Latest news with #SonnyBoy
Daily Mirror
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Al Pacino admits 'it's a miracle' he's still alive after gang pals died at 30 from heroin
Legendary Hollywood icon Al Pacino shared an indepth look into his life where he opened up about his chilhood struggles and death of his close friends growing up After a career spanning 50 years, legendary Godfather actor Al Pacino will be thanking his lucky stars at turning 85 today. The kid from the wrong side of the tracks calls his entire life a "moon shot" – having survived a tough childhood in the Bronx, where three of his closest gang friends ended up "dead by 30 from heroin". After he began drinking at nine, he says even surviving the 1940s was a miracle - crediting his mum for his longevity, after she banned him from roaming the streets after dark with hoods. He says: "I loathed her at the time. But I'm still here because of my mother. I never thanked her for… keeping me away from the path that led to delinquency, danger and violence, to the needle that killed Petey, Cliffy and Bruce." The method actor's awards shelf boasts an Oscar for Scent of a Woman in 1992, four Golden Globes, three Tonys and two Emmys, but his path to success from street kid to one of the greatest actors of all time is the very stuff of Hollywood epics. The star, who has never married, shares daughter Julie Marie, 34, with acting coach Jan Tarrant, and twins Anton and Olivia, 22, with Beverly D'Angelo. Then, in 2023, Pacino shocked Hollywood by becoming a father for the fourth time to son, Roman, with ex partner Noor Alfallah, 31. Calling parenthood a "mini miracle", the doting father says he wrote his memoir, Sonny Boy, to share his extraordinary life story with his brood. Alfredo James Pacino was born the only child of Italian immigrants in New York's East Harlem ghetto, on April 25, 1940. Abandoned by his dad Salvatore Pacino, when he was just two-years-old, Pacino - nicknamed Sonny Boy after an Al Jolson song - and his mum, Rose, lived in a series of cheap furnished rooms, before moving into her parents' tiny South Bronx tenement apartment. "I slept between my grandparents," says Pacino, recalling the poverty. "I never had playmates in our apartment and we didn't have television." Instead, his pretty factory worker mum smuggled him into the movies, where they found a bit of glamour to lift their bleak lives. "I learned at an early age to make friends with my imagination," he recalls. His father barely paid any support and went off to war – not coming back into his son's life until he'd remarried, going on to have three daughters. Too late to save their relationship. Pacino says, simply: "He was absent." But a chance conversation with his father's relatives revealed a family secret about his mother's fragile mental health which left him reeling. "When I was a young actor, the Pacinos came backstage to see me," he recalls. "It came out that I had been taken away from my mother for eight months while my father was at war and sent to live with my father's mother." Pacino called his grandmother Josephine "a gift from God" and one the "first of the lifesavers" for saving him from the care system and keeping him out of the gutters. His mother's father, James, a plasterer, had come, possibly illegally, to New York from a Sicilian town, Corleone. "He was the first real father figure I had," says Pacino. His granny, Kate, was a great storyteller, and he would sit with her and listen as she peeled potatoes. "I'd eat the skins raw – I loved the way they tasted." One day, aged six, while out playing in the street, he saw an ambulance pull up. "Coming out of the doors on a stretcher was my mother. She had attempted suicide," he says. While his mother was in a psychiatric hospital, Pacino climbed tenement rooftops and smoked cigarettes in alleys with his street gang. "Every day was an adventure with Cliffy, Bruce and Petey," he says. But the love he received at home saved him from a downward spiral. "I think that made the difference. I made it out alive, they didn't," he reflects. As a 10-year-old toughie, Pacino says he was like 'a cat with many more than nine lives' the way he cheated death – from falling through ice in the freezing Bronx river to impaling his groin on a fence. "I remember my mother, aunt and grandmother poking my penis in a panic," he says. "But it remained attached, along with the trauma." Recalling the wild freedom of opening hydrants on hot summer days and fishing for lost dimes in street grates, he says: "If we wanted food, we'd steal it. We never paid for anything." Athletic Pacino got into sport. "It was like I lived two lives – my life with the gang, and the guys I played baseball with," he writes. Meanwhile, his mother got engaged again, but was crushed after being dumped. "Doctors said she had anxiety neurosis, and she needed costly electroshock treatment and barbiturates," the actor shares. At New York's High School of Performing Arts, Pacino's talent was being noticed. "A guy came up to me after a show