Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro was raised by his mother in Greenwich Village and Little Italy after his parents, both painters, separated when he was two. Nicknamed 'Bobby Milk' for his pale skin, he ran with the neighborhood's Italian kids despite his bohemian parents' misgivings and made his stage debut at 10, playing the Cowardly Lion in a school production of The Wizard of Oz. He trained seriously afterward, first at the HB Studio, then under Stella Adler, then at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, absorbing a Method approach built on Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. Minor film roles through the mid-1960s led nowhere in particular until Brian De Palma's Greetings in 1968 gave him his first real part.

De Niro's run with Martin Scorsese, beginning with Mean Streets in 1973, produced the two performances that defined him: the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, which won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1975 as the first man to win an Academy Award for a largely Italian-language performance, and Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, for which he gained 60 pounds to play the boxer's physical decline and won Best Actor in 1981. Nine features with Scorsese followed across five decades, through Goodfellas, Cape Fear, and The Irishman. After September 11, 2001, he and producer Jane Rosenthal founded the Tribeca Film Festival to help revive Lower Manhattan's economy, and it grew into one of the country's major film festivals.

De Niro spent the 1970s and 1980s built around total transformation, roles that demanded weeks of specific research, 60 pounds gained and lost for Raging Bull, a saxophone learned from scratch for New York, New York, and spent much of the 2000s and 2010s in the opposite mode. Critics increasingly described a career slump built on formulaic comedies and poorly reviewed genre films, Godsend among the more harshly judged at a 4 percent critical approval score, alongside broad sequels like the Fockers franchise and Dirty Grandpa. The two Oscars sit at one end of the same career that produced those reviews, and De Niro kept working through both halves of it without much public accounting for the distance between them.

De Niro has kept collecting institutional honors as the decades add up: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the Screen Actors Guild's Life Achievement Award in 2019, an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2025. Six of his films have entered the Library of Congress's National Film Registry, and five appear on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, the two Scorsese Oscars now inside a résumé that also includes some of the era's least-loved studio comedies. He was still acting, and still pairing with Scorsese, into his eighties: The Irishman in 2019 reunited him with Scorsese and Al Pacino through de-aging effects rather than the physical transformation that built his name.

Robert De Niro's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The Godfather Part II film
  Won Best Supporting Actor as the young Vito Corleone 1974
• Taxi Driver film
  Played Travis Bickle; improvised the 'you talkin' to me?' line 1976
• Raging Bull film
  Won Best Actor as boxer Jake LaMotta; gained 60 pounds for the role 1980
• Tribeca Film Festival company
  Co-founded with Jane Rosenthal after September 11 2002
• The Irishman film
  Reunited with Scorsese and Al Pacino using de-aging effects 2019

• August 17, 1943 aged 0 Born in Manhattan, New York City
• 1968 aged ~25 Lands his breakout role in Brian De Palma's Greetings
• 1973 aged ~30 Begins working with Martin Scorsese on Mean Streets
• April 8, 1975 aged 31 Wins the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Godfather Part II
• 1980 aged ~37 Gains 60 pounds to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull
• March 31, 1981 aged 37 Wins the Academy Award for Best Actor for Raging Bull
• 2002 aged ~59 Co-founds the Tribeca Film Festival with Jane Rosenthal Created to help revive Lower Manhattan after September 11.
• 2016 aged ~73 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom
• 2019 aged ~76 Reunites with Scorsese and Al Pacino in The Irishman

• Martin Scorsese b. 1942
  Director and preservation advocate whose films and institutions have shaped both American cinema and understanding of its history. longtime collaborator
• Francis Ford Coppola b. 1939
  Director and producer whose landmark films helped define the New Hollywood era and modern American epic filmmaking. directed him in The Godfather Part II
• Al Pacino b. 1940
  Legendary actor whose roles in The Godfather and Scarface made him an icon of American cinema. frequent co-star
• Al Capone 1899–1947
  Gangster whose criminal empire made him the defining symbol of Prohibition-era organized crime. portrayed him in The Untouchables