With Hollywood’s most celebrated actor turning 80, a look back at the good, the bad and the plain shameful.
Robert De Niro celebrated his 80th birthday last week. Over the course of a career that stretches back over five decades, there are few actors who have produced such distinctive, often incendiary performances for cinema. From his early pictures with Brian de Palma to his breakthrough role in Mean Streets – the first of the 10 films that he has made with his closest collaborator Martin Scorsese – to his recent performances in The Irishman and his Oscar-tipped appearance in the forthcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, De Niro has a chameleonic ability to convey everything from psychotic menace to gentle sensitivity, often in the same role and sometimes even in the same scene.
He is an actor of extraordinary versatility and range, nominated for eight Oscars to date and winning two. Britain had Laurence Olivier; America has De Niro.
There is, however, a flip side to all this. When De Niro is good, there are few actors to compare to him. However, when he is bad, he is absolutely terrible. It is sometimes as if, for whatever reason – boredom? Bills to pay? A lost bet? – he deliberately takes on roles that are far beneath his talent, and then gives the most god-awful performances in them, as if to demonstrate his contempt for the material.
He is a fine comic actor in the right role, as we shall see, but too often given to wild and unrestrained mugging, and if he is acting in a dramatic part that he clearly considers beneath him, he has all the animation of a corpse. Perhaps it was no coincidence that one of his weaker films saw him essay just such a role, Kenneth Branagh’s disappointing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
It sometimes seems as if there are, in fact, two Robert De Niros. The same actor who embraced the furthest reaches of Method acting for the likes of Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, with electrifying results, is also the same man who fell asleep on camera while filming the failed rom-com New Year’s Eve. The performer who breaks hearts at the conclusion of The Irishman, revealing the frightened little boy underneath the murderous gangster, is the one who appeared in degrading scenes in the bizarre and revolting Dirty Grandpa a couple of years before.
One of these De Niros should be celebrating his 80th birthday looking back with pride at a stellar cinematic career; the other one should be posting public apologies for shaming himself quite so spectacularly. Yet the hits outweigh the misses, even latterly. Here are 10 of his best performances, and, for balance, five of the absolute worst.
The hits
The Godfather Part II (1974)
Following Marlon Brando’s titanic performance as the crime lord Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s original Godfather film would be a tall order for any actor, but the then 31-year-old De Niro did a magnificent job of playing the young Vito in flashback scenes that saw him work his way up to the pinnacle of organised crime in early 20th-century New York. The role, which deservedly won him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, is performed almost entirely in Italian – De Niro spent four months perfecting the Sicilian dialect that Vito speaks in the film, which is rather more preparation than the famously indolent Brando undertook – but he does get to deliver the famous line “I make him an offer he don’t refuse” in English.
Taxi Driver (1976)
Most of this list could be filled with De Niro’s collaborations with his kindred spirit and friend Martin Scorsese, so we shall be selective and choose three of the best (as well as their weakest). Their second film together, Taxi Driver, cast De Niro as an alienated New York cab driver, Travis Bickle, who, sickened by the scenes of depravity that he sees in everyday life and besotted with a 12-year-old prostitute (Jodie Foster), embarks on a bloody mission to clean up the streets.
Along with the late William Friedkin’s The French Connection, no film of the era made Manhattan seem grittier or more menacing, and De Niro’s famous “You talkin’ to me?” monologue – improvised by the actor – is just as disturbing and incendiary as it was nearly half a century ago, and the perfect fit for his introverted and chilling performance.
Raging Bull (1980)
De Niro won his second Oscar, this time for Best Actor, for Scorsese’s exemplary biopic of the boxer Jake LaMotta. While the directorial skill on hand is hugely impressive – shooting the film in black and white, and choreographing the slow-motion boxing scenes to Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana – it would count for little were it not for De Niro’s vastly committed performance in the lead role.
Not only did the actor put on a considerable 27kg to depict the aged LaMotta in his post-boxing days, but he also managed to bring out the humanity and pathos in the violent, intellectually limited character, right up to the heartbreaking moment towards the end when, locked in a police cell, he is reduced to shouting, “I’m not an animal!” In a bizarre coincidence, the actor who De Niro beat to the Oscar – John Hurt, for his portrayal of John Merrick in The Elephant Man – delivers exactly the same line in his picture.
The King of Comedy (1983)
De Niro and Scorsese’s fifth collaboration was a massive flop on release, and perhaps it was no coincidence that the two men did not work together again until their triumphant reunion in 1990 with Goodfellas. This remains a shame, as the black comedy The King of Comedy, in which De Niro plays a delusional would-be stand-up who first stalks and eventually kidnaps Jerry Lewis’s veteran comedian, is one of the most incisive and prescient studies of the corrupting effects of fame ever made. De Niro’s manically grinning Rupert Pupkin is neither an evil nor a wholly untalented man, but a mediocrity who believes that fame should be his, as if by right, and will do anything he can to obtain it. It’s the highest homage that the film received that Todd Phillips’s vastly successful Joker is a virtual remake of the picture, complete with De Niro playing a variant on the role that Lewis essayed first time round.
Brazil (1985)
One of the many pleasures of Terry Gilliam’s finest film is De Niro’s extended cameo as Archibald ‘Harry’ Tuttle, a renegade plumber who is hunted by the state for being a suspected terrorist. De Niro originally wanted to play the role promised to Michael Palin – that of the cheery bureaucrat Jack Lint, who ends up epitomising the banal evil of this dystopian society – but as a consolation prize, he was offered the part of the heroic Tuttle, a man who can say of his career as a “freelance heating engineer” that “I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there’s trouble, a man alone. Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can’t make a move without a form.” De Niro displays his gift for comedy here with precise understatement; would that the same could be said for much of his later career.
The Untouchables (1987)
De Niro’s reunion with De Palma was eagerly anticipated and didn’t disappoint. In a role that was half-offered to Bob Hoskins, who was paid $43,000 when De Niro became available, the actor is only in a handful of scenes, but as the mobster Al Capone, who is in complete control of Chicago’s Prohibition-era crime empire, De Niro combines charm, menace and unsettling charisma to memorable effect, never more so than in a scene when he beats a subordinate to death with a baseball bat. He relished the demands of preparing for the role, having Capone’s original tailors create replicas of the suits that the gangster wore, and even donned the same silk underwear as the man he played; the result is an indelible cameo of entitled viciousness.
Heat (1995)
Michael Mann’s magisterial crime epic is rightly regarded as one of the decade’s best films, and one of the key reasons for its success was its pairing of Al Pacino and De Niro as a dedicated cop and an equally dedicated robber, who go for cinema’s most celebrated cup of coffee in the first on-screen pairing of the two actors.
Part of its appeal lies in the way that their performances complement one another perfectly; Pacino overplays entertainingly, while De Niro’s still, highly contained portrayal of a man who has constructed his life into a compartment so tightly wound that he can declare, rightly, “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” When his character Neil McCauley disobeys his own edict towards the end, to take revenge, it’s electrifying in the extreme, even as McCauley – and the audience – know that it’ll be the end of him.
Meet the Parents (2000)
Ignore the increasingly useless sequels: the first instalment of the antics of Ben Stiller’s hapless Gaylord Focker and his father-in-law and nemesis, De Niro’s hilariously stern ex-CIA agent Jack Byrnes, remains a cast-iron comic joy, in large part because Stiller is generous enough as an actor to realise that his co-star is stealing all the scenes that they are in together, and thus takes a back seat. Channelling something of his therapy-seeking mob boss from the earlier Analyze This, De Niro is both menacing and uproarious as the sort of man that you really wouldn’t want to have in your life if you weren’t related to him. Jack’s line, after some failed observation of Stiller’s, “I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me?” remains the perfect encapsulation of the picture’s ethos.
Ronin (1998)
De Niro has made better films than the John Frankenheimer-directed Ronin – it doesn’t even begin to compare to Goodfellas, Casino or Once Upon a Time in America, for instance – but it merits a place on this list because it’s a fascinating, and successful, attempt by the actor to try a different kind of lead role, that of the Nineties action hero. De Niro is wholly convincing and vigorous in the part of Sam, an ex-CIA mercenary who finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy far beyond his understanding, and throws himself into two of the finest car chases ever put on screen with aplomb. Yet he’s also able to deliver the meaty, David Mamet-ghostwritten dialogue as convincingly as any actor ever could, spitting off tough-guy lines and firing off bullets with all the cool assurance of any Willis or Stallone.
Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
In his latter-day career, De Niro has collaborated on several occasions with the maverick filmmaker David O Russell, and when the results are successful – as with their first film together, the black comedy Silver Linings Playbook – it comes close to the actor’s work with Scorsese. In the supporting role of Bradley Cooper’s American football-obsessed father, who is comically unsure how to deal with his son’s mental illness while attempting to mask his own OCD tendencies, De Niro clearly relishes playing a ‘normal’ character who isn’t given to extremities. He has a cracking climatic monologue in which he tells his son to man up, take responsibility for himself and declare love to the woman he’s supposed to be with; he knocks it out the park, and was nominated for an Oscar in the process.
The bad
Cape Fear (1991)
Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear is anything but a bad film – it’s far too well-made for that – but it suffers immensely from just how OTT De Niro is in the role of the psychotic antagonist Max Cady, seeking revenge on Nick Nolte’s squirming lawyer for failing to exploit evidence at his trial that might have secured his acquittal for rape.
The problem with De Niro’s performance, which sees him covered in tattoos and gurning and grimacing as if he were a psychotic Popeye, is that it starts off at such a fever pitch of hysterical evil that there’s nowhere else for it to go over the next two hours. By the time that his character finally dies, speaking in tongues while tied to a boat in a storm and singing a hymn, it’s a blessed relief. Somewhat unbelievably, he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor; “Most Actor” would have been more accurate.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)
Kenneth Branagh’s film of Frankenstein attempted to treat Mary Shelley’s novel with the respect that it deserved, but was hamstrung firstly by the actor-director’s tendency to amp up every scene to ludicrous extremes (“It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!”) and secondly by De Niro’s unfortunate performance as the Creation. Covered in unconvincing latex-heavy scar make-up and speaking with a strong New York accent that’s at odds with the RADA diction of the rest of the cast, De Niro fails to convince as Shelley’s tragic anti-hero, instead coming across like a grumpy drunk who has undergone some unfortunate misadventures while out on the streets. Never a natural actor for costume roles, De Niro seems especially out-of-place here, to the film’s terminal detriment.
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000)
Oh dear. In this disastrous part-animated, part-live action comedy, De Niro dons a monocle, speaks in a peculiar accent that’s somewhere between English, German and Italian, and seeks to defeat the dynamic duo of Rocky the squirrel and Bullwinkle the moose. It’s almost certainly the worst performance that de Niro has ever given, revealing a true tin ear for comic timing and with the character’s Looney-Tunes villainy barely concealing the obvious contempt that the actor – who at one regrettable point spoofs his own “You talkin’ to me” monologue from Taxi Driver – has for the material. Still, he could barely blame the filmmakers; he is credited as one of the film’s producers.
Stardust (2007)
Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s comic fantasy is mainly great fun, but it suffers from some terrible miscasting of some of the smaller roles, including a lame Ricky Gervais and a diabolically dire De Niro as Captain Shakespeare, a dastardly pirate captain aboard a flying ship who is revealed to be a secret gay cross-dresser. Although the role itself would meet with more raised eyebrows today than when the film was made, it would have been perfectly acceptable had the originally suggested Stephen Fry been cast, but De Niro’s overblown, over-broad performance capsises any of the humour from his scenes, making it embarrassing to watch him prancing about on deck. Dialling the absurdity right down might have helped, but instead he goes for broke, with lamentable results.
Dirty Grandpa (2016)
On paper, there was, perhaps, nothing wrong with the odd-couple casting of Zac Efron as a straight-laced corporate lawyer driving his ex-army grandfather to Florida, only to be drawn into the older man’s lecherous, pill-popping habits. Yet its mind-blowingly poor execution led at least one critic to write, of De Niro’s participation, that Dirty Grandpa “is not just the worst movie he has ever been in, but it may be the worst movie anyone has ever been in”.
It’s inexplicable how bad the film is, with the would-be gross-out comedy scenes being merely revolting rather than even slightly amusing, and the would-be touching moments embarrass and bore. Yet the nadir of De Niro’s career can also be found here, in a scene in which he is found masturbating by his grandson; thankfully, it was not long until he could cast off the shame of making this picture to be nominated for an Oscar for The Irishman instead.