and said, "Hey kid, you're going to be the next Marlon Brando." He had to leave at 16 and took odd jobs as an errand boy, removals and even bus boy. "They caught me eating leftovers off the tables – that's how hungry I was," he admits. Seeing acting as an escape route from poverty, he enrolled in acting classes, where he met fellow student Martin Sheen. Dreaming of being a stage actor, Pacino would recite Shakespeare aloud in vacant lots. "Marty moved in with me so we could split the rent," he says, adding they both worked cleaning toilets. Aged 22, Pacino was performing in off-Broadway productions to mixed reviews. Then the news came that his mother was sick and he rushed to see her. "I was too late. She had died choking on her own pills." Within a year, he also lost his beloved grandfather and used alcohol and pills to dull the pain. "It was my lowest point," he admits. "But drinking saved my life. I was able to self-medicate." At 26, he learned his famous method acting skills from Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio in New York, before going to Boston to do rep theatre and appeared in his screen debut in TV cop drama N.Y.P.D. with first love Jill Clayburgh. "My relationship with the director who would change my life began oddly," he writes. "Frances Ford Coppola offered me a part in a film that never got made. "Months later, I got a call from Francis who was going to be directing The Godfather. He offered me the role of Michael Corleone. This was a hundred-to-million-to-one-shot." Coppola got his way and Pacino met the love of his life, Diane Keaton, on the set of The Godfather. "We just hit it off," he says. "She was easy to talk to and funny." He would also go on to have love affairs with Tuesday Weld while working on his next film Serpico, and Kathleen Quinlan during Scarface in the 1980s. When Pacino finally met Marlon Brando - the man he'd been compared to years earlier - he was mesmerised. "When I had lunch with Marlon Brando he was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands. His hands were full of red sauce," he says. The first time Pacino ever visited his home country Sicily was to shoot the wedding scene in the gangster epic. "Francis asked me to speak to extras in the scene, dance the waltz with my bride, then drive off with her," he says. "I told him, 'I don't speak Italian, I don't know how to waltz… and I can't drive'!" But the time the film hit cinemas in 1972, directors were falling over themselves to have Pacino play their leading tough guys. The stratospheric rise to fame sent him hurtling for the drink and drugs again. But having seen what happened to his childhood friends, the star has been sober since 1977. After making over 70 films, including critically acclaimed crime movies like Serpico (1973) and Scarface (1983), two Godfather sequels,Carlito's Way (1993), Heat (1995) and Donnie Brasco (1997), still a stage actor at heart, Pacino will be back next year starring in the film adaptation of King Lear. Miraculously surviving his brush with death with Covid in 2020, he tells how he remembers waking up. "I didn't have a pulse. Everybody thought I was dead. I opened my eyes and they said, "He's back. He's here'" he says. Those "lifesavers" from childhood must still be looking out for their kid from the Bronx.
Express Tribune
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Celeb memoirs to boost your shelf
SLOUGH, ENGLAND: Do you lovers of novels balk at the spectre of non-fiction? Do you subscribe to the school of thought that non-fiction books were invented as an alternative to medically approved sedatives? Do you cast aspersions on a person's character based on the contents of their bookshelf? From one fiction lover to another, you, of course, are free to cast as many aspersions on non-fiction aficionados as you choose. However, you may need to make a small space in your heart for the purest form of escapist non-fiction the literary world has to offer: the coveted celebrity memoir. One hastens to add that whilst a celebrity memoir may not be as insufferable as a self-help manual, it is still in danger of causing you to weep like an English teacher up to their eyeballs in mediocre essays. Bearing this in mind, please allow a moment of silence for Prince Harry's Spare, with its short sharp RL Stine-esque paragraphs. If this book has taught us anything, it is that in the hands of the wrong writer, the most riveting life becomes slightly less interesting than an economics textbook. Exceptions to the rule Please do not let Harry and his ghost-writing ilk put you off. Every once in a while, we fiction lovers are treated to a rare and dazzling example of an autobiography recounted with the mesmerising skill of an award-winning novelist, as Al Pacino's rather colourful Sonny Boy proved last year. Meanwhile, no one who has devoured Trevor Noah's Born A Crime will have complained of boredom after reading his account of nearly losing his mother to a stray bullet or being hurled out of a moving car as a child ("I was nine years old when