Robert De Niro and Lee Strasberg (second from left).
Gallery of Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro and Lee Strasberg
Career
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1973
Martin Scorsese (left) and Robert De Niro on the set of Taxi Driver movie.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1973
Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Martin Scorsese in Mean Streets movie.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1974
Robert De Niro in the role of the young Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1976
Robert De Niro in the role of mentally unstable ex-Marine turned vigilante Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver movie.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1976
Robert De Niro in the role of mentally unstable ex-Marine turned vigilante Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver movie.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1978
Robert De Niro starring in The Deer Hunter.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1980
Martin Scorcese (left) and Robert De Niro on the set of Raging Bull movie.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1982
Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin in the black comedy The King of Comedy.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1985
De Niro in Roland Joffe's 1985 film The Mission as a ruthless Spanish slave hunter who converts to Christianity.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1987
Robert De Niro (left) as Louis Cyphre and Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel in the 50s set thriller Angel Heart (1987).
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1988
Robert De Niro in 1988.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1991
Robert De Niro as Max Cady in Scorcese's Cape Fear.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1991
Robert De Niro as Max Cady in Scorcese's Cape Fear.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
2000
Robert De Niro played Ben Stiller's father in law to be Jack Byrne in 2000 Jay Roach comedy Meet the Parents.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
2013
6801 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA 90028, United States
Robert De Niro with his then-wife Grace Hightower arrive at the Oscars at Hollywood & Highland Center on February 24, 2013 in Hollywood, California.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1990
375 Greenwich Street, Tribeca, Manhattan, New York City, United States
Robert De Niro in Tribeca Grill restaurant which he co-owns with Drew Nieporent and Lou Diamond Phillips, among others.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
1990
375 Greenwich Street, Tribeca, Manhattan, New York City, United States
Robert De Niro (center) in Tribeca Grill restaurant which he co-owns with Drew Nieporent and Lou Diamond Phillips, among others.
Gallery of Robert De Niro
2002
New York City, New York, United States
Co-founders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal rally the troops at the first Tribeca Film Festival, founded in the shadow of September 11.
Photo: Courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival.
Achievements
Robert De Niro on Esquire Magazine Cover.
Membership
Awards
Academy Awards
1981
Robert De Niro with the Academy Award for Best Actor for the character of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.
American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement
2003
Robert De Niro speaking at the presentation of the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award.
BAFTA/LA Britannia Awards
2009
Robert De Niro speaking at the presentation of the BAFTA/LA Britannia Awards 2009.
Kennedy Center Honors
2009
Robert De Niro was presented to the Kennedy Center Honors award in 2009.
AARP Movies for Grownups Career Achievement Award
2010
Robert De Niro holding his AARP Movies for Grownups Career Achievement Award in a company of Sean Penn.
Cecil B. DeMille Award
2011
Robert De Niro received the Cecil B. DeMille Award (a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement) in 2011.
AACTA International Awards
2013
Robert De Niro with his Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts International Awards for the Best International Supporting Actor.
Presidential Medal of Freedom
2016
Robert De Niro was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
Golden Globes Awards
Golden Globe Award that Robert De Niro received for the role of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.
Co-founders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal rally the troops at the first Tribeca Film Festival, founded in the shadow of September 11.
Photo: Courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival.
Robert De Niro is an American actor famous for his uncompromising portrayals of violent and abrasive characters and, later in his career, for his comic depictions of cranky old men.
Background
Ethnicity:
Robert is of Irish and Italian descent on his father's side, while his mother had Dutch, English, French, and German ancestry.
Robert De Niro Jr. was born on August 17, 1943, in New York City. His parents were both respected artists who had met while attending Hans Hoffman's famed Provincetown painting classes. His mother, Virginia Admiral, was a cerebral and gifted painter, a Berkeley graduate who made a significant name for herself in the 1940s and '50s New York art scene. His father, Robert De Niro Sr., was a painter, sculptor, and poet whose work received high critical acclaim. Known as the "golden couple" of the New York art circle, Virginia and Robert Sr. nevertheless split ways in 1945, when young Robert was only 2 years old. As his father remained singularly devoted to his art, De Niro was raised primarily by his mother, who took on work as a typesetter and printer in order to support her son.
