‘He knows how to use his gifts’

Today Al Pacino receives a Kennedy Centre honour for a lifetime contribution to American culture. Now 76, he tells The Washington Post how Elizabeth Taylor cooked for him and that he was nearly fired from

ALMOST everyone 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.”

They thought he was delivering an “anaemic” performance.

The studio brass, Pacino says, “tried to fire me three times”.

Paramount had wanted Ryan O’Neal or Robert Redford to play Michael in The Godfather, America’s great epic about violence and family.

Pacino thought he would be better as the hot-headed 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 in him. 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. 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 stayed in the picture. Audiences saw what he was doing, having Michael’s character build with the story.

Pacino, The New York Times noted, is “an actor worthy to have Brando as his father”.

Now Pacino is sipping tea, surrounded by hounds, in front of his white-columned house in Beverly Hills, this fabled, palm-lined enclave. He’s at ease, but he doesn’t fit, an inveterate New Yorker in a far too sunny place.

Buses loiter on his block every few minutes, tourists trying to steal a glimpse beyond the gates of the man that film historian David Thomson in 2002 deemed “our greatest actor now”.

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.” A kiss on each cheek. Everything, except his physical stature, is outsized .

His voice, a Bronx rasp, shades the world in italics. Where Robert De Niro recedes in public appear- ances, 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.

He’s also that rare actor who is not just admired but loved by his peers. “I can’t think of any actor people care more about in films than Al,” says friend Alec Baldwin, who has appeared in two of his movies. “There are actors who are admired, but Al they embrace.”

More indelible lines of dialogue are associated with him than with almost any other actor, a testament not only to the way the roles were written but to how he came to own them.

He’s initially drawn to the script. “I’m very text-oriented. The text is everything,” he says. “The play’s the thing.”

He keeps doing theatre, his first love, including a 2010 New York performance of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice that critics deemed revelatory. He has performed Richard III many times, but Hamlet is “my favourite Shakespeare play”, he confesses.

In the early days, Pacino was known as the actor who would ask for just one more take. “Oh, a small number of takes,” he laughs. “Like 30. I had Brian De Palma scratching his head.”

Pacino was an only child. He lived with his fragile mother, who was prone to depression and became addicted to barbiturates, and his Italian immigrant grandparents – his grandfather was from Corleone (!), Sicily – 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.

He recalls that a junior-high teacher, Blanche Rothstein, came to the apartment and told his family, “You have to encourage your boy to act.”

“I wasn’t very good at school,” he says. “I wasn’t focused on my classes. My mother had problems, and there was no money coming in.”

After Grade 10, 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.

When Pacino finally landed theatre work, the reviews were rhapsodic. In 1968, The New York Times called him “the best young actor in town”.

He can become so preoccupied with acting that almost everything else falls by the wayside. There are stories of him misplacing cars, losing a new coat because, when he tried to go back to the store to pick it up, he’d forgotten where he’d bought it and had lost the receipt.

His only other driving passions are his children: Julie, a 27-year-old film-maker, and 15-year-old twins Anton and Olivia; he shares joint custody of the latter with their mother, actress Beverly D’Angelo.

His massive 1920s house is decorated like graduate student housing – if the student happened to be particularly wealthy. Gym equipment and dress shoes collect in a corner of the living room, which is dominated by an enormous television that appears to be always on.

“Not to drop names,” says Pacino “but Elizabeth Taylor used to come to my house and cook spaghetti.”

The actress would ask Pacino’s friends, “How’s that boy doing?” Pacino recalls. “Did he get help around the house? Because he needs all the help he can get.”

The “boy” was 40 at the time. He got help.

“Women find him irresistible,” says Coppola.

Pacino is celebrated for the company he has kept, a cavalcade of smart, accomplished actresses – Jill Clayburgh, Diane Keaton, Marthe Keller, Tuesday Weld, D’Angelo – many of whom make brief appearances in his conversation and are always spoken of warmly.

Pacino has famously never married. “Sometimes I think I would have preferred that I did get married. One reason is I would have found out so much more than I think that I know.”

Audiences pay a premium to watch Pacino become violent on the screen. After he became a star, he commanded $14 million a picture. These days, “he gets five million”, his manager told The New Yorker in 2014. “With a gun – seven million.” Violent behaviour is anathema. “I know it’s going to seem odd, but every time I go to do a movie and there’s a gun, I have to ask them to show me how to use it. And they’re like, ‘He’s putting me on’. But I have an aversion to guns.”

Celebrity and drinking – he’s been sober since 1977 – wore him down. “It was a ride, hard to compute. I wasn’t helping it along. I was having the whole thing of fame.”

Pacino long ago proved the studio brass wrong, that he’s the furthest thing from a disaster.

“You gotta realise 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.”

And so he acts, constantly.