Al Pacino will make you an offer you can’t refuse.
The actor had just made his film debut in 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park when he caught the eye of director Francis Ford Coppola. The following year, Coppola cast him as Michael Corleone, one of his most iconic roles to date, in The Godfather.
“Before The Godfather, the first Godfather, nobody else wanted me,” Pacino revealed to The Talks in August 2015. “But Francis wanted me! He just wanted me, and I didn’t understand it . . . The studios didn’t want me, nobody wanted me — nobody knew me. I think when a director is interested, I have a tendency to lean forward instead of backing off.”
Pacino’s performance earned him an Oscar nomination and boosted him to stardom. He reprised the role in the sequels The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Godfather Part III (1990), the latter earning him another Oscar nomination.
When the Oscars ceremony came around, Pacino didn’t attend. Despite his success with the trilogy, Pacino had a hard time coping with his newfound fame and told The New York Times in March 2022 that “The Godfather gave me a new identity that was hard for me to cope with.”
“I just was afraid to go. I was young, younger than even my years,” Pacino said at the time. “I was young in terms of the newness of all this. It was the old shot-out-of-a-cannon syndrome.”
After The Godfather, Pacino was happy to star in Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), telling Vulture in March 2018 he “didn’t have to see Michael Corleone. I was flying.” He went on to star in Scarface (1983), Scent of a Woman (1992), Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and House of Gucci (2021).
Keep scrolling to see Pacino’s career in photos:
