Robert De Niro

Robert Anthony De Niro (, ; born August 17, 1943) is an American actor and film producer.

Known for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese, he is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential actors.

De Niro is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.

Robert Anthony De Niro was born in the Manhattan borough of New York City on August 17, 1943, the only child of painters Virginia Admiral and Robert De Niro Sr.. His father was of Irish and Italian descent, while his mother had Dutch, English, French, and German ancestry.

His parents, who had met at the painting classes of Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts, separated when he was two years old after his father announced that he was gay.

He was raised by his mother in the Greenwich Village and Little Italy neighborhoods of Manhattan.

His father lived nearby, and remained close with De Niro during his childhood.

Nicknamed "Bobby Milk" because of his pale complexion, De Niro befriended many street kids in Little Italy, much to the disapproval of his father.

Some, however, have remained his lifelong friends.

His mother was raised Presbyterian but became an atheist as an adult, while his father had been a lapsed Catholic since the age of 12.

Against his parents' wishes, his grandparents had De Niro secretly baptized into the Catholic Church while he was staying with them during his parents' divorce.

De Niro attended PS 41, a public elementary school in Manhattan, through the sixth grade.

He began acting classes at the Dramatic Workshop and made his stage debut in school at age 10, playing the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

He later went to Elisabeth Irwin High School, the upper school of the Little Red School House, for the seventh and eighth grades.

He was then accepted into the High School of Music & Art for the ninth grade, but attended for only a short time before transferring to a public junior high school: IS 71, Charles Evans Hughes Junior High School.

De Niro attended high school at McBurney School and later, Rhodes Preparatory School.

He found performing as a way to relieve his shyness, and became fascinated by cinema, so he dropped out of high school at 16 to pursue acting.

He later said, "When I was around 18, I was looking at a TV show and I said, 'If these actors are making a living at it, and they're not really that good, I can't do any worse than them.'" He studied acting at HB Studio and Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio.

De Niro also studied with Stella Adler, of the Stella Adler Conservatory, where he was exposed to the techniques of the Stanislavski system.

As a young actor, De Niro was inspired by the work of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Greta Garbo, Geraldine Page, and Kim Stanley.

De Niro's had minor film roles in Encounter, Three Rooms in Manhattan (both released in 1965) and Les Jeunes Loups (1968).

His comedic roles include Greetings (1968); Hi, Mom! (1970); Midnight Run (1988); Wag the Dog (1997); Analyze This (1999) and its sequel, Analyze That (2002); the Meet the Parents films (2000–2010); and The Intern (2015).

Shortly afterwards, De Niro landed a major role in Greetings (1968), a satirical film about men avoiding the Vietnam War draft.

The film marked the first of a series of early collaborations between De Niro and director Brian De Palma.

A year later, De Niro appeared in the drama Sam's Song in which he portrays a New York City filmmaker.

His first collaboration with Scorsese was with the 1973 film Mean Streets.

He has also acted in the films Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), 1900 (1976), The King of Comedy (1982), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Brazil (1985), The Mission (1986), The Untouchables (1987), Jacknife (1989), Goodfellas (1990), This Boy's Life (1993), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), Heat (1995), Casino (1995), Jackie Brown (1997), Ronin (1998), Joker (2019), and The Irishman (2019).

De Niro earned two Academy Awards, one for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II (1974) and the other for Best Actor portraying Jake LaMotta in Scorsese's drama Raging Bull (1980).

His other Oscar-nominated roles were for Taxi Driver (1976), The Deer Hunter (1978), Awakenings (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

De Niro and producer Jane Rosenthal founded the film and television production company TriBeCa Productions in 1989, which has produced several films alongside his own.

He directed and acted in both A Bronx Tale (1993) and The Good Shepherd (2006).

Also with Rosenthal, he founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002.

Many of De Niro's films are considered classics of American cinema.

Six of De Niro's films have been inducted into the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" as of 2023.

Five films are featured on the American Film Institute's (AFI) list of the 100 greatest American films of all time.

Timeout magazine's list of 100 best movies included seven of De Niro's films, as chosen by actors in the industry.

In 2009, De Niro received the Kennedy Center Honors, and earned a Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Barack Obama in 2016.

De Niro studied acting at HB Studio, Stella Adler Conservatory, and Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio.

Also known for his television roles, De Niro portrayed Bernie Madoff in the HBO film The Wizard of Lies (2017), earning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie nomination.

He received further Emmy Award nominations for producing the Netflix limited series When They See Us (2019), and for portraying Robert Mueller on Saturday Night Live.