Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro was born in Manhattan on August 17, 1943, to painters Virginia Admiral and Robert De Niro Sr. He grew up in Greenwich Village and attended the Stella Adler Conservatory as well as Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, training that helped shape the intense preparation associated with his screen work. His first film appearance came in Brian De Palma’s The Wedding Party, filmed in 1963 and eventually released in 1969. His breakthrough arrived with Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), where he played volatile small-time criminal Johnny Boy opposite Harvey Keitel’s Charlie. He then won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for portraying young Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974). De Niro learned Sicilian for the role and appeared in flashbacks tracing Vito’s early life in New York and Corleone. For Taxi Driver (1976), De Niro played alienated Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle, a New York cabdriver who becomes obsessed with rescuing a teenage prostitute portrayed by Jodie Foster. He prepared by working twelve-hour shifts as a taxi driver and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. His improvised question, “You talkin’ to me?”, became one of American cinema’s most quoted lines. De Niro earned his first Best Actor Oscar for Raging Bull (1980), Scorsese’s black-and-white drama about boxer Jake LaMotta. He gained substantial weight to portray LaMotta after retirement and won the award at the 53rd Academy Awards. His Scorsese collaborations also include The King of Comedy (1982), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Departed (2006), and The Irishman (2019). In Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), he played David “Noodles” Aaronson across several decades of a gangster’s life. In The Untouchables (1987), he embodied Al Capone opposite Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness. His later acting range included comic performances in Midnight Run (1988), Analyze This (1999), Meet the Parents (2000), and Silver Linings Playbook (2012), which brought him another Academy Award nomination. In 1993, he directed and starred in A Bronx Tale, adapted from Chazz Palminteri’s one-man play. He founded Tribeca Enterprises with Jane Rosenthal in 1989, and helped establish the Tribeca Film Festival after the September 11, 2001, attacks to support Lower Manhattan. De Niro co-founded the Nobu restaurant and hotel business with Nobu Matsuhisa and Meir Teper. In 2024, he earned a supporting-actor Oscar nomination for playing William Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon.