Few actors prepare their characters with such thoroughness as Robert de Niro in his quest for perfection. For Taxi Driver he worked as a taxi driver for a month; he learned fencing to be Captain Rodrigo Mendoza in The Mission; He put on 60 pounds and learned to box to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, and years later was nearly skinny for Cape Fear, where he also paid a dentist to mess up his mouth and make him look scary and scary. disgusting to return to operate and fix the teeth after finishing filming; he spent four months in Sicily so that Don Vito Corleone could speak Sicilian well in The Godfather II; he learned to play the saxophone for New York, New York; he receded his hair and gained several pounds to play Al Capone in Eliot Ness’s The Untouchables…
A long anecdote of a cinematographic chameleon who turns 80 this Thursday and who remains tireless in front of the camera. His intention is to continue in the trade while, he says, he continues to enjoy acting. After his latest premiere this June of the comedy All About My Father, next October Killers of the Flower Moon will arrive, the new collaboration with his fetish director, Martin Scorsese. With this film there are already ten joint works between actor and director and it should not be noted that it can bring a third Oscar to the now eighty-year-old interpreter.
And in 2024 more film projects will arrive such as Wise Guys, a film by Barry Levinson in which he plays a double role as the bosses of the mafia of the fifties, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, and Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to the successful movie starring Joaquin Phoenix. Three television series are also pending release: Nada, Mr. Natural and Zero Day.
Silent, solitary and introspective, De Niro was born in New York in 1943. His parents -Virginia Holton and Robert De Niro Sr.- were painters and instilled in him a love of art. They divorced when he was three years old, after his father came out as gay. He grew up with his mother between Greenwich Village and Little Italy, but never stopped seeing his father, who lived a few blocks away. They went to the movies together and continued to share their taste for art, until his death from cancer in 1993.
Nicknamed “Bobby Milk” for his pale complexion, De Niro was very shy growing up and the way to get over it was through acting. At the age of ten he already played the cowardly lion in a school performance of The Wizard of Oz and at sixteen he had decided that this would be his profession: he studied acting at the Stella Adler school and later at the prestigious Actor’s Studio.
He began his prolific film career (he has shot close to 130 films) with The Wedding Party, directed in 1969 by Brian De Palma. But it would be at the hands of Scorsese in Mean Streets when she emerged as a future great star. Her great commitment in interpreting the roles thanks to a methodical acting technique and an intense study of the background or physical and psychological traits of her characters have earned her recognition from the public and critics. In her house he has two Oscars: the first came when he got into the skin of the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II (1974) and the second when he climbed into a ring in Raging Bull (1980).
On a personal level, De Niro has been married twice and has had seven children. He was married to Diahnne Abbott from 1976 to 1988. They both have a son named Raphael and the actor also adopted Abbott’s daughter from a previous marriage named Drena. From his relationship with the model Toukie Smith, two twin sons were born, Julian Henry and Aaron Kendrick.
In 1997, he married Grace Hightower and a year later Elliot was born, of whom De Niro himself revealed in 2016 that he had autism with the aim of helping him and people with this pathology. In 2011 they had a second daughter, Helen Grace, by surrogate. In 2018 they divorced.
This 2023 the actor revealed in May by surprise that he had been a father for the seventh time, although he did not reveal the identity of the mother. A few weeks later, the actor was in the news again, but this time due to a tragic event: his grandson Leandro (Drena’s son) died on July 2 at the age of 19, due to an accidental overdose of at least six drugs, including fentanyl and cocaine.
A staunch defender of the Democratic Party, to which he has provided financial support in various presidential elections, De Niro has also shown signs of being committed to his environment: in 2002 he was one of the creators of the Tribeca Film Festival in response to the 9/11 attacks. September 2001 and the consequent loss of vitality suffered by this New York neighborhood.
De Niro, who was diagnosed in 2003 with prostate cancer that he overcame after undergoing surgery, received Italian citizenship in 2006, despite opposition from the Sons of Italy Order in America, who argued that De Niro had damaged the image publicity of the Italians when portraying criminals.
