontaneous expression", and New York magazine noted the development of psychology of his characters.

Playwright Israel Horovitz observed that Pacino developed his characters by observing others, sometimes walking the streets for hours, even going so far as to follow a particular person, noting their gait, body posture, and clothing. Having appeared in multiple biographical films, the actor values the importance of prior study of his characters, drawing on both literary sources and meetings with the actual character portrayed. Likewise, he does not memorize the lines of the script, instead believing that the words should to be "an extension of [his] emotional state". Pacino was absorbed by his characters, who invaded his life off camera and off stage: walking alone for hours, and even with the play already out of the loop, he would sometimes walk with a limp. "The body doesn't know a performance is over until the mind says so," the actor clarified. After filming Scarecrow, he wore the character's prison shoes for months; after Serpico, he came to attempt an arrest on the streets of New York; and after Revolution, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times noted that Pacino still had the character's haircut and spoke with a slight British accent. Recognized as an avid fan of the work of William Shakespeare, the newspaper The Globe and Mail claimed that "Pacino possessed the Shakespearean depth of tragic grandeur".

The beginning of his career was marked by his portrayal of urban characters, lowlifes and losers, problematic characters "on the brink of madness"; actor Ron Silver noted that Pacino did not focus on making the character likeable, but rather play him honestly and "make that human being understood". who followed him (Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Brad Pitt), Pacino (like other 1970s actors) yearned for morally tainted and slightly out-of-control roles." Variety called those characters "figures disturbing and anti-authoritarian whose ways reflected the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate spirit of mistrust, vengeance and paranoia.” The publication added that "shining with unusual ebullientness, he brings to his roles a mix of strong presence, haunting intensity, sharp vulnerability, seductive malevolence and mild self-deprecation." Alluding to another stage in the actor's career, the reviewer Italian filmmaker Roberto Lasagna compared Pacino's characters to Clint Eastwood's because often "he is the individual of rights and obligations, eternal guardian of his own moral code." Lasagna added that "Pacino is the perfect symbol of the 1990s: the edgy, outgoing, worn-out, sarcastic, almost animalistic man."

Leaving behind the implosive character shown in The Godfather, he was going to generate both positive and negative reactions due to the overacting or exaggerated way of approaching his characters, as for example in Scarface or Heat. Author Dan Callahan recognized Scarface as the actor's adaptation to a new era, writing that "Pacino moved away from Brando's naturalism toward the of hyperbolized imitation that at one time had served James Cagney». Callahan concluded that the film "marked a turning point in Pacino's career, when he began to transform into a comic figure, a caricature of a man, someone easily imitated." People magazine stated that in Scarface "his acting isn't acting, it's shameless bragging". The Washington Post noted that the emphasis on his histrionics is a generalization, citing as an example his subtle performance in Donnie Brasco. he observed that "his favorite game is chess, in which he reflects on all possible moves and their consequences". Referring to that characteristic, Pacino said: "You know what they say, in the theater you have to 'reach the balcony.' In the cinema things are magnified" and he maintained: "[...] I see myself as a tenor. And a tenor needs to play those high notes from time to time.” On another occasion he explained:

Sometimes you take it to the limit, sometimes you can exaggerate a little, but all that is part of a vision. I say, go with intensity. If an effort is being made to produce something that has taste and passion and is not done just to get the golden cup, it is not a damn waste. Yes, there are flaws, but there are things you will remember in them.

Having both emerged in the cinema of the 1970s, within the context of "New Hollywood", Pacino and Dustin Hoffman were frequently compared to each other. The two actors entered the Actors Studio the same year and came to compete for the same awards and roles. During his early days on stage, Pacino was described as "an Italian Dustin Hoffman" by The New York Times and in her review of Serpico Pauline Kael stated that he is "often indistinguishable from Dustin Hoffman". humorous—as his "nemesis". Film critic David Denby commented that the actor "was annoyingly (to Pacino) lumped in with De Niro and Dustin Hoffman as one of New York's revolutionary 'ethnic' actors (the 'anti-Redfords')". Regarding the comparison with De Niro, Pacino opined: "I don't see any similarities between Bobby [De Niro] and me. Same with Dustin; I don't see them, although I think he's very good.” Empire magazine noted the difference in approach between the two: “Where De Niro is precision, Pacino is elemental, just as obsessive but much more instinctive.” He also stated that, unlike De Niro, "he can share the screen without giving up ground". The description of Empire concurred with the opinion of Michael Mann, who directed them both: "The method of Pacino's acting is the Pacino method, that's all. For Al, it's very much about internalizing the way someone feels. He memorizes scenes two weeks before recording them. He wants them to circulate in his consciousness. He will dream of them. And Bobby [De Niro] is terrifyingly intelligent, brilliantly analytical". Newsweek magazine said that Pacino "has a haggard, feisty beauty and an urban eloquence that has more innocence than De Niro and more sincerity." than Nicholson." Variety noted that while Jack Nicholson "played cool, alienated anti-heroes", "Pacino specialized in down-on-his-luck ethnic outsiders, emotionally explosive men who they behave with violent bravado despite their unfavorable context". Delon and the intensity of a young Rod Steiger".

