A MAN OF WORDS—AND LETTERS
The Danny Collins star on fan letters, encouragement and how he communicates with his kids.
Fan letters. You’d expect acting legend Al Pacino to receive them—but to send one? That’s just what he did in 1963 when he saw Christopher Plummer on Broadway in
the play The Resistible Rise of
Arturo Ui . “He’s one of the greatest actors ever, and an inspiration,” says Pacino, 74, who remembers handing his note to a theater doorman to give to Plummer. “I don’t know if he got it. I was a kid. He wouldn’t have known how to get back to me.”
A fan letter also plays a starring role in Pacino’s new movie,
Danny Collins , in which he plays a once-superstar singer-songwriter whose middleaged life is changed when he receives a long-lost missive from the past, written to him decades before with words of praise and encouragement from Beatle John Lennon.The letter is given to Collins by his manager, who is played—with no small degree of showbiz coincidence—by Christopher Plummer.
The plot of the movie, which opens in limited release March 20 and also features Annette Bening, Bobby Cannavale and Jennifer Garner, seems like a rock ‘n’roll fantasy, but it’s not: The screenplay was based on the true tale of an encouraging letter Lennon actually did write to a British folk singer, Steve Tilston, back in 1971. Tilston, unaware of the letter, didn’t receive it until a collector found it and presented it to him years later, in 2005.
Pacino also received letters of support from famous fans early in his career, when he was on stage in New York and then starring in soon-to-be-classic films, including The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon . Who were the letters from? He won’t say. But he believes that what a person does with that encouragement is what counts.
“Sometimes we do things in life that we don’t realize [make us] turn profound corners,” he says. Pacino now has entered a phase of his career where he’s more into satisfying his artistic curiosity than making big splashes. He played “suicide doctor” Jack Kevorkian and infamous producer Phil Spector in HBO movies that won several awards; he’s scheduled to perform on Broadway this October in China Doll , a new play by David Mamet; he starred in two 2014 independent films,
Manglehorn and The Humbling ; and he’s visiting film festivals promoting Salomé , a movie he directed and stars in based on Oscar Wilde’s play about the Biblical story.
His work takes him back and forth between film and theater, and his life takes him from coast to coast. Keeping up with his children (14-year-old twins Anton and Olivia, with whom he shares custody with actress Beverly D’Angelo, and 25-yearold Julie) requires both commuting and communicating with a 21st-century method that this man of words has found he now prefers to letters, something that has morphed his love of lengthy sentences and long, flowing responses into something much shorter and snappier. “I like texting,” he admits. “You can’t really write a long text.”