Education
De Niro attended PS 41, a public elementary school in Manhattan, through the sixth grade. He then went to Elisabeth Irwin High School, the private upper school of the Little Red School House, for the seventh and eighth grades. He was accepted into the High School of Music and Art for the ninth grade but only attended for a short time before transferring to a public junior high school. De Niro began high school at the private McBurney School and later attended the private Rhodes Preparatory School, although he graduated from neither.
Nicknamed "Bobby Milk" for his pallor, De Niro hung out with a group of street kids as a youth in Little Italy, some of whom have remained his lifelong friends. His stage debut was at age 10 when he played the Cowardly Lion in a school production of The Wizard of Oz. Along with finding relief from shyness through performing, he was also fixated by cinema, and he dropped out of high school at age 16 to pursue acting. He studied acting at HB Studio, the Stella Adler Conservatory, as well as Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio.
After working in a few Off-Off-Broadway plays, De Niro appeared in his first film, Brian De Palma’s The Wedding Party (filmed 1963, released 1969). Thereafter he appeared in several minor films, the most notable being The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971). It was not until his performance in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) that he was widely recognized as an excellent actor. Mean Streets (1973) marked De Niro’s first association with director Martin Scorsese, with whom he would do some of his most celebrated work.
Director Francis Ford Coppola, whose massively popular The Godfather (1972) had won the Academy Award for best picture, was so impressed by De Niro in Mean Streets that he offered the actor the part of young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II (1974), forgoing even a screen test. De Niro’s brilliant take on the part that was created by Marlon Brando in the first Godfather film earned him a best-supporting actor Oscar and made him an international star.
Following The Godfather, Part II, De Niro worked with some of cinema’s most noted directors in such films as Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976), and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), the last one receiving the Oscar for best picture. But it was his films with Scorsese for which De Niro acquired a reputation for masterfully portraying extremely dark and unappealing figures. He received an Oscar nomination for his role as the isolated and violent Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976) and won the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980). Known for his intense role preparation, De Niro spent weeks driving a taxi in New York City before filming Taxi Driver, and he gained more than 50 pounds (about 23 kg) to portray La Motta. By the end of the 1970s, he was widely considered one of the best actors of his generation.
In the 1980s De Niro appeared in a series of box office failures that have nevertheless become cult favorites. Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), which offered a desolate look at the hazards of celebrity, won critical praise but little public interest, whereas Sergio Leone’s epic Once upon a Time in America (1984) suffered from postproduction studio interference, as did Terry Gilliam’s futuristic satire Brazil (1985). De Niro also performed in more conventional films during that era, including True Confessions (1981), Falling in Love (1984), The Mission (1986), and De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987). He revealed a talent for comedy in Midnight Run (1988) and won some of the best notices of his career for his depiction of a catatonic patient in Awakenings (1990). GoodFellas (1990) reunited De Niro with Scorsese for a brutal look at organized crime. Most critics agreed that Scorsese and De Niro had returned to form, but two further collaborations, Cape Fear (1991) and Casino (1995), were met with mixed reviews.
De Niro later appeared in Michael Mann’s crime thriller Heat (1995), which pitted him against actor Al Pacino. He continued to explore his comedic side in such films as the satirical Wag the Dog (1997); Analyze This (1999) and its sequel, Analyze That (2002); and Meet the Parents (2000) and its sequels, Meet the Fockers (2004) and Little Fockers (2010). In 2008 De Niro reteamed with Pacino in the police drama Righteous Kill, and the following year he starred in Everybody’s Fine, portraying a widower who discovers various truths about his adult children. He later took supporting roles in the thrillers Machete (2010) and Limitless (2011), the action drama Killer Elite (2011), and the ensemble romantic comedy New Year’s Eve (2011).