Theater

Pacino began his career as a stage actor and, unlike many of his peers, never left the stage despite his success in film. Although it was thanks to film that he achieved international fame, he is strongly connected to classical theater, having as referents the Italian actress Eleonora Duse and the English Edmund Kean. Pacino declared he preferred the theater, not only because of the challenge of acting in plays, but also because of the possibility it gives him to modify his acting. Several of his colleagues noted his unpredictability as an actor and that he "doesn't do the same thing twice". According to statements by Ed Harris, "we tend to forget and overlook the fact that he is first and foremost a theater actor". Pacino highlighted the challenging nature of acting on stage, where "there are more demands", and the "feeling of being at home", unlike the cinema with which he always felt "a kind of distance ». He also compared acting with balancing on a rope:

Acting is like being an equilibrist, and there's a difference between doing it on stage and doing it in a movie. On stage, the rope is very high. If you fall, you fall. In a movie, the cable is on the floor. You fall, you get up and you do it again. Acting in a play is a different emotional state. You wake up knowing you have to walk on the cable at eight o'clock.

His ten years of experience in the theater prior to his rise to fame shaped the style of his performances and even influenced the type of characters he would cast. For Pacino, acting on stage opens up new creative possibilities for an actor and enriches his craft, further strengthening his performance in film. "Commercial movies are not the place where you learn and experiment," he stated. According to the magazine, "the eccentricity and dramatic intensity that defined his work on the stage would soon become his hallmarks on the screen".

Influences

At the age of three, Pacino imitated actor Al Jolson, and later he used to emulate a scene by Ray Milland in the film Days Without a Trace (1945). At sixteen years he went to the cinema to see On the Waterfront (1954), where he discovered Marlon Brando and became his main source of inspiration. Pacino repeatedly watched that film only to observe Brando's performance, which he described as "unlike anything he had ever seen before" and a revelation that had a profound impact on him. He was also marked by Brando's role in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), another Elia Kazan film, mentioning that "he is somehow bringing a theatrical performance to the screen". "We are all in his debt", Pacino stated. "There's been an American style of acting since Brando," he said. He also named Ermanno Olmi's Italian film The Tree of Clogs (1978) as one of his favorites. In the documentary Discovering John Cazale (2009), Pacino commented of his acting partner John Cazale: "I think I learned more about acting from John than anyone else." He also quoted Julie Christie as his favorite actress and the "most poetic" and George C. Scott as one of the best "post-Brando" actors.

Private life

Family and relationships

Pacino next to Lucila Solá at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014.

Although Pacino never married, he had three children from two relationships. At the age of sixteen, he dropped out of high school and moved into his own apartment, it was then that he had his first girlfriend, with whom he lived. While still a teenager, he shared a house with some women; for a period, one of them offered him lodging in exchange for sex. His first partner in the field of theater was the actress Susan Tyrrell with whom he had shared the stage on a few occasions. Also during his early days he met Jill Clayburgh in Boston, who moved with him to New York, and they remained together for five years until 1972. However, Pacino was not ready for marriage, which inspired the role of Clayburgh in her first successful film as an actress, A Married Woman. The most painful moments in the life of the actress was the end of her relationship with Pacino, which was related to the fact that he had already succeeded in the cinema and she had not yet.

After a brief relationship with Tuesday Weld —with whom ten years later he would star in Author! Author! —, she met Diane Keaton while filming The Godfather and over the years they would have an on-and-off relationship. Later he met Marthe Keller on the set of Bobby Deerfield and extended the relationship he had with her in the film to real life. He had a fleeting romance with the young woman actress Maureen Springer, who was to make her film debut as his girlfriend in Cruising, but before filming their relationship ended and Springer was replaced in the role by Karen Allen. Between the early 1980s and In the mid-1990s, Pacino was romantically linked to Kathleen Quinlan. "There was a time in my life when being dishonest with women was the natural way to be. I finally said: "Hey, I have to stop with this nonsense," "recalled the actor.