my mother threw me out of a moving car. It happened on a Sunday.") If you take away nothing else from this memoir, Noah will have at least confirmed for you that this whole rolling-out-of-a-car charade is not quite as painless as Hollywood heroes would like you to believe. Of course, if you are in the market for a something that slightly more mundane than car chases and gunfights, you could always sift through Alan Rickman's collection of diaries (Madly Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries), which definitively proves that Professor Snape's life has the capacity to be as refreshingly dull as a, well, ours. One diary entry picked at random rather delightfully reads reads as follows: "2PM. Dentist. Bleaching. Ouch. 4PM. Refit the Harry P. costume. A bit of taking in is necessary." Not all memoirs can reach the heights that Alan Rickman's beautifully unadorned diaries aspire to, but here are some additional celebrities whose life stories will make a slow, rainy weekend streak past in the blink of an eye. Matthew Perry After Matthew Perry's tragic death in 2023 broke the heart of every Chandler Bing fan, his unapologetic take on his debilitating drug addiction and '90s pop culture in Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is a harrowing but gripping read. Opting for the simple touch, Perry began, "Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by my full name. My friends call me Matty." Laying himself bare thus, Perry preserved his life for posterity with this trademark Chandler-like sarcasm and self-deprecation. From shuffling between his divorced parents to nearly being a ranked tennis player, from yearning for fame and battling the drugs that failed to fill his hunger for something just beyond reach, Perry gives his own unflinching take of his life and the choices he made. "I have spent upward of $7m trying to get sober. I have been to 6,000 AA meetings I've been to rehab fifteen times," wrote Perry. And whilst Friends fans will already be aware of Perry's struggles with addiction behind the scenes, reading his own account twists the knife in just a little further. "I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment centre," he confessed in his memoir, a disquieting reminder that reality is as far away from television as we could possibly imagine. Britney Spears There was once a time when it was considered the height of coolness to loathe this blonde pop princess and her Baby One More Time repertoire. Those days have long since passed, as Spears' painfully honest The Woman In Me has proven. As horrifying accounts of the amount of coercion this once-teenaged idol was put through as a young woman have emerged over the years, we have been taught repeatedly not to judge a book by its cover. Or at least to not judge a woman by the blonde-ness of her hair, or the shallowness of her songs. "There have been so many times when I was scared to speak up because I was afraid somebody would think I was crazy," writes Spears. "But I've learned that lesson now, the hard way. You have to speak the thing that you're feeling, even if it scares you. You have to tell your story. You have to raise your voice." And so in her short, sharp memoir, Spears's cautionary tale is yet another harrowing reminder of the drawbacks of living in the public eye. Where once Spears was a sex symbol and a pop icon, her book shows that she is a relatable figure to any adult woman whose life has been dictated by others. This is less of a story about music, and more of an insider's account of the way women continue to be mistreated in the industry. Far from spinning out a tale of woe, The Woman In Me is a candid eye-opener brimming with (of all things) optimism where it could have justifiably spewed out bitterness. Paris Hilton Speaking of blonde women people loved to hate, Paris Hilton's rather imaginatively titled memoir The Memoir finally proves what people had once assumed was as inconceivable as pigs flying: that there is more to Hilton than meets the eye. However, if you were among those in the noughties who believed it was not humanly possible to be more airheaded than Hilton (who paved the way for influencers before even the hint of TikTok existed in the outer realms of anyone's dreams), The Memoir proves that you have Hilton herself to thank. Or rather, her cunning marketing strategy rather than any cripplingly low IQ. "I came of age during the most turbulent pop culture period ever," Hilton reminds us in her book. "The character I played [...] was my steel-plated armour. People loved her. Or they loved to hate her, which is just as marketable. I leaned into that character, my ticket to financial freedom and a safe place to hide. I made sure I never had a quiet moment to figure out who I was without her." Refreshingly bereft of self pity, Hilton shows us how easily manipulated audiences can be, and what a minefield the early 2000s were for women celebrities. In The Memoir, Hilton owns her story without a speck of martyrdom, and for that alone, she deserves to be read.
