Acting, sexiness and late babies: why Pacino v De Niro is the daddy of all rivalries
Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are forever destined to be intertwined. The two greatest actors of their generation – the two greatest actors of most generations – Pacino and De Niro will spend the rest of eternity being compared. People will tie themselves up in knots over who did the best work, who was the best in The Godfather Part II, who won their first scene together in Heat, who was the least bad in Righteous Kill.
And now the comparisons have started to spill out from their professional efforts. A couple of weeks ago Twitter blew a gasket trying to work out whether Al Pacino was sexier than Robert De Niro. The competition between them is fierce, and never lets up. Just days after De Niro announced that he’d become a father again at the age of 79, Pacino has announced that he’s about to become a father again at the age of 83.
Pacino’s representatives this week revealed that the actor’s 29-year-old girlfriend Noor Alfallah (who previously dated 79-year-old Mick Jagger) is eight months pregnant. And this, I’m sure you’ll agree, has opened up an entire world of new and exciting comparison categories.
Obviously, as things currently stand, Pacino wins if we’re judging this purely on the basis of the father’s age. And, by some degree, he also romps home in the category of age difference with partner. De Niro’s girlfriend Tiffany Chen is reportedly 45 years old, which means that they enjoy a 34-year age gap. Pacino, meanwhile, has his eyes laser-focused on the gold. He is a full 54 years older than Alfallah. For reference, when Chen was born, De Niro was preparing to make Raging Bull. But Alfallah was born in 1994, which was one year before Pacino played the role of Grandpa in Two Bits.
However, De Niro gets the edge if we’re talking sheer quantity of babies. Pacino’s child will only be his fourth, while De Niro’s new kid is his seventh. However, this isn’t a category that can be conclusively put to bed yet. After all, they’re still only 79 and 83. Nothing – apart from age, common sense and potentially a disastrous Viagra shortage – can stop them from churning out a procession of babies like a wet Mogwai. For all we know, a decade from now Pacino could be in double digits. He couldn’t see anything weird about having a baby at age 83, so what’s wrong with having them when he’s pushing a century?
There is also the question of which child will grow up with the most memories of their father. Not to be too bleak but, even if De Niro and Pacino beat the odds and die at the ripe age of 100, their children will still only be 21 and 17. By that age, they won’t be old enough to truly get to know their dads as flawed three-dimensional men outside of their father-offspring relationship. Neither Pacino or De Niro will be able to pass on their most trusted wisdom to their children; which, at a guess, is either: “Never make a third Godfather film” or: “Stay away from any movie with the word Grandpa in the title”. Again, this is a category that needs to play out in its own time.
Obviously, though, there can only be one true winner here, and that is Al Pacino. He was born 83 years ago. His child will be born in 2023. If the new baby can live as long as their father, then what a truly enormous span of history they will have seen between them. Al Pacino was born five years before Adolf Hitler died. If his child reaches the age of 83, then they will live until the year 2106; long after AI will have weaponised itself and obliterated all of humanity as we know it. What an amazing, impressive legacy. Congratulations, Al!
generations of British indie musicians, says Connie Constance. The 28-year-old Watford musician counts the Smiths as one of her biggest reference points when it comes to guitar sounds, along with the Clash. “The sound has all the negativity that I think Brits just naturally have,” she says. “It has this gritty, I’m not bothered, moany thing, while having this beautiful layer on top that makes everything feel like it’s gonna be all right.”
Although Constance first engaged with the Smiths as a child, she didn’t realise until later the impact they had on all the other bands she had grown up listening to. “I was listening to their back catalogue and being like, ‘Oh my gosh, this sound is so laced into all of British indie rock,’ from that moment onwards.”
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, a longtime Smiths fan, remembers that the band “came along at a time when the north-west of England was probably at its lowest ever ebb in recent history. It seemed to me to be a recurrent theme in Morrissey’s lyrics that you can kind of aspire to be more than this. You don’t have to be dragged down by your situation or circumstances.” In Burnham’s eyes, the band gave the region a rare sense of cachet. “When I got to university, people would ask, ‘You’ve seen the Smiths?’ and it was like, OK, I’ve got something that you want – that was important, in terms of building a sense of confidence and ambition.”