Towards the end of 1980 her relationship with Keaton resumed and, after a miscarriage, the actress wanted another child and a stable relationship. "Poor Al, he never wanted to get married and poor me, I never stopped insisting ", the actress admitted. Faced with the recurring question about the possibility of marriage, Pacino commented: "I have had long relationships that undoubtedly felt like marriages" and explained: "Why didn't I propose? I hate to say this, but marriage is a state of mind, not a contract." At the same time, the actor expressed his desire to be her father, and later he had a brief relationship with acting teacher Jan Tarrant and later with a friend of hers, actress Annie Praeger. Pacino's relationship with Praeger ended when news broke that the actor was going to be a father for the first time. Their daughter, Julie Marie, was born in 1989 from their relationship with Tarrant, and Pacino stated, "It's a relief to see that life isn't about me, it's about her," adding, "Being a parent changed me in a big way. On another occasion he maintained that acting, which "used to be everything" in his life, had become a "small part". His next relationship was with Australian film director Lyndall Hobbs. Still in a formal relationship with Hobbs, Pacino had a few months' affair with Penelope Ann Miller during the filming of Carlito's Way.

He met his next partner, actress Beverly D'Angelo, on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. The couple had twin children in 2001, Anton and Olivia, via IVF; Pacino was sixty years old and D'Angelo was forty-six. The relationship lasted from 1997 to 2003. The separation was followed by a custody battle over the children; A few months later, it was stipulated that the two-year-old twins would be allowed to stay with Pacino once a week, although shortly thereafter D'Angelo requested to move with them to Los Angeles. At that time, D'Angelo and her children lived in an apartment in Manhattan, but the actress wanted to relocate to revive her film career. Both sides reached a settlement outside of court—in addition to the $93,000 D'Angelo received from Pacino each month—and Pacino was going to modify his schedule to spend as much time as possible with his children. he was to leave New York and move to Beverly Hills to share custody. Nearly fifteen years later, in 2017, Pacino and D'Angelo were to become close again and remain friends.

Reception in honor of Pacino at the Bosch Palace in Buenos Aires in 2016.

In 2006 Pacino revealed in Inside the Actors Studio that his mother's family came from Corleone, as did his family in the saga of the godfather.

During the premiere of You Don't Know Jack, he was seen for the first time together with the Argentine actress and model Lucila Polak —daughter of the lawyer and politician Federico Polak—, with who had been in a relationship for two years; they separated in 2018 after ten years of relationship. Shortly after, he began to be seen with the Israeli model Meital Dohan. In early 2020, Dohan, aged forty-three, left the actor, declaring: "The difference old was difficult [...] He only bought me flowers. How can I politely say that he did not like to spend money? ».

Interests and Personality

Early in his acting career, Pacino rarely gave an interview. The actor felt that he had not "earned" the attention of the public.For years, Pacino carried a feeling of "intellectual insufficiency" as a result of not having finished high school and not having other formal studies. His insecurities were appeased thanks to his dedication to acting, because it allowed him to speak and express himself without the need for a university education, explaining that "the language of great writing frees you from yourself" and that his characters "said those things that I could never say and that I had always wanted to." In reference to his success in the film industry, Pacino admitted: "I feel like an outsider who managed to get in, so I'm backwards." His excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages increased as a result of his fame caused by the success of The Godfather in 1972. "The Godfather gave me a new identity that was difficult for me to bear", he recalled. The public recognition, added to the mental exhaustion that playing the character meant, had negative effects on his health, to such an extent that he declared that he had "forgotten the 70s". The fact that his mentor and acting coach, Charlie Laughton, was also a heavy drinker did not help the actor. The actor expressed relief that Jack Lemmon won Best Actor at the 1974 Academy Awards and not having to It was he who went on stage, finding himself in an altered state due to substance use. However, it was going to be Laughton himself who was going to encourage Pacino to give up alcohol consumption - habitual since he was a teenager -, which he finally achieved in 1977. Later he was also going to quit smoking. He revealed that his most difficult emotional periods were mitigated thanks to regular visits to the psychologist and during his early days as an actor he used to turn to literature.

