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By: Siobhan Synnot
THE SCOTSMAN, 10-26-03
ROBERT DE NIRO’s response to a diagnosis of prostate cancer was a typical one. A brief statement confirmed that the two-time Oscar winner had been told he had the disease but since the cancer was caught at a very early stage, it is likely to respond to treatment. All other details of his treatment, which may involve surgery, have been kept secret. At a time when the public is privy to the most intimate details of celebrities’ private lives, De Niro, 60, still works hard to remain a mystery.
Of course this studied silence only adds to the myth, especially when he has friends who fall over themselves to buff up his image as an actor savant. Edward Norton, who worked with his idol in The Score, described De Niro as the "e.e. cummings of acting" for his economy of style. Paul Schrader, who wrote his speeches in Taxi Driver, said that he only existed inside someone else’s skin. Brian De Palma, who directed him in The Untouchables, called him a "goddam chameleon".
That bit is hogwash, of course, because De Niro is an actor, not The Shadow. And when acquaintances describe him as mysterious, there’s a suspicion that they really mean "quiet’’, or even "a tad dull’’. Martin Scorsese has anticipated our cynicism. In private, Bob is like Jim Carrey and Robin Williams with extra caffeine, claims Scorsese. "He’s a terrific mime, he’s a clown.’’ This sounds unlikely, on par with the suggestion that in the privacy of her own home Pamela Anderson likes to entertain pals to excerpts from Mother Courage. Yet only Mario Puzo, who wrote The Godfather, has dared to suggest De Niro has limits - "he can’t do Shakespeare and he can’t do comedy’’.
De Niro’s Hamlet remains a buried project, but in the last five years the actor has been throttling laughs out of a series of larky vehicles. (Sometimes, rather effectively, like his mobster’s response to his shrink’s explanation of the Oedipus complex: "You ever seen my mother?") Dig a little deeper, and it turns out that his start in movies came through a trio of comedies (The Wedding Party, Greetings and Hi, Mom! ) as Robert Denero, directed by Brian De Palma. Now "De Palma", "De Niro" and "comedy" do not sound like they belong in the same sentence any more than , say, "blood sample" and "harpoon" - yet De Niro insists we have simply failed to recognise his upbeat cheeky chappy side. ‘Taxi Driver: there’s a lot of funny stuff in it. Really,’ he has insisted.
The shift towards comedy - successfully (Meet the Parents, Analyse This) and unsuccessfully (Rocky and Bullwinkle, Analyse That) - is a smart move given that the gilt started to flake off his icon a long time ago following a slew of forgettable films in the Eighties and Nineties. Certainly the comedies that have served De Niro best still play with his 70s image, only now he pokes fun at that legend; the King Of Comedy is now trying to be the king of comedy.
Yet in his pomp, few actors were better at tapping the dark corners of the male psyche than Robert De Niro, and his appeal still has nothing to do with old-fashioned Hollywood charm or elegance. He appears to have easy access to the violence, alienation and pain of obsessed loners and feisty misfits, thwarted dreamers and tortured, impassive men who want to be left to brood in darkness. His best performances have a visceral brutal directness.
According to De Niro; "It makes people feel they’re not alone in how they feel." De Niro’s films have regularly inhabited the seedy underside of New York but although it’s a world he may have observed, he never really inhaled. Born on August 17, 1943, in Greenwich Village, the son of two painters, De Niro’s family life was far removed from New York’s Mean Streets. De Niro’s father, also named Robert De Niro, was an avant garde artist back in the early Forties when he married another artist, Virginia Admiral, but the marriage didn’t last for long after the birth of their only child because De Niro Sr realised he was homosexual.
When his father died of cancer at 71, his son preserved his father’s studio intact, minus the beloved parakeet, Dimitrios, which was replaced upon its demise with a stuffed likeness. Often, De Niro goes there just to sit. After their separation, De Niro’s mother never remarried, while his father never entered into any long-term relationship, gay or otherwise. Later their son was to display a similar disinclination to lengthy relationships.
It was at the age of 10 that the kid nicknamed "Bobby Milk" found his most constant love, when he portrayed the cowardly lion in a production of The Wizard of Oz at his local theatre. He was a natural actor. He dropped out of high school to join a street gang but later honed his acting skills at the Stella Adler Conservatory and American Workshop schools.