In 2012 De Niro starred as a destitute writer reconnecting with his estranged son in the drama Being Flynn and played another paternal role in the seriocomic Silver Linings Playbook. The latter film earned him his first Oscar nomination in more than two decades. In The Family (2013) De Niro starred as a mobster turned informant whose family moves to France in the witness protection program. He then teamed with Morgan Freeman, Michael Douglas, and Kevin Kline in the buddy comedy Last Vegas (2013).
In addition to acting, De Niro also directed several films. In 1993 he made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale, a movie about the Mafia set in the 1960s. He later directed the highly acclaimed The Good Shepherd (2006), which centers on the origins of the CIA and the compromises made by an agent over the span of his career.
Artistically endowed with exceptional acting talent and impressive personality, Robert De Niro is a stellar actor who needs no introduction of sorts. Fans adore him for his impeccable style, while critics admire and adulate him for his extraordinary passion towards acting. The actor who rose to fame with ‘Bang the Drum’ and ‘Mean Streets’ has had an upward and escalating career ever since, delivering one hit performance after the other. A seasoned character actor, he is applauded and commended by one and all for his meticulous approach that he takes towards acting and his aim for achieving precision and excellence in every role he dons. He is one of the best-known method actors of Hollywood today who employs even the extremes of tactic to give richness, reliability and tangibility to his characters to elicit the best performance out of himself. In his career that has spanned over five decades and still going strong, he has done various genres of movies, right from, action, romantic, thriller and comedy.
A seven-time Academy Award nominee, De Niro won two Oscars for playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974) and Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980). He is also a six-time BAFTA Award nominee, and an eight-time Golden Globe Award nominee. In 2009, he was among the five recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors, presented by 44th President of the United States Barack Obama and two years later he received the Cecil B. DeMille Award (a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement). In 2016 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
De Niro was raised by an atheist mother and a lapsed Catholic father who left the Catholic Church at age 12. His grandparents had him secretly baptized Catholic, and his grandmother was the main advocate of Catholicism in the family. He refuses to be asked about religion in interviews.
Politics
In 1998, De Niro lobbied Congress against impeaching President Bill Clinton. While promoting the film The Good Shepherd with co-star Matt Damon on December 8, 2006, episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews at George Mason University, De Niro was asked whom he would like to see as President of the United States. De Niro responded, "Well, I think of two people: Hillary Clinton and Obama." On February 4, 2008, De Niro supported Obama at a rally at the Izod Center in New Jersey before Super Tuesday. In 2012, De Niro joined the anti-fracking campaign Artists Against Fracking. During the 2016 presidential campaign, De Niro was an outspoken critic of then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Views
De Niro initially supported the inclusion of the controversial documentary about an alleged vaccination coverup, Vaxxed, at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. He explained his interest in the film resulted from his family experience with an autistic son. De Niro withdrew his recommendation after discussion with the scientific community. He said he was pressured by some festival filmmakers to remove Vaxxed from the festival line-up. He also said that he intends to be a part of the conversation about vaccines and autism in the future. The director of the film, Andrew Wakefield, who is considered the father of the anti-vaccination movement, had reportedly been communicating with Grace Hightower and once reportedly told them that "your family's life (has) been blighted by autism."
Quotations:
"You learned the two greatest thing in life, never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut."
"There is a certain combination of anarchy and discipline in the way I work."
"You'll have time to rest when you're dead."
"The talent is in the choices."
"One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people's lives without having to pay the price."
"It's important not to indicate. People don't try to show their feelings, they try to hide them."
"There's nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself."
"I don't like to watch my own movies - I fall asleep in my own movies."
"I think Hollywood has a class system. The actors are like the inmates, but the truth is they're running the asylum."
"I've never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality."
Personality
De Niro is a private man. He doesn’t like to be interviewed and on the rare occasions that he does grant an interview, reporters are given a list of off-limit topics, which includes religion, politics, his family, or wine (which he apparently loves). He has a distinctive New York accent.
