Robert De Niro (born 17 August 1943) is an American actor, director and producer. Known particularly for portraying criminals, obsessive outsiders and men whose restraint conceals violence, he became one of the central actors of American cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. His films include The Godfather Part II (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), The Deer Hunter (1978), Raging Bull (1980), Brazil (1985), Goodfellas (1990), Heat (1995) and The Irishman (2019).
De Niro was born in New York City to painters Virginia Admiral and Robert De Niro Sr. He grew up in Manhattan and studied acting as a teenager, including at the Stella Adler Conservatory. His earliest screen work included several low-budget films directed by Brian De Palma. His breakthrough came in Mean Streets (1973), in which he played the reckless small-time criminal Johnny Boy under director Martin Scorsese.
In The Godfather Part II, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, De Niro portrayed the young Vito Corleone, a role played as an older man by Marlon Brando in the first film. Much of De Niro's dialogue was spoken in Sicilian. The performance earned him the Academy Award for best supporting actor and established him internationally despite the character having relatively little English-language dialogue.
Collaboration with Martin Scorsese
De Niro's collaboration with Scorsese became one of the most prominent long-term partnerships between an actor and director. In Taxi Driver, he played Travis Bickle, an isolated Vietnam War veteran driving a taxi through nocturnal New York while developing increasingly violent ideas about cleansing the city. De Niro prepared for the role by obtaining a taxi licence and driving passengers during breaks from another production. The film's improvised “You talkin' to me?” scene became one of his most widely imitated performances.
Their subsequent films repeatedly examined masculinity, ambition, guilt and self-destruction. De Niro played saxophonist Jimmy Doyle in New York, New York (1977), boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, failed comedian Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1982), organised-crime figures in Goodfellas and Casino (1995), and the vengeful Max Cady in Cape Fear (1991). For Raging Bull, he trained as a boxer and later gained substantial weight to portray LaMotta in retirement. The performance won him the Academy Award for best actor.
De Niro and Scorsese reunited for The Irishman, in which digital effects were used to portray De Niro's character Frank Sheeran across several decades. De Niro also appeared in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) as William King Hale, a wealthy cattleman responsible for organising murders within the Osage Nation.
Other films
Outside his work with Scorsese, De Niro appeared in films spanning crime drama, comedy, historical drama and fantasy. He played Jewish gangster David “Noodles” Aaronson in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and the renegade heating engineer Harry Tuttle in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Tuttle's brief appearances as a cheerful outlaw working beyond the control of Central Services made him one of the film's principal symbols of practical resistance to bureaucracy.
De Niro's other roles included a Jesuit missionary in The Mission (1986), Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987), a bounty hunter in Midnight Run (1988), a professional thief opposite Al Pacino in Heat, and an arms dealer in Ronin (1998). Quentin Tarantino cast him as the habitually silent criminal Louis Gara in Jackie Brown (1997).
From the late 1990s, De Niro increasingly used his established screen persona in comedy. In Analyze This (1999), he played a mob boss suffering from panic attacks, while Meet the Parents (2000) cast him as an intimidating former intelligence officer questioning his daughter's prospective husband. Both films produced sequels and introduced his work to audiences more familiar with comedy than with the crime dramas that had established him.
In Matthew Vaughn's Stardust (2007), De Niro played Captain Shakespeare, the feared commander of a flying pirate ship who privately prefers dancing, fine clothing and hairdressing to the brutal reputation expected of him. The performance deliberately overturned De Niro's history of intimidating roles and became one of the film's most overtly comic departures from conventional heroic fantasy.
Directing and Tribeca
De Niro made his directing debut with A Bronx Tale (1993), a coming-of-age drama in which he also played a bus driver attempting to keep his son away from organised crime. He later directed The Good Shepherd (2006), a fictionalised account of the early history of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Following the September 11 attacks, De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002. The festival was intended partly to support the economic and cultural recovery of Lower Manhattan and developed into a major international event for film, television and other forms of storytelling.
De Niro received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 2003 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. His reputation rests particularly on performances built through physical preparation, close observation and controlled behaviour, allowing characters to move between charm, vulnerability and sudden violence without changing their essential personality.