Al Pacino had to wait 20 years for the Oscar


Al Pacino was nominated for an Oscar four years in a row but had to wait 20 years before he won the coveted statuette. Al Pacino never seriously faltered throughout the rest of the 1970s, scoring either critical or commercial successes (or both) in Scarecrow (1973), Serpico (1973), for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination, The Godfather, Part II (1974), for which he received another Best Actor nomination, Dog Day Afternoon (1975), culminating in a third Best Actor Academy Award nomination, Bobby Deerfield (1977), which was, perhaps, his weakest film of the decade and . . . And Justice for All (1979), which was the last hit he would have for a very long time.

Al Pacino's first film of the 1980s was the controversial Cruising (1980), a movie about gay life in New York City that was blasted by the critics and avoided by filmgoers. Author! Author! (1982) garnered the actor better reviews but was a small, sentimental movie that was not well attended. His next film, BRIAN DE PALMA's remake of Scarface (1983), got lots of attention—mostly negative. There was a virtual tidal wave of criticism against the film's violence, and Al Pacino's riveting performance in the title role was generally overlooked amid a storm of controversy. Scarface was nothing compared to the big-budget disaster Revolution (1985). Al Pacino's voice and acting style did not lend themselves to the portrayal of an 18thcentury American.

The actor took much of the criticism for this badly scripted and poorly done epic. He was little seen until he made his comeback movie, Sea of Love (1989), in which he played a hard-drinking police detective. With his dark eyes and raspy voice, he proved to be ideal for threatening gangster roles. He appeared in The Godfather: Part III (1990), Carlito's Way (1993), and Heat (1995), in which he was cast for the first time opposite another acclaimed gangster actor, ROBERT DE NIRO.

He was a romantic lead of sorts in Frankie and Johnny (1991), assuming the role of an ex-con who works as a cook; MICHELLE PFEIFFER was the waitress who eventually falls for him. His most remarkable role during the early 1990s, however, was in Scent of a Woman (1992), a blind military officer bent on suicide. The most memorable sequence in the film involved his tango with a beautiful young woman waiting for her dinner date to arrive. This role brought him an Oscar for Best Actor.

In 1996, he directed and played in Looking for Richard, an offbeat semidocumentary about a filmmakers's attempts to come to terms with Shakespeare's Richard III; the film won the Directors Guild of America Best Feature Documentary award. In Donnie Brasco (1997), he returned to the underworld as the mob mentor to an undercover agent. He was at his devilish best as the Satanic figure in The Devil's Advocate (1997), playing the head of a law firm.

He had a more sympathetic role as the professional football coach in Any Given Sunday (1999). Al Pacino provided strong support to RUSSELL CROWE in Michael Mann's The Insider (1999), playing the tough 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman. In The Recruit (2002), he played CIA professional Walter Burke, who recruits computer genius James Clayton (Colin Farrell) into the CIA. Al Pacino's performance was typical of his recent work.

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