Three years of good notices for his work off-Broadway brought him to the notice of movie-makers. When De Palma tried him for The Wedding Party, he was uncertain whether he had the chops, being "very mild, shy, self-effacing.’’ But when Martin Scorsese cast him as the mercurial petty criminal Johnny Boy in the 1973 cult classic Mean Streets, De Niro made his real impact on screen. It was the start of a relationship that spawned some of the greatest movies of the past 30 years. Together De Niro and Scorsese made classics such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino.
For much of his career, De Niro has shown what the Method can achieve. His immersion in the role is legendary, whether wearing Al Capone’s underwear for authenticity in The Untouchables or learning to play saxophone for New York, New York. He took it to its furthest extreme when he persuaded Raging Bull to shut down production halfway through so that he could undo his 3% bodyfat boxer build with a hearty eating tour of France to play Jake Le Motta’s physical decline in the second part of the film. Over the years this has been followed by the priest’s garments in True Confessions, which De Niro insisted on wearing even during rehearsals, and an incontinence nappy strapped round him in Awakenings.
No one seemed to question whether an actor actually needed to learn to speak Sicilian fluently for The Godfather but some of us were a little disappointed when he turned down the title role in The Last Temptation of Christ: "I couldn’t relate to it.’’
Traditionally De Niro has regarded himself as an actor rather than a film star - the difference being that actors play characters, whilst stars play themselves. But arguably acting in lead roles in Hollywood films is star acting, and actors become stars anyway through familiarity and repetition. De Niro has been making a lot more films since he began subsidising his Tribeca film centre, established in 1988 as a home for the city’s film-making community and his own production company. He has also become slightly more available to the public, appearing at film festivals and grudgingly giving interviews, although he isn’t terribly illuminating when describing his work, and usually refuses to discuss his personal life. This is a great pity because occasionally we get the nod that his offscreen life is not without incident. In 1998, De Niro appeared to have made himself very unpopular by embarking on a spree of freeloading, womanizing and fraud - until a police investigation revealed that all these crimes were the work of a Joseph Manuella, a would-be actor, who had traded on his uncanny resemblance to the star to become a De Niro impersonator.
Manuella even persuaded one fan to spend £18,000 of his own money building a Vietnam-style military camp using museum-quality armaments from the period as a set for a non-existent film. The fan only got suspicious when he spotted ‘De Niro’ nicking off with a machine gun and a mortar. "I couldn’t believe that Robert De Niro was stealing my stuff. I’m an ex-marine so I marched up to him and knocked him on to his backside," he reported. Manuella was later caught and sentenced.
Around the same time, De Niro himself was picked up by police whilst filming in France and questioned for nine hours about possible connections to an international callgirl ring. De Niro denied all knowledge of the ring: "Yes, I knew one of the girls, and I had met two of them. But had I paid for them? I have never paid for a woman in my life. And even if I had, it wouldn’t be a crime.’’ He vowed never to return to France. Women he hasn’t paid include Naomi Campbell and Whitney Houston, and generally he’s known to favour long-legged black models as his companions. His first marriage in 1976 was to Diahanne Abbott, formally adopting her daughter after the ceremony. The following year he had his first son, Raphael, now 25.
Fortunately, the Holiday Inn must have been full. But by 1978 he had become involved with Toukie Smith. They were seen together so often in New York that close friends considered them a couple, though they never lived together. They did, however, become parents in November 1995, when De Niro announced that he and Toukie, by then his former girlfriend, had had twins. But they had not had sex, he said. De Niro’s sperm was used to fertilise Toukie’s egg in a laboratory dish before being implanted into an unnamed surrogate mother. The estranged couple share parental roles. In 1997, De Niro married for the second time to Grace Hightower, a former model and air stewardess, and although they were on the brink of divorce earlier this year, they announced this autumn that they had fallen in love again. In addition to his four existing children, De Niro also spent 10 years assuming he had a fifth by a nightclub singer who claimed $10,000 a month from de Niro until he refused to make further payments. At that point, the mother hired palimony lawyer Marvin Mitchelson, the judge ordered DNA tests, and the results turned out to be negative. With admirable cheek, Mitchelson then argued that De Niro owed support because he’d assumed a role as a father figure by making the earlier payments. The case was thrown out.
Small wonder De Niro tries to downplay such exotic highpoints in his life, preferring to underline his enjoyment of activities such as going to ball games with his son: "I spend my time like most people. I yell at my kid when he gets on my nerves... That’s normal.’’ Mind you, if you’ve seen De Niro yelling in The Deer Hunter, you wouldn’t want to be the son.