Posted on 04/25/2020 11:14:33 AM PDT by Borges
Is Al Pacino one of the great Jewish actors of our time?
Hear me out.
While best known for portraying characters of Italian and Latino descent think Michael Corleone of The Godfather films, Carlito Brigante of Carlitos Way, and Tony Montana of Scarface, Pacino has an arms-length resumé of portraying Jews in film and onstage.
Most famous perhaps are Pacinos much-discussed, multiple portrayals of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender from William Shakespeares Merchant of Venice, whom Pacino has portrayed with overwhelming sympathy both onstage and on the silver screen.
Pacino who discussed his career in an interview with film critic David Edelstein in Vulture, has impersonated real-life Jewish figures including journalist and TV new producer Lowell Bergman (The Insider), mob lawyer and Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn (in HBOs minseries version of Tony Kushners Angels in America), and Phil Spector in the eponymous HBO biopic of the wig-wearing, gun-toting rock n roll hitmaker. Most recently, and to significant critical acclaim, Pacino played the role of Meyer Offerman, a fictional Polish-Jewish philanthropist leading a band of Nazi hunters based in New York City in 1977 in the Amazon TV series Hunters. You havent lived until youve heard Pacino utter the words, This is not murder, this is mitzvah, in a deep, convincing Yiddish accent.
Born in Manhattan to Sicilian-American parents (his maternal grandparents, coincidentally, hailed from a small town named Corleone) and raised by a single mother in the Bronx, Pacino escaped the poverty of his childhood first by attending Manhattans High School of Performing Arts and then by falling in with the Greenwich Village scene, where he studied the Stanislavski Method of acting and its offshoots under the tutelage of such Jewish-American theater greats as Lee Strasberg, Julian Beck, and Judith Malina. (Edelstein describes this period as the space where Pacino is happiest: the experimental theatrical milieu in which, 50 years ago, he found his voice.) Pacino worked odd jobs at the time to support himself, including a stint as an office assistant at the American Jewish Committees magazine, Commentary, where he interacted with editor Norman Podhoretz and essayist Susan Sontag, among others.
Early on, Pacino became a favorite of Village playwright Israel Horovitz, who cast him in the Obie Award-winning play, The Indian Wants the Bronx, alongside John Cazale. (The two would reunite often in film, playing brothers in The Godfather films and bank robbers in Dog Day Afternoon. Curiously, in both movies, Pacinos character winds up responsible for the murder of Cazales.) Pacino won an Obie Award for his role in Indian, and was discovered and signed by manager Martin Bregman, who went on to produce many of Pacinos films, including Scarface, Sea of Love, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Carlitos Way. Pacino would work again with Horovitz in the 1982 film, Author! Author!, portraying an Armenian-American playwright named Ivan Trevalian, whom Horovitz obviously based upon himself.
Pacino has also enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration with Jewish-American playwright David Mamet, playing the role of Teach in American Buffalo and starring in the 1992 film version of Mamets Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross (reportedly referred to by the cast lovingly as Death of a F*** Salesman). Pacino appeared in the 2012 Broadway revival of Glengarry, and again in Mamets China Doll on Broadway a few years hence.
Pacinos other Jewish film roles have included the fictional celebrity publicist Eli Wurman in the 2002 crime drama People I Know, written by Jon Robin Baitz; Simon Axler in The Humbling, based on Philip Roths novel by the same name; and a very delirious Satan in The Devils Advocate, based upon a character who first appeared in various books of Jewish scripture, including Numbers, Chronicles, Job, and Zechariah.
In 2015, Pacino was slated to appear in a stage adaptation of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsuns novel, Hunger, in Copenhagen. Upon learning that Hamsun supported the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II and was a confidante of high-ranking Nazi officials, including propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, Pacino withdrew from the production.
I can’t even stand watching the trailers for “Hunters”. You have to assume that they’re showing you some of the ‘best moments’ and all I can think is that if this is their best...
Pretty sure his character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” — agent Marvin Schwarz — was Jewish.
Happy birthday Al.
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