One more feather to his cap
RANDOR GUY
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With the Life Achievement Award, Al Pacino joins the ranks of Hitchcock, Spielberg and Connery.
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A scene from film, ‘The Recruit.’
Standing at the podium of the packed Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, the 67-year-old actor, described as the ‘King of New Hollywood,’ was speechless after receiving the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award recently. He is Al P
acino. Struggling for words, Al Pacino said, “I need a character. I don’t think of myself as being able to do anything.”
During the Award function, clips were shown from some of his classic movies such as like ‘The Godfather,’ ‘Scarface,’ ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ ‘Serpico’ and ‘Scent of a Woman.’ No stranger to awards, Pacino has won the Tony Award (top theatre award) twice and has been was nominated for eight Academy awards before winning the Oscar in 1992 for ‘Scent Of A Woman.’
35th recipient
Pacino is the 35th recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award. Earlier awardees include Alfred Hitchcock ,Bette Davis, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor and Jack Nicholson. He has also received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996, given by the Independent Feature Project, and the Cecil B. De Mille Award by the Hollywood Foreign Press in 2001.
However the climb to the top was not easy for he had to work very hard ever since his school days when he discovered that theater and acting would be his life-mission. Alfredo James Pacino comes from a family of Italian immigrants in New York. He was born on April 25, 1940. His father was an insurance agent who separated from his mother Rose when the future star was only two.
After studying at the famous High School for Performing Arts for some time, he dropped out and worked on a series of jobs to make a living. He also played minor roles in off-off- Broadway plays.
In 1966, Pacino was selected by the Actors’ Studio, and his role in a play won him a Best Actor award during the 1967-1968 theatre season. A year later, he made his Broadway debut as a drug addict, which won him his first Tony.
Pacino took his bow in movies in ‘Me, Natalie’ (1969) which flopped. His next movie was ‘Panic In Needle Park’ (1970) which won him praise. He hit the big time with with Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ (1972). As Michael Corleone, the second son of the crime boss (Marlon Brando) reluctantly driven to take up the reins, he became a star winning an Oscar nomination. He played the lead role in the ‘Godfather’ sequels.
‘Serpico’ (1973) was all about an idealistic young New York police officer who faces corrupt fellow officers. The movie was a success and then came a bigger hit, ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ (1975). Based on a true event, Pacino played a robber attempting to rob a bank.
Cult classic
Al Pacino.
After a few films such as ‘Cruising’ and ‘Author! Author!,’ he played the ‘mob boss’ Tom Montana in Brian De Palma’s ‘Scarface’ (1983), a violent rehash of the 1932 Howard Hawks gangster masterpiece. The movie did not do well at first but began to get a fine reputation and is today hailed as a cult classic.
After the dismal failure of the historical epic ‘Revolution’ (1985), he was in hibernation for some years. And in 1989 he bounced back with ‘Sea of Love,’ a tautly told thriller.
Another gangster movie, ‘Dick Tracy’ was a hit and it won him an Oscar nomination. The year 1992 saw him winning the Best Actor Oscar for his role as the blind colonel in ‘Scent Of A Woman.’ Blind, retired and impossible to get along with, a school boy is hired to look after him but the boy learns that there is nothing called easy money for the blind colonel has his own ideas of spending his time in New York on a holiday!
As a theatre person he had deep love for Shakespeare and played Shylock in the 1964 film version of ‘Merchant of Venice.’ The anti-Semitic theme created a controversy, but his intense performance brushed all that away such atmosphere and the film was a success.
His love for the Bard surfaced once more when he wrote, produced, directed and acted in ‘Looking for Richard,’ a documentary exploration of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III.’
Commenting about his AFI Award, a critic in The Arizona Reporter remarks that Al Pacino is the greatest actor and ranks ‘Godfather’ above such celluloid masterpieces as ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘Casablanca
.’
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