PACINO MORE THAN A PRETTY SCARFACE
On this, almost everyone was agreed: Al Pacino was looking like a disaster as Michael Corleone.
Shooting had begun in early 1971. Pacino recalls the Paramount suits looking at the rushes and saying: “What the hell is this kid doing? And he’s short to boot.” The studio brass, Pacino says, “tried to fire me three times.”
There “was a movement not to have me in the part,” the 76-yearold actor recalls, sitting on the porch of his rental house in the flats of Beverly Hills. “I didn’t want me in the part.”
Paramount had wanted Ryan O’Neal or Robert Redford to play Michael in The Godfather, America’s great epic about violence and family. Pacino himself thought that he would be better as the hotheaded older brother, instead of in the role that secured his stardom. “Michael? Sonny would be more appropriate,” he remembers thinking.
But ultimately, he knew what he was doing. “I was trying to create a character who you don’t know where you’re at with him,” he says. “I knew it was a tough part to pull off. Michael’s so insular, so private.”
Writer and director Francis Ford Coppola believed. He had always envisioned Pacino, already an acclaimed New York stage actor, as Michael.
“His intelligence is what I noted first. He knows how to use his gifts,” says Coppola. “He uses what he has, this striking magnetic quality, this smouldering ambience.” Then came the Sollozzo scene. Michael, teeth clenched, eyes darting, grabs the gun hidden in the restaurant bathroom and shoots Corleone rival Sollozzo and corrupt New York police captain McCluskey. It’s the law-abiding son’s first mob hit, and it seals his fate as his father’s replacement.
The scene sealed the actor’s fate, too. Pacino, who will receive a Kennedy Center Honor on Dec. 4, stayed in the picture. Audiences saw what he was doing, having Michael’s character build with the story.
Pacino is sipping tea, surrounded by hounds, in front of his white-columned house in this fabled, palm-lined enclave. He’s at ease, but he doesn’t fit, an inveterate New Yorker in a far too sunny place.
Pacino is the winner of an Oscar (eight nominations), two Tonys, two Emmys, four Golden Globes (17 nominations) and a National Medal of Arts.
In person, he does not disappoint. He seduces. Call me Al. Here’s my cell number. Where Robert De Niro recedes in public appearances, all nods and mumbles, Pacino offers a banquet of observations.
“Talk is therapy,” he says, opening his arms. “Everything’s therapy. I’ve been in therapy my whole life.”
Pacino has been a star for 44 years, yet he still displays a penchant for risk and for working with young talent. Famous for saying no in the beginning of his career, “the last 20 years, I say yes more. I don’t know why,” he says. He’s filming Hangman with Johnny Martin, an unknown director.
In the span of a dozen years, beginning with 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park, he created a cinematic canon that few can best: the first two Godfathers, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Scarface, eviscerated by critics at the time but ultimately placed atop pop culture’s altar.
He keeps doing theatre, his first love, including a 2010 New York performance of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice that critics deemed revelatory.
Pacino has done exceptional television work: He played closeted New York superlawyer Roy Cohn, dying of AIDs, in Angels in America; pathologist and assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian in You Don’t Know Jack; the legendary record producer in Phil Spector. He has also made dreck — perhaps the nadir was Al Pacino in Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill — which he prefers not to talk about. And then he does. “My accountant was put in jail,” he says. “That was part of the genesis.”
Pacino was one of many celebrities who invested their savings with financial adviser Kenneth I. Starr, who pleaded guilty in 2010 to stealing at least $59 million from his clients.
Pacino grew up in an era that was more Vito than Michael. An only child, he lived with his fragile mother, who was prone to depression and became addicted to barbiturates, and his Italian immigrant grandparents in a three-room, fifth-floor tenement apartment in the South Bronx. His given name is Alfredo, but he was nicknamed Sonny — the name of his character in Dog Day Afternoon.
After 10th grade, he quit Manhattan’s High School for the Performing Arts. He worked at various jobs, including as a Standard Oil office messenger with John Cazale, who would play his weak brother, Fredo, in The Godfather.
His mother died when he was 21, and his grandfather a year and a half after that. The Actors Studio rejected him, only to accept him four years later. The studio’s famed Lee Strasberg later became his mentor and friend
When he finally landed theatre work, the reviews were rhapsodic. In 1968, the New York Times called him “the best young actor in town.”
His only other driving passion is his children: Julie, a 27-year-old filmmaker, and 15-year-old twins Anton and Olivia. He shares joint custody of the twins with their mother, actress Beverly D’Angelo.
Pacino long ago proved the studio brass wrong, that he’s the furthest thing from a disaster.
“You gotta realize yourself in all your roles. For me, the acting is very much a sanctuary,” he says. “It’s a place where I go and feel as close to what I should be doing in life, and why I’m here.”