De Niro is very good friends with Joe Pesci and a longtime friend, fan and confidant of Whoopi Goldberg.
Robert De Niro is famous for method acting. He is known for employing whatever tactic he feels appropriate to get into the psyche of his character, which will ensure he can offer the best performance possible.
Physical Characteristics:
Growing up in the Little Italy section of New York City, De Niro's nickname was "Bobby Milk" because he was so thin and as pale as milk.
Robert is 5 ft 9¾ in (177 cm) tall with salt and pepper hair, green eyes and a mole on his right cheek.
In October 2003, his spokesman announced that De Niro had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He underwent surgery at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in December 2003.
Interests
Politicians
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama
Writers
When a child, De Niro was an avid reader of playwrights.
Artists
Robert's boyhood idols among actors included Montgomery Clift, Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando. He preferred the darker, more character-driven work of these men to the older stars of Hollywood, for whom their public persona as a star was more important than their immersion into the character.
Sport & Clubs
Robert De Niro recorded a video in 2015 wishing Argentina good luck ahead of a Copa America final against Chile because he felt an affiliation to the country.
Connections
De Niro married his first wife, Diahnne Abbott, in 1976. They have a son, Raphael, a former actor who works in New York real estate. De Niro also adopted Abbott's daughter Drena De Niro from a previous relationship. They divorced in 1988. De Niro has twin sons Aaron Kendrick and Julian Henry de Niro conceived by in vitro fertilization and delivered by a surrogate mother in 1995, from a long relationship with former model Toukie Smith.
In 1997, De Niro married his second wife, actress Grace Hightower, at their Marbletown home. Their son Elliot was born in 1998 and the couple split in 1999. The divorce was never finalized and in 2004 they renewed their vows. In December 2011, a daughter named Helen Grace was born via surrogate.
De Niro announced on March 25, 2016, that his son Elliot has autism and explained his interest in its causes and treatment.
Robert De Niro Sr. was an American abstract expressionist painter and the father of actor Robert De Niro.
Mother:
Virginia De Niro
(February 4, 1915 – July 27, 2000)
Virginia Holton Admiral was an American painter and poet. She studied painting under Hans Hofmann in New York, and her work was included in the Peggy Guggenheim collection.
Spouse:
Grace Hightower De Niro
(born April 7, 1955)
Grace Hightower De Niro is an American philanthropist, socialite, actress, and singer. She has been married to actor Robert De Niro since 1997.
ex-spouse:
Diahnne Abbott
(born January 1, 1945)
Diahnne Abbott is an American actress and singer. Abbott played supporting roles in films of the 1970s and 1980s, including Taxi Driver.
adopted daughter:
Drena De Niro
(born September 3, 1967)
Drena De Niro is an American actress who is the daughter of Diahnne Abbott and adoptive daughter of Robert De Niro after their marriage in 1976.
Son:
Raphael De Niro
(born 1976, New York City, New York, United States)
Son:
Aaron Kendrick De Niro
(born October 20, 1995)
Aaron Kendrick De Niro is the first biological son to the iconic De Niro and used to appear in his father’s movies when he was much younger. Raphael has proved that the entertainment business is not for him and is now a wealthy real estate broker. He married Claudine De Matos in 2008.
Daughter:
Helen Grace De Niro
(born 2011)
Helen Grace De Niro is the third child of the actor that was born via surrogate and he had her while he was with Grace Hightower.
Son:
Julian Henry De Niro
(born October 20, 1995)
Son:
Elliot De Niro
(born March 18, 1998, New York City, New York, United States)
Elliot De Niro is the only child that was biologically born to Robert and his current wife. Elliot has autism and since his diagnosis has been treated with special care from his parents. Robert mentioned that his son’s condition happened ‘overnight’ and they believe it was after vaccination. Because of Elliot, his famous father has been very particular about increasing awareness for kids with special needs though he has tried as much as he can to keep this part of his life in the dark.
Meryl Streep, original name Mary Louise Streep is an American film actress known for her masterly technique, expertise with dialects, and subtly expressive face.