Considered one of the greatest actors in Hollywood history, Robert De Niro, who is set to receive an honorary Palme d'Or in Cannes, won two Oscars before he turned 40 and remains tirelessly dedicated to the seventh art.
The 81-year-old actor was nominated for an Oscar in 2024 for his supporting role in "Killers of the Flower Moon," his tenth collaboration with director Martin Scorsese.
This year, he stars in Zero Day, a Netflix series in which he plays a former US president investigating a devastating cyberattack, and in the film Alto Knights, in which he plays two mobsters fighting for control of New York.
The Cannes Film Festival will celebrate his legendary career as an actor, but also as a director and producer, with an honorary Palme d'Or, which will be presented to him at the opening ceremony, AFP reported.
"With his inner acting, which shows in the tenderness of his smile or the severity of his gaze, Robert De Niro has become a cinema legend," the festival's website said.
His first collaboration with Martin Scorsese dates back to 1973 with Mean Streets and defined his entire career.
He then became the favorite actor of "New Hollywood," the generation of Coppola and Cimino, which shook up studio cinema and brought a breath of fresh air to auteur cinema.
In 1974, he played the role of the young mobster Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II, for which he won his first Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Two years later, Scorsese offered him the role of a psychopathic taxi driver in Taxi Driver, for which he received the first of his five Oscar nominations for Best Actor.
There, he confirmed his status as a genius of composition and immortalized the phrase "You talkin' to me?", repeated in front of a mirror, one of the most famous scenes in cinema history. He later said that it was improvised.
Scorsese also led him to his second Oscar in 1981 with Raging Bull, where the actor gained 30 kilos to play the role of boxer Jake LaMotta.
His friendship with the director would lead to many other great moments in cinema: New York, New York (1977), The Last Tango in Paris (1984), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Casino (1995), and The Irishman (2019).
The actor also appeared in films by Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter), Bernardo Bertolucci (1900), Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in America), Roland Joffé (The Mission), Brian De Palma (The Untouchables) and Michael Mann (Heat).
Born on August 17, 1943, in New York City's Little Italy neighborhood, Robert Anthony De Niro Jr. grew up under the watchful eye of his immigrant parents, both artists.
His bohemian childhood led him to the theater at the age of 16 and then to the cinema.
Throughout his exceptional career, he has achieved "untouchable" status in the seventh art thanks to the quality, commitment, and intensity of his performances.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, the actor founded the Tribeca Film Festival, an independent film festival in Manhattan, to revitalize his city. He devoted enormous energy to this cause.
He continued to act extensively in films, but was less selective in his choices and appeared in a number of critically panned productions in the 2000s, such as 2008's Righteous Kill, which reunited him with Al Pacino after Heat.
His filmography began to include more comedies, from Mafia Blues to the Meet the Parents series.
A man of few words by nature, the actor avoided interviews for a long time, disliking journalists and loving nothing more than answering long questions with a simple "yes" or "no."
After more than 100 feature films, this purebred New Yorker has relaxed a little with age, realizing that his time is limited. In 2023, at the age of 79, he became a father for the seventh time. | BGNES