Al Pacino, known as Sonny Boy, as Michael Corleone, with James Caan, who plays his brother Santino, known as… Sonny
Having reached the age of 84, still active in cinema and television, Al Pacino decided to tell his story in an autobiography released simultaneously all over the world (La nave di Teseo was published in Italy) which has the title of the nickname with who they called him as a child, Sonny Boy. A name that already carried within itself his destiny: Al Pacino came to the attention of the world with the role of Michael Corleone in Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola. He was the only one of Don Vito Corleone’s four children who had not yet been involved in the family’s criminal affairs when, after the attack on his father, he saved his life from an ambush in the hospital where he was hospitalized, in one of the scenes he highest tension in the history of cinema, To take the reins of the family was destined his older brother Santino, known as Sonny, who is lured into a trap and killed. It is Michael, then, who sets out to avenge the family, and then becomes the new godfather. As he confides in the book, the production would have wanted more established actors, and furthermore Al Pacino would have had to overcome his phobia of flying to get the part, because at a certain point in the film the story would have been set in Sicily. The actor recalls: «Paramount would never have chosen me as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, they wanted Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal. My manager, furious, ordered me to get on that fucking plane and made me drunk on whiskey.”
The child plays with the gun, which he will later use as an actor in many films, credit Mark Scarola
To convince the mafia family that he is a worthy heir of Don Vito, Michael Corleone, hero of the Second World War, cold drug trafficker Virgil Sollozzo with a gun ingeniously hidden in the bathroom of a restaurant. And that gun-in-hand execution convinces not only the Corleones and their allies of Michael’s skill and cold blood, but also the world public that a new movie star is born. From the photo of him as a child on a street in the Bronx where he lived with his mother and grandparents, it seems that the gun was one of his favorite toys. He will return to handle it several times on set, in films such as Serpico, Scarface, Carlitos way, Heat, 88 minutes… His childhood was that of a street kid: he started smoking at the age of 9, he was rejected several times, he went on raids with gangs of his peers, carrying out actions bordering on the limits of legality. But it was his love for acting that saved him. Love, which as he himself states, was born in the very first years of his life, when his mother, who raised him alone since his father had left them when he was two years old, took him with her to the cinema to see adult films. This is how he begins in his autobiography: «Watching the actors on the screen captured me right away. Since there was no one in our house I could play with and we didn’t have a television yet, the one thing I didn’t lack was time to think about the movies I’d seen. I went through the characters that had stuck with me and brought them back to life one by one. Very early I learned to make friends with my imagination.”
But where did that nickname, Sonny Boy, come from, which always stuck with him enough to choose it as the title of his autobiography?
«My mother had taken it from a well-known Al Jolson song that went like this:
Climb up on my knee, Sonny Boy
Though you’re only three, Sonny Boy
You’ve no way of knowing
There’s no way of showing
What you mean to me, Sonny Boy.
This song stayed in her head for a dozen years and when I was born, in 1940, he still remembered it so well that he always sang it to me.”
The maternal grandparents Vincenzo Giovanni Gerardi, originally from Corleone, and Kate.Credit Mark Scarola
It is well known that Al Pacino is of Italian origins. Both his father Salvatore Pacino (1922-2005) and his mother Rose Gelardi (1919-1962) were children of Italian emigrants. His grandparents were very important in Alfred’s growth, also because his mother was mentally unstable, so much so that she attempted suicide when Al was ten years old. But the origin of the maternal grandfather is not so well known. Let’s leave it to the words of the actor himself to reveal it: «When I learned that the part of Michael was mine, I called my grandmother to tell her. “Do you know I’m going to be in The Godfather? They gave me the role of Michael Corleone.” And she: “Corleone? Did you know that it is also the name of the town where your grandfather was born?” I ignored it; I only knew that he came from Sicily. He never talked about what he did before coming to the United States. But now that I learned about this coincidence I thought that someone, somewhere, was helping me: otherwise how was it possible that they would give me that part?».
The book is a mine of anecdotes, reflections, encounters of which we have only given a taste. However, it is only right to recall in a few lines the greatest successes of his career as a theater, film and TV actor.
Al Pacino attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York and studied acting at Herbert Berghof’s studio with Charles Laughton and at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. He received nine Academy Award nominations, for films like The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Godfather Part II and The Irishmanand he won the Oscar for best actor in 1992 for Scent of a Woman – Scent of a woman. He has been nominated nineteen times for the Golden Globes and won four, and has been nominated for three Tony Awards, winning two, and for three Emmy Awards, winning two. He also won an Obie Award. Al Pacino received the Kennedy Center Honor, the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Merit of Arts from President Obama, and the Cecil B. DeMille Golden Globe for Lifetime Achievement.