How Al Pacino overcame tragedy and addiction to become our greatest living actor

In his highly anticipated new memoir ‘Sonny Boy’, the star of ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Scarface’ looks back on his ascent to the top of Hollywood’s A-list – and the self-sabotage and family trauma that nearly derailed it. Martin Chilton dives in

‘I began to question the very essence of what I was doing and why I was doing it’: Al Pacino in 1974 (Getty Images)

In Al Pacino’s new memoir Sonny Boy, some of the most heartfelt revelations from the 84-year-old actor are about his factory worker mother Rose Gerardi Pacino, who began taking him to the movies when he was “a little boy of three or four”.

Pacino, the Oscar-winning star of the Godfather trilogy, Serpico, Scarface and Scent of a Woman, describes his mother as “emotionally fragile” and recalls a particularly traumatic moment in his childhood, growing up in New York’s South Bronx. “We had been outside for about an hour when we saw a commotion in the street,” Pacino recalls in the book, ghost-written by Dave Itzkoff. “People were running toward my grandparents’ tenement. Someone said to me, ‘I think it’s your mother.’ I didn’t believe it, but I started running with them. There was an ambulance in front of the building, and there, coming out the front doors, carried on a stretcher, was my mother. She had attempted suicide.”

“Sonny Boy” was Rose’s nickname for Pacino – she’d taken it from the hit song by Al Jolson, which she often sang to him – and Pacino adds that the movies “were a place where my single mother could hide in the dark and not have to share her Sonny Boy with anyone else.” His mother had been abandoned by her younger husband, Salvatore Pacino, when their child, Alfredo James Pacino, was just two.

Pacino called his father’s desertion “the missing link” of his life. The consequences were dire. Money was tight for Rose, who suffered from chronic depression. Before the suicide attempt now made public by Pacino, we know that she even resorted to electric-shock therapy and eventually became addicted to barbiturates. She was only 43 when she died in 1962. “Poverty took her down,” Pacino said. His beloved maternal grandfather, Vincenzo, died a year after Rose. Pacino described this as his “darkest period”. “I went through some stuff. I had therapy five days a week for 25 years,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019.

In Sonny Boy, Pacino also recounts learning much about the codes of life from Vincenzo, who had emigrated to America from an old Sicilian town whose name, Pacino would later learn, was Corleone. He calls him the “father figure” in his life and the actor has a distinct memory of what happened one day when, aged six, he came from school.

“Granddad, this kid in school did a very bad thing. So I went and told the teacher, and she punished that kid,” he recalls in the book. “Without missing a stroke, my grandfather said, ‘So you’re a rat, huh?’ It was a casual observation, as if he were saying, ‘You like the piano? I didn’t know that.’ His words hit me right in the solar plexus. I never ratted on anybody in my life again. (Although right now, as I write this, I guess I’m ratting on myself.)”

Breakout role: Pacino alongside Kitty Wynn in ‘The Panic in Needle Park’ (Shutterstock)

It is clear that the indelible memories of growing up in the South Bronx, and of the “characters” who helped form him, are still at the forefront of Pacino’s mind. He says it was hard being poor, and is convinced “there was still a stigma against” Italian-Americans in the postwar era. He began smoking at nine and was drinking hard liquor by the time he was 13. He was part of a street gang called The Red Wings. In Sonny Boy, he calls his little crew “a pack of wild, pubescent wolves with sly smiles,” and describes how his three best friends – Cliffy, Bruce and Petey – eventually died of heroin overdoses. Pacino laments, “Why didn’t I end up that way? Why am I still here? Was it all luck? Was it Chekhov? Was it Shakespeare?” Perhaps he instinctively knew that acting was always his outlet and his escape route, with Rose always doing her best to encourage Pacino’s youthful acting ambitions.

In 1967, at 27, Pacino met Charles Laughton in a bar in Greenwich Village. The meeting changed his life. Laughton was an acting teacher at the Herbert Berghof Studio and persuaded him to enrol. He became Pacino’s mentor, introducing him to great writers such as Joyce and Rimbaud. “In those knockabout years, you could not find me without a book,” said Pacino.

Even though he was always in bars at night, Pacino was working ferociously at his craft during the day, soaking up all he could at the Actors Studio. His first break was appearing in regional theatre in Boston. His Broadway debut came in 1969, the same year he made his film debut in Me, Natalie. Most importantly, he found his purpose. “Acting is what I’m meant to do,” Pacino told The New Yorker. “With this, everything suddenly coheres, and I understand myself.”

At the same time, Pacino sought refuge in drink when his personal problems and childhood memories overwhelmed him. Indeed, Pacino spent much of the Seventies in a drunken haze. It is to his immense credit that he has been teetotal for nearly five decades now, celebrating his 80th birthday in 2020 with a soft drink. But he drank so much in his younger days that his brain was, in his own words, “scrambled”.

He would down beers along with martini chasers, the alcohol serving as an antidote to his natural shyness, a way for him to cope with the intense burden of being in the public eye. Drinking was part of the culture of his trade at the time, he would later explain, recalling that even a thespian as eminent as Sir Laurence Olivier cited “the drink after the show” as his favourite part of acting.

Superb: Pacino as Michael Corleone in ‘The Godfather’ (Shutterstock)

By the time Pacino was 31, alcohol had begun to threaten his burgeoning career. He’d made Me, Natalie and shot a well-received lead in The Panic in Needle Park when he was spotted by Francis Ford Coppola, who insisted Pacino was perfect for a main role in 1972’s The Godfather. Paramount Pictures were pushing for Robert Redford or Warren Beatty to play Michael Corleone, but the director stuck to his guns. “I couldn’t get Al out of my head,” he said. Pacino nearly blew it, though. On the day of his first screen test, he was hungover and had not memorised his lines. He tried to ad-lib the scene, infuriating Mario Puzo, the author of the crime novel on which the film was based. It took a lot of persuasion for Pacino to land the role.

In the end, he was superb as the mafia boss, narrowly missing out on an Oscar for Best Actor, which went instead to his co-star Marlon Brando, who played his father Vito Corleone. But the sudden fame and acclaim pushed Pacino into drinking even more heavily.

A true crisis point came in London in 1974, following the success of Serpico, when Pacino was staying at The Dorchester hotel. He was exhausted after six months of filming for The Godfather Part II, and had already signed up to play Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, a film directed by Sidney Lumet. It dramatised the story of an inept robber who holds up a bank in Brooklyn to get the money for his partner’s gender confirmation surgery.

Pacino began to have second thoughts about the role. After a pub crawl in London’s West End, he backed out of the movie, with Lumet reluctantly accepting the actor’s change of heart and sending the screenplay to Dustin Hoffman. Producer Martin Bregman, however, pestered Pacino to reconsider. “He said, ‘Could you stop drinking for a while and read the script?’,” Pacino recalled. “I didn’t drink for a couple of days and I read the script. It was clear. I said, ‘Why am I not doing this? I should be doing this.’ I was very lucky I had him there.”

Dog Day Afternoon was a critical success. The real Wortzik (John Wojtowicz), who was serving time at a federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, even wrote to The New York Times declaring that Pacino deserved an Oscar. In the end, he earned a Best Actor nod, one of eight nominations (The Godfather, Serpico, The Godfather Part II, And Justice for All, Dick Tracy, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Irishman) that sit alongside his sole triumph, a Best Actor award for 1993’s Scent of a Woman.

‘Why am I not doing this? I should be doing this’: Al Pacino in ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ (Shutterstock)

Pacino drew on all the experiences and turmoil in his life to become one of the most empathetic actors of the modern age. He has brought his own magic to portrayals of some of cinema’s most memorable characters. There were also roles he turned down. As he recalls in his memoir: “After The Godfather, they would have let me play anything. They offered me the role of Han Solo in Star Wars. So there I am, reading Star Wars. I gave it to Charlie. I said, ‘Charlie, I can’t make anything out of this.’ He calls me back. ‘Neither can I.’ So I didn’t do it.”

Yet winning his battle with booze must rank as one of the greatest achievements of a remarkable life. Pacino credits Laughton with making him “recognise” his addiction. “It was a powerful moment … I wouldn’t have made it without Charlie,” Pacino told Playboy. He jokes in his memoir about often being “as drunk as a skunk” and says he did try going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but that he “just didn’t relate personally to that environment”. He has been sober since 1977.

Pacino, who always wears sunglasses outdoors to stay unrecognised, has consistently complained about the “public attention” his career has brought. He has talked wistfully about not being able to do normal things like riding the subway or going out in public with his three children. Before his death at the age of 82 in 2022, James Caan said that his Godfather co-star had always been “pretty complex”. He says Hollywood knew in 1972 that a special talent had appeared on the scene. “Although Pacino was the weird guy in the corner, I think we all knew at the time that the guy in the corner was mushrooming into probably one of the greatest talents of all time in our industry.”

We certainly learn more about that complex character in Sonny Boy, including his ambivalence towards fame. He was underwhelmed by being voted most likely to succeed in junior high school, stating, “All it meant was that a lot of people had heard of you. Who wants to be heard of anyway?”, adding “at a certain point, dealing with fame is a self-centred problem and one should probably keep their mouth shut about it. Here I am talking about it now, so I’m starting to feel I should keep my mouth shut too.”

His qualms only grew after the success of The Godfather. “I began to question the very essence of what I was doing and why I was doing it”. He also details his financial problems, saying that he went broke in 1988 and, later, in 2011, explaining: “I had $50m, and then I had nothing,” adding: “The kind of money I was spending and where it was going was just a crazy montage of loss.”

In 1988, it was Diane Keaton, then his girlfriend, who persuaded him to take a part in the thriller Sea of Love – “for the moolah” – that got him back working and earning big money again. The film paired him with Ellen Barkin and Pacino comments in his autobiography about their sex scene: “I’m not usually one to perform graphic lovemaking scenes, and I don’t think many other actors like to do them either. It can become sort of borderline porn.” More than 20 years later, and once again in a financial hole, he concedes that his money problems affected his career. “I ended up doing some really bad films that will go unmentioned, just for the cash, when my funds got low enough,” he writes.

Al Pacino’s memoir ‘Sonny Boy’ (Century Books)

Although Sonny Boy is not a tell-all style memoir, the actor does clear up some Hollywood gossip stories. Of the rumour that he boycotted the 1973 Oscars because he was supposedly annoyed at being nominated for supporting actor rather than lead actor, for The Godfather, he offers a more mundane and simple explanation. He was simply scared. “It explains a lot of the distance I felt when I came out to Hollywood to visit and work,” he writes.

The book includes only brief details about his long time in therapy (he says one-on-one therapy helped him quit drinking) and about his Hollywood romances – which include Keaton, Jill Clayburgh, Tuesday Weld, Marthe Keller and Kathleen Quinlan. He’s rather deft about his motivations and how he tried to escape what he calls “the pain train” by leaving relationships. He does admit that he failed to give his twins, Anton and Olivia – born to ex Beverly D’Angelo in 2001 – the attention they “desired or deserved.” He described it as a “broken family”. His most recent child, a son called Roman, was born in June 2023. He recently split from Roman’s mother Noor Alfallah, who is more than 50 years Pacino’s junior.

Now in his eighties, Pacino has been struggling with eye ailments (Fuchs’ dystrophy, a problem with the corneas) and the after-effects of a bad bout of Covid – which he says in his memoir left him close enough to death to experience the “nothing” on the other side. But he’s also presently filming a new adaptation of King Lear, playing one of literature’s great depictions of a tormented old man. “I’m only human,” he writes in Sonny Boy, although most people in Hollywood consider him to be a superhuman actor. As Oscar winner Javier Bardem once put it: “I don’t believe in God; I believe in Al Pacino.”

‘Sonny Boy: A Memoir’ by Al Pacino is published by Century, £25