Martin Scorsese

Martin Charles Scorsese was born November 17, 1942, in Flushing, Queens, and grew up in Manhattan's Little Italy, the son of a clothes presser and a seamstress who also worked occasionally as actors. Severe asthma kept him off the streets and out of the stickball games other kids played; his parents and older brother took him to the movies instead, and the isolation turned into an education. He enrolled at a preparatory seminary intending to become a priest, lasted a year, and left for New York University instead, earning a bachelor's degree in English in 1964 and a master's in film in 1968 under professor Haig Manoogian, who pushed him toward directing rather than criticism. He was still a student when he made his first short films.

Scorsese's filmography reorganized what an American crime picture could look like: Mean Streets (1973) established the voice — rapid cuts, pop soundtracks, Catholic guilt, contemporary violence — and Taxi Driver (1976) took the Palme d'Or at Cannes. A box-office failure and a cocaine addiction nearly ended the run in the late 1970s; Robert De Niro, his most frequent collaborator, is widely credited with talking him into making Raging Bull (1980) instead of quitting, a film Sight & Sound later called the best of its decade. Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Departed (2006) followed, the last finally winning him the Academy Award for Best Director after five earlier losses. He was still directing at eighty, and in 2023 Killers of the Flower Moon drew a nine-minute standing ovation at Cannes.

The cost showed up twice, in different currencies. After New York, New York flopped in 1977, Scorsese fell into a cocaine addiction severe enough that he later credited De Niro's insistence he direct Raging Bull with saving his life; he had nearly worked and used himself into an early grave before he turned forty. A decade later he collided with the church he had once nearly joined: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), imagining a fully human Jesus tempted by an ordinary life, drew organized protests, boycotts, and at least one arson attempt at a Paris theater showing it. Scorsese, raised devoutly Catholic and still preoccupied with sin and redemption in nearly every film since, said the film was itself an act of belief, but the audience he came from did not see it that way.

Scorsese has spent much of his later career building institutions rather than just films: The Film Foundation, which he started in 1990, has restored hundreds of endangered movies, and the World Cinema Project he founded in 2007 does the same for films from countries with no preservation infrastructure of their own. In 2018, Italy granted him citizenship through his grandparents' birth there, a formality that acknowledged what his films had always insisted on — that the immigrant neighborhoods of postwar New York were as fully American a subject as anything else. Now past eighty, he continues directing, and the standing ovations at Cannes have gotten longer even as the films have gotten harder to finance.

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

• Mean Streets film 1973
• Taxi Driver film
  Won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 1976
• Raging Bull film
  Named the best film of the 1980s by Sight & Sound 1980
• Goodfellas film 1990
• The Departed film
  Won Best Picture and Best Director 2006
• The Film Foundation company
  Nonprofit that has restored hundreds of endangered films 1990

• November 17, 1942 aged 0 Born in Flushing, Queens
• 1968 aged ~26 Earns his MA in film from NYU under Haig Manoogian
• 1973 aged ~31 Releases Mean Streets
• 1976 aged ~34 Taxi Driver wins the Palme d'Or at Cannes
• 1980 aged ~38 Releases Raging Bull
• 1988 aged ~46 The Last Temptation of Christ draws organized protests on release
• 1990 aged ~48 Founds The Film Foundation
• 2006 aged ~64 Wins the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed
• 2023 aged ~81 Killers of the Flower Moon premieres at Cannes

• Leonardo DiCaprio b. 1974
  Oscar-winning actor and environmental activist whose career spans blockbusters and prestige dramas. frequent collaborator of
• Bob Dylan b. 1941
  Songwriter whose poetic lyrics transformed folk, rock, and the role of popular music in public life. made documentaries about
• Edith Wharton 1862–1937
  First woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, known for The Age of Innocence and Gilded Age novels. adapted the work of
• Alfred Hitchcock 1899–1980
  Director whose Hollywood films and television presence defined modern suspense and influenced generations of American filmmakers. influenced by