Legendary Hollywood icon Al Pacino shared an indepth look into his life where he opened up about his chilhood struggles and death of his close friends growing up
After a career spanning 50 years, legendary Godfather actor Al Pacino will be thanking his lucky stars at turning 85 today. The kid from the wrong side of the tracks calls his entire life a “moon shot” – having survived a tough childhood in the Bronx, where three of his closest gang friends ended up “dead by 30 from heroin”.
After he began drinking at nine, he says even surviving the 1940s was a miracle – crediting his mum for his longevity, after she banned him from roaming the streets after dark with hoods. He says: “I loathed her at the time. But I’m still here because of my mother. I never thanked her for… keeping me away from the path that led to delinquency, danger and violence, to the needle that killed Petey, Cliffy and Bruce.”
READ MORE: ‘Forgotten’ Al Pacino classic film ‘teaches us all to be better people’ on BBC this weekend
The method actor’s awards shelf boasts an Oscar for Scent of a Woman in 1992, four Golden Globes, three Tonys and two Emmys, but his path to success from street kid to one of the greatest actors of all time is the very stuff of Hollywood epics.
The star, who has never married, shares daughter Julie Marie, 34, with acting coach Jan Tarrant, and twins Anton and Olivia, 22, with Beverly D’Angelo. Then, in 2023, Pacino shocked Hollywood by becoming a father for the fourth time to son, Roman, with ex partner Noor Alfallah, 31.
Calling parenthood a “mini miracle”, the doting father says he wrote his memoir, Sonny Boy, to share his extraordinary life story with his brood. Alfredo James Pacino was born the only child of Italian immigrants in New York’s East Harlem ghetto, on April 25, 1940.
Abandoned by his dad Salvatore Pacino, when he was just two-years-old, Pacino – nicknamed Sonny Boy after an Al Jolson song – and his mum, Rose, lived in a series of cheap furnished rooms, before moving into her parents’ tiny South Bronx tenement apartment.
“I slept between my grandparents,” says Pacino, recalling the poverty. “I never had playmates in our apartment and we didn’t have television.” Instead, his pretty factory worker mum smuggled him into the movies, where they found a bit of glamour to lift their bleak lives.
“I learned at an early age to make friends with my imagination,” he recalls. His father barely paid any support and went off to war – not coming back into his son’s life until he’d remarried, going on to have three daughters.
Too late to save their relationship. Pacino says, simply: “He was absent.” But a chance conversation with his father’s relatives revealed a family secret about his mother’s fragile mental health which left him reeling. “When I was a young actor, the Pacinos came backstage to see me,” he recalls.
“It came out that I had been taken away from my mother for eight months while my father was at war and sent to live with my father’s mother.” Pacino called his grandmother Josephine “a gift from God” and one the “first of the lifesavers” for saving him from the care system and keeping him out of the gutters.
His mother’s father, James, a plasterer, had come, possibly illegally, to New York from a Sicilian town, Corleone. “He was the first real father figure I had,” says Pacino.
His granny, Kate, was a great storyteller, and he would sit with her and listen as she peeled potatoes. “I’d eat the skins raw – I loved the way they tasted.”
One day, aged six, while out playing in the street, he saw an ambulance pull up. “Coming out of the doors on a stretcher was my mother. She had attempted suicide,” he says. While his mother was in a psychiatric hospital, Pacino climbed tenement rooftops and smoked cigarettes in alleys with his street gang.
“Every day was an adventure with Cliffy, Bruce and Petey,” he says. But the love he received at home saved him from a downward spiral.
“I think that made the difference. I made it out alive, they didn’t,” he reflects. As a 10-year-old toughie, Pacino says he was like “a cat with many more than nine lives” the way he cheated death – from falling through ice in the freezing Bronx river to impaling his groin on a fence.
“I remember my mother, aunt and grandmother poking my penis in a panic,” he says. “But it remained attached, along with the trauma.” Recalling the wild freedom of opening hydrants on hot summer days and fishing for lost dimes in street grates, he says: “If we wanted food, we’d steal it. We never paid for anything.”
Athletic Pacino got into sport. “It was like I lived two lives – my life with the gang, and the guys I played baseball with,” he writes. Meanwhile, his mother got engaged again, but was crushed after being dumped.
“Doctors said she had anxiety neurosis, and she needed costly electroshock treatment and barbiturates,” the actor shares. At New York’s High School of Performing Arts, Pacino’s talent was being noticed. “A guy came up to me after a show and said, “Hey kid, you’re going to be the next Marlon Brando.”
He had to leave at 16 and took odd jobs as an errand boy, removals and even bus boy. “They caught me eating leftovers off the tables – that’s how hungry I was,” he admits. Seeing acting as an escape route from poverty, he enrolled in acting classes, where he met fellow student Martin Sheen.
Dreaming of being a stage actor, Pacino would recite Shakespeare aloud in vacant lots. “Marty moved in with me so we could split the rent,” he says, adding they both worked cleaning toilets.
Aged 22, Pacino was performing in off-Broadway productions to mixed reviews. Then the news came that his mother was sick and he rushed to see her. “I was too late. She had died choking on her own pills.”
Within a year, he also lost his beloved grandfather and used alcohol and pills to dull the pain. “It was my lowest point,” he admits. “But drinking saved my life. I was able to self-medicate.”
At 26, he learned his famous method acting skills from Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio in New York, before going to Boston to do rep theatre and appeared in his screen debut in TV cop drama N.Y.P.D. with first love Jill Clayburgh. “My relationship with the director who would change my life began oddly,” he writes. “Frances Ford Coppola offered me a part in a film that never got made.
“Months later, I got a call from Francis who was going to be directing The Godfather. He offered me the role of Michael Corleone. This was a hundred-to-million-to-one-shot.”
Coppola got his way and Pacino met the love of his life, Diane Keaton, on the set of The Godfather. “We just hit it off,” he says. “She was easy to talk to and funny.”
He would also go on to have love affairs with Tuesday Weld while working on his next film Serpico, and Kathleen Quinlan during Scarface in the 1980s. When Pacino finally met Marlon Brando – the man he’d been compared to years earlier – he was mesmerised.
“When I had lunch with Marlon Brando he was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands. His hands were full of red sauce,” he says. The first time Pacino ever visited his home country Sicily was to shoot the wedding scene in the gangster epic.
“Francis asked me to speak to extras in the scene, dance the waltz with my bride, then drive off with her,” he says. “I told him, ‘I don’t speak Italian, I don’t know how to waltz… and I can’t drive’!”
But the time the film hit cinemas in 1972, directors were falling over themselves to have Pacino play their leading tough guys. The stratospheric rise to fame sent him hurtling for the drink and drugs again. But having seen what happened to his childhood friends, the star has been sober since 1977.
After making over 70 films, including critically acclaimed crime movies like Serpico (1973) and Scarface (1983), two Godfather sequels,Carlito’s Way (1993), Heat (1995) and Donnie Brasco (1997), still a stage actor at heart, Pacino will be back next year starring in the film adaptation of King Lear.
