Born 1943

Born in Little Italy in 1943, Robert DeNiro was so skinny and pale as a child that he was called “Bobby Milk” for years. He immersed himself in acting and later became the quintessential New York tough guy, winning wide acclaim as the titular character in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver (1976) and as the young immigrant Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II (1974). He went on to win an Academy Award as the boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980), a role for which he gained sixty pounds. As the quixotic Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, he delivered an opinion of New York that we’ve all shared at one time or another: “This city here is like an open sewer,” he snarled. “It’s full of filth and scum.”