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Al Pacino

b. 1940 Specialist

The South Bronx kid who became Michael Corleone

Portrait of Al Pacino — Embajada de EEUU en la Argentina (US Embassy of Argentina) — 2016 — CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Al Pacino was born April 25, 1940, in East Harlem to Sicilian American parents who split up when he was two, and his mother took him to live with her parents in the South Bronx. Rose Pacino introduced him to movies before he could read, and the neighborhood gave him three nicknames: Sonny, after an Al Jolson song his mother sang him, Pacchi, and Pistachio, for his favorite ice cream. He started smoking and drinking at nine and lost two close childhood friends to drugs before he was out of his teens. He dropped every class but English, got himself cast in school plays by a teacher who saw something, and left home for good after his mother objected to acting as a life plan.

Pacino trained at HB Studio under Charlie Laughton and later the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, won an Obie for The Indian Wants the Bronx in 1968, and took a Tony a year later for his Broadway debut. Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Michael Corleone in The Godfather over the objections of Paramount executives who wanted a bigger name, and the performance carried him through The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon, four Oscar nominations in four years without a win. Scarface, in 1983, was mauled by critics on release and became a cult and then a mainstream classic. He finally won the Academy Award in 1992 for Scent of a Woman, the same year he was nominated for Glengarry Glen Ross, the first man ever nominated twice in one year and to win the lead category.

Pacino's mother died in 1962, at 43, when he was 22, a loss he later called the lowest point of his life. Decades later, at the height of a career that commanded some of the largest fees in Hollywood, he still was not signing his own checks. His accountant handled the money, and Pacino did not look closely. By his 70s that accountant had been convicted of running a Ponzi scheme, and Pacino discovered his fifty million dollars was gone. "I had nothing," he said afterward. The disclosure forced him back into work he might otherwise have turned down, including a 2011 comedy that won him a Golden Raspberry, and into paid speaking engagements at universities, a landing he never expected.

Pacino nearly died again in 2020, when COVID left him without a pulse until paramedics revived him at home. At 86 in 2026, he remains active, working steadily since his 2024 memoir Sonny Boy and continuing to take roles into his ninth decade. Whether the volume of later work, some of it made to cover old debts, adds to or dilutes the achievement of the 1970s run that made him is a question critics still argue over, unresolved the way only a living reputation can be. Four of his films before 1980 are preserved in the National Film Registry. What the decades since add up to is still being written.

Lifespan

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Al Pacino's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

The Godfather film
Cast as Michael Corleone over studio objections 1972
Serpico film
Based on the true story of an NYPD whistleblower 1973
The Godfather Part II film
Third Oscar nomination, first in the lead category 1974
Dog Day Afternoon film
Based on a real 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery 1975
Scarface film
Panned on release, later a genre-defining cult classic 1983
Scent of a Woman film
His only competitive Academy Award, after seven prior nominations 1992