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The gangsta we lust after, the actor who makes us just slightly uncomfortable and the wit-mouthed who makes us laugh... no matter what Robert De Niro plays, you can’t not notice him

He is the man. We love his work (his good work) and dismiss his less than stellar movie choices as momentary bursts of insanity. He defines what it is to be an actor and learn your craft. ‘’He brings an artistic touch to his movie roles and often makes us want to leave the movie theatre and punch out the first clown we see. Now that’s what we call inspiring,’’ says Naseeruddin Shah about one of his favourite actors.

‘’De Niro has built a durable star career out of his formidable ability to disappear into a character, whether tempering his charisma to become a believable everyman or imbuing his renowned gallery of mobsters and psychopaths with a compelling, frightening authority,’’ adds Shah.

After rising to stardom in the 1970s with landmark performances as violent New York brutes in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980), not to mention his quietly bravura turn in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), De Niro appeared to falter in the 1980s. Rejuvenated after The Untouchables (1987) and Goodfellas (1990), as well as the founding of the Tribeca Film Center, De Niro picked up his pace in the 2000s by turning to comedy in Analyze This (1999) and Meet the Parents (2000).

His career’s somewhat like Om Puri’s though. Two extraordinary actors and probably the only ones on the East and West of film-making, who can pull off even the worst ‘comic’ script!

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The son of artists, De Niro is a New York man. One of the reasons why he’s been trying to get the Academy Awards held in the Big Apple. In fact, when he was unable to do so, he decided it was time to start one of New York’s own.

He was raised in New York’s Greenwich Village by his mother after his parents split up when he was two. Nicknamed ‘Bobby Milk’ for his pallor, the youthful De Niro joined a Little Italy street gang, but the direction of his future had already been determined by his stage debut at age 10 playing the Cowardly Lion in his school’s production of The Wizard of Oz.

Ironically, playing the Cowardly Lion helped De Niro to break out of his shyness. By 16, he was so entranced by the movies that he quit high school and decided to pursue acting. Again, like Om Puri, De Niro began on stage in Broadway shows. S

Several low-budget movies later, including a successful satire Greetings (1968) directed by Brian De Palma, De Niro’s professional life took a more auspicious turn, when he was re-introduced to former Little Italy acquaintance Martin Scorsese at a party in 1972. Sharing a love of movies as well as their neighbourhood background, De Niro and Scorsese hit it off.

De Niro was immediately interested when Scorsese asked him about appearing in his new film, Mean Streets . Conceived as a grittier, more authentic portrait of the mafia as a collection of petty street hoods rather than The Godfather’s (1972) wealthy dons, Mean Streets drew on Scorsese’s neighbourhood experiences in its story of Harvey Keitel’s conflicted striver Charlie and his ruinous friendship with De Niro’s volatile Johnny Boy.

Though he initially didn’t want the part, De Niro transformed Johnny Boy into an indelible combination of anarchic energy and violent stupidity, from the moment he blew up a mail box onscreen, through his humorous, improvised monologue about Joey Clams to his bloody end.

‘’Though Mean Streets failed to become a mainstream hit, it’s the film that turned Scorsese and De Niro into rising artistic stars,’’ remembers Naseerudin Shah. ‘’It was Mean Streets that impressed Francis Ford Coppola enough to cast De Niro as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II ,’’ says Shah. Rather than cash in on his Godfather success, however, De Niro headed to Europe to star in Bernardo Bertolucci’s opus 1900 (1976).

A sprawling allegory about class struggle in 20th century Italy, 1900 ’s expansive story hinged on the lifelong relationship between De Niro’s rich landowner and his proletarian best friend (Gérard Depardieu).

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After 1900 ’s equally epic shoot, De Niro returned to the US to collaborate with Scorsese on the far leaner (and meaner) production Taxi Driver. After working for two weeks as a Manhattan cabbie and losing weight, De Niro transformed himself into the disturbed ‘God’s Lonely Man’ Travis Bickle. De Niro’s line, ‘’You talking to me?’’ became a legend and the film earned the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, Good Box Office, and several Oscar nominations including Best Picture and De Niro’s first nod for Best Actor. Controversy erupted about the film’s violence, however, when would-be Presidential assassin John Hinckley cited Taxi Driver as a formative influence in 1981.

Scorcese and De Niro went on to ride a variety of waves together with controversial productions and ambitious projects that might have been ahead of their time (for example, De Niro and Liza Minnelli’s New York New York ).

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What’s De Niro the man all about? A workaholic, whose work takes him all over the globe, but he finds enough time to be an attentive father.

Robert De Niro likes his personal life to stay just that... personal. A quintessential New York man, De Niro, carries the city’s attitude in his gait. He’s successfully ridden out controversies that have linked him to a prostitution ring in France and pedophilia and emerged unscathed and clean.