Pacino came to opine that "fame is a perversion of the natural human instinct for validation and attention" and on another occasion said that "until you are famous, you cannot understand the refuge of anonymity" and that fame " it really complicates personal relationships." In her autobiography titled Then Again, Diane Keaton wrote: "She was so sensitive that she was numb to her surroundings. [...] There were normal things that he was not familiar with, such as the idea of enjoying a meal in the company of others. He felt more comfortable eating standing up alone". An article in The Daily Telegraph newspaper argued that "Pacino has a way of making you forget, very quickly, that he is 'Al Pacino'" and clarified that despite his overwhelming presence and charisma, he is still "low-key, straightforward and incongruously humble". Laughton called him "gentle and compassionate" and "the opposite of his characters". For The New York Times was "the legendary shy guy from Hollywood". Pacino said, "I'm shy and that's never going to change", and has described himself as a "fun-loving depressive", "lonely" and "sensitive". ». The actor has never endorsed any product or service and in 2007 signed an agreement that prohibited the use of his name and image for commercial purposes without his prior written consent. In contrast to his Hollywood colleagues, Pacino avoids making political statements of any kind.

One of his first passions, along with acting, was baseball, to the point that Diane Keaton, Pacino's ex-partner, declared that he was only interested in two things, theater and baseball. He is also a fan of boxing and to American football. During his relationship with Lucila Polak, he also showed interest in football and came to send a message supporting the Argentine soccer team in the 2015 Copa América final. The following year, on a visit to Argentina, he became a member of the Racing Club. In addition to appreciating the theater and classical English literature, he is fond of opera. His skills as a musician allow him to play the piano, guitar and percussion instruments, even writing and record their own music. The historic restaurant Musso & Frank's Grill located on Hollywood Boulevard is frequented by Pacino, whose favorite table is number twenty-eight; one of Pacino's scenes in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was filmed at that restaurant. regular client of Patsy's restaurant, located in Manhattan.

Filmography

Awards and recognitions

Pacino at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2016.

Throughout his career, Pacino has been the recipient of multiple national and international awards, including the Oscar, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, the Primetime Emmy and the Tony. Being one of the most awarded actors in cinema and theater in the XX century, he positioned himself within the group of actors who They hold the "triple crown of acting", for having won the Oscar, the Emmy and the Tony for best actor. He was nominated for an Oscar for the first time for The Godfather for best supporting actor and two Years later he was nominated again for his role in the second part of the saga, although this time in the best actor category; thus he became the first actor to be nominated in both categories for the same character and in two different films. After being nominated for an Oscar on several occasions, he finally got the statuette in 1993 thanks to his work on Scent of a Woman . With this victory he reached a new record, being the first to win the award for best actor while also being nominated for best supporting actor (Glengarry Glen Ross) at the same ceremony. from the Academy, the actor stated: "It's similar to winning an Olympic medal, because it's so distinguished. It's just that you win the Olympics because you're the best. With the Oscars that's not necessarily the case. It's just your turn.” Not having been recognized before by the Academy, many considered Pacino's Oscar as a lifetime achievement award rather than an acting award for him in particular.

The BAFTAs, Britain's equivalent to the US Oscars, recognized Pacino's work with multiple nominations and a Best Actor award for Dog Afternoon and the second installment of The Godfather . In addition to having received the Golden Globe on four occasions, he was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award for his years of work in the cinema at the 58th edition of said awards. "One of the greatest actors in movie history, Al Pacino established himself during one of cinema's greatest decades, the '70s, and has become an enduring and iconic figure in the world of American movies", the organization stated. His subsequent television involvement was also recognized at the Golden Globes, as well as the Emmys. Likewise, his early efforts as a stage actor earned him two Tony Awards. In 2007 the American Film Institute presented Pacino with the honorary award for his career; the organization's director, Howard Stringer, announced that "Al Pacino is an icon of American cinema. He has created some of the greatest characters in cinema, from Michael Corleone to Tony Montana. His career inspires audiences and performers alike, each new performance a master class for a new generation of actors."

Legacy

Pacino's footprints outside the Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

Pacino is often ranked as one of the greatest actors of his generation and of all time. Historian and critic David Thompson called him "our best actor today." National magazines Review and Variety called him—along with Jack Nicholson—"the most essential American actor of his generation" and "the quintessential actor of the 1970s", respectively. In this sense, The Daily Telegraph considered him one of the representative faces of the golden age of American cinema of the 70s. For its part, Vanity Fair cataloged him as the actor "post-Brando" natural talented American and Esquire as Brando's "heir". the counterculture of the early 1970s" and outlets such as The Independent, The Hollywood Reporter and GQ referred to him as a " legendary actor.” For Vogue "Pacino is not only one of the greatest actors in Hollywood history - his Michael Corleone in the first two The Godfather films may be the best performance of the second half of the century XX—, but also one of the best bad actors", referring to his performance even when the material is of lower quality. His Karina Longworth's rise in the film industry and her status as a sex symbol in the 1970s transformed American popular culture. The prestige she achieved with her role in The Godfather i> contributed to modify the masculine ideal of Hollywood. According to The Atlantic magazine, his introverted appearance and character was far from the stereotype of the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant movie star of the time. "We seriously considered changing our names because at that time it was unthinkable to have a vowel." at the end of your last name and want to be an actor," said Pacino, who at one point in his youth planned to call himself "Sonny Scott." Rick Nicita, a member of the American Cinematheque, argued that the New York actor's appeal "not only it transcends generations if not also ethnic and social boundaries. Al's audience is really anyone who goes to the movies." For Slate magazine "somewhere along the way, the character of Al Pacino acquired the caricatured proportions of a folk hero, surpassing almost any role I could play on stage or screen."

In 1997, Empire magazine selected him fourth on its list of the hundred greatest movie stars of all time. The same magazine confirmed him in a new list of the fifty greatest actors voted for by the public in 2022. In 2003, viewers of the British channel 4 channel voted Pacino as the best actor of all time. magazine Esquire . The following year, Esquire also included him in the list of "the 10 greatest living actors"... 100 Heroes and Villains" by the American Film Institute included Pacino as one of only two actors to appear in both sections: on the "hero list" as Frank Serpico and on the "villain list" as Michael Corleone Similarly, Premiere magazine ranked his performance as Sonny Wortzik in Dog Afternoon as the fourth best performance ever. ón in the history of cinema; his role in the second part of The Godfather was part of the same list at number twenty. In addition, Entertainment Weekly took into account his performance in Donnie Brasco for the list of "100 Greatest Performances That Should Have Won Oscars But Didn't".

"It is tempting to call him 'the inimitable Al Pacino,' even though he is the most imitated actor in the world," reported the Vulture site. Pacino's work has influenced and been praised by numerous figures in the entertainment industry. Several of his co-stars agreed to participate in such projects once Pacino's presence was confirmed, including John Cusack, Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell or Matthew McConaughey. His co-star in The Devil's Advocate , Keanu Reeves, praised its importance: «I grew up watching his films, and as an actor I cannot deny that he has greatly influenced me. He is one of my idols." Reeves also proposed to the producers of said film to significantly reduce his salary in order to hire Pacino. The roles of Pacino and John Cazale in Dog Afternoon and The Godfather II surprised Steve Buscemi and contributed to his confidence in his possibilities as an actor: "It was inspiring for me because I felt that maybe I could do what those guys did", recalled Buscemi. Similar was the experience from Jeffrey Wright: “[Pacino] arose in that era of cinema where movies could say something, mean something about the world around us. In that stretch it seemed that every movie he made was a milestone. A career like his showed me what can be achieved", commented the Angels in America actor. Similarly, Bruce Willis decided to pursue acting in 1972, after seeing Pacino in The Godfather. It also inspired the career of Bobby Cannavale, who in 2016 declared: "I don't think there is an actor in the last five decades who has not been influenced by Al Pacino" and indicated that " he is the greatest living actor we have." Kevin Spacey called him a "cultural icon", Sean Penn said that Pacino "makes the acting gods smile" and Javier Bardem stated: "I don't believe in God, I believe in God." in Al Pacino». Actor Anthony Ippolito played Pacino in the television series The Offer (2022), about the production of The Godfather.

According to Entertainment Weekly magazine, Pacino's idiosyncratic performances "gave paid employment to generations of comedic impersonators"; his most notable impersonators include Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin. Some of his movie catchphrases became very popular; the American Film Institute published in 2005 a list of the hundred most famous movie quotes in American cinema that included three quotes from Pacino's characters: "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer" by Michael Corleone, "Say hello to my little friend!" by Tony Montana and "Attica! Attica!" by Sonny Wortzik. Other phrases that transcended the big screen were "The trial is out of place!" of Justice for All and "Hoo-ah!" of Scent of a Woman. Michael Corleone's famous quote in The Godfather Part III, "Just when I thought I was out, they drag me in", was parodied and featured on numerous television shows, including Friends, Saturday Night Live, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, and has even been referenced it in other Pacino films such as Righteous Kill and Jack and Jill. For The Washington Post: "More lines of memorable dialogues with him than with any other actor, a testament not only to the way the roles were written, but to how he came to own them."