Richard King, author of the book How Soon Is Now: The Mavericks and Madmen Who Made Independent Music 1975-2005, says the Smiths created a give and take with their fans that felt fresh. “Morrissey wasn’t an adolescent, but he did seem to know how to articulate the extremes of adolescence, and there were very few people who did,” he says. “There was a sense of generosity and value in every release – the picture sleeves, the tone they used, the B-sides: everything they did had this value that you couldn’t find anywhere else – and it felt like it was coming directly from the band. It meant that the emotional investment that you put in as an adolescent, into the songs and their meaning, you felt like that investment was returned by the band in their quality control and their look.”
Although it had been common to pledge sartorial fealty to a genre or subculture – such as punk or goth – Smiths fans, even before they had released an album, dressed like the Smiths. Although other artists had developed a similar aesthetic sensibility previously, most of them, such as Orange Juice’s Edwyn Collins, took their cues from 1950s Americana, with leather jackets, sunglasses and immaculate quiffs. Morrissey combined the 50s hair with what Reed calls a “studenty” look – raincoats bought from charity shops and vintage stores. That look, now, has calcified into what might be termed the classic indie boy aesthetic: T-shirts and shirts tucked into 501 jeans, thick-rimmed glasses, mismatched or ill-fitting outerwear.
Fletcher saw the band in late 1983, and remembers seeing that “fans were already dressed like them – in London, people were carrying flowers in their back pockets. From 1984, Morrissey had the big overcoat thing, and suddenly you just started seeing people like that. It was like some of them were just coming out of their shell – they were very bookish people who suddenly realised that bookish was fashionable, and they didn’t have to apologise for their NHS specs and being a bit dishevelled and literate and into pop music.”
Burnham remembers Manchester’s Affleck’s Palace as being a centre of the Morrissey aesthetic. “Morrissey created it, but people would go there to replicate it,” he says. “It was vintage 501 jeans before they were as ubiquitous as they became, cardigans, stuff that was deliberately old-school looking. It was kind of an outsider look – it became anti-cool fashion before that existed in our heads.”
He recalls the Smiths acting as a kind of codex for broader culture. When the band performed on the South Bank Show, for example: “I remember everyone videotaping it, and it really laid out a hinterland of references. People started reading Oscar Wilde – it kind of did broaden your horizons, liking the Smiths.” The band’s iconography and music was so strong that despite’s Morrissey’s aesthetic and political shifts after he went solo – on 1988’s Bengali in Platforms he suggested south Asian migrants didn’t belong in the UK, and by 1992 he was draping himself in the union jack – many fans can easily separate the Smiths off in their minds.
The freedom that the band seemed to offer their audience – to remove themselves from staid ideas of how to look, dress or think – was revolutionary at the time. King remembers the way Marr and Morrissey interacted on stage, and the amount of fun they seemed to be having, feeling radically new. “The two of them dancing together as men, but both being very feminine and, in Johnny’s case, quite androgynous, was incredibly powerful,” he says. “It felt to an adolescent audience that it was giving them agency to act differently – two men dancing together not in an overtly homoerotic or political way, but just having fun together in their own unique way.”
Moreover, Morrissey pioneered a musical expression that wasn’t geared towards heterosexual romance – or even romance in general. “To have somebody that wasn’t singing either, ‘I’m in love with you,’ or, ‘You broke up with me,’ but singing, ‘I’m not really sure if I want love, I don’t know if I want romance’ – he managed to encapsulate feelings that so many people had,” says Fletcher. “I don’t think anybody had come along with that.”
Constance says that Morrissey’s less explicitly masculine presentation has “allowed a softer side of men in indie bands to come through” in the years since. “I feel like men can share a bit more in the indie world, and they can sing and get things off their chest a bit more, rather than being just this like brutal anarchist punk or superstar over-sexual glam-rock male,” she says. “Someone like [the 1975’s] Matty Healy – Morrissey was the first of that [archetype].”
“Like a lot of the best bands of that time,” says Reed, the Smiths’ “stature has grown – the music has spread around the world. British indie music was massively influential on music that came out of North America, South America, Australia, all around, probably more than in the UK. That isn’t specific to the Smiths, but the Smiths are a big part of that.”
“They proved you could be an indie band, make the charts and be successful,” says Fletcher. “Do things on your own terms, be controversial, make great music, be proud of guitars, not be luddites. You could be all of those things.”
It seemed to me to be a recurrent theme in Morrissey’s lyrics that you can kind of aspire to be more than this
Andy Burnham