What really went down when Robert De Niro partied with a certain famous comedian?
And did he really have a feud with another iconic actor?
Considering his intense sense of privacy, we may never know for sure.
One of Robert De Niro's greatest regrets seems to be the fact that some of his early interviews
got a little too personal.
As he explained to Time Magazine in 1977,
"After my first movies I gave interviews, then I thought, 'What's so important about
where I went to school and hobbies?
What does any of that have to do with acting, with my own head?'
Nothing."
De Niro does give interviews, but they're mostly restricted to professional topics,
as he figured out what his own boundaries are a long time ago.
In a 1987 profile about the actor, Vanity Fair talked with Parade writer Barbara Goldsmith.
She spoke at length with De Niro in 1984, and afterwards, he called her to clarify what
she was and wasn't going to write about.
Then when the article ran, he called her again to tell her that he regretted ever talking
to her.
And as revealed in the biography De Niro: A Life, the media storm around the 1977 movie
New York, New York was so overwhelming that De Niro stepped away from doing interviews
altogether for four years.
De Niro's father, Robert De Niro Sr., was an abstract expressionist artist who passed
away in 1993.
In a 2016 interview with Out, the younger De Niro revealed that he still kept his father's
art studio exactly as he'd left it, as he explained,
"It was the only way to keep his being, his existence alive.
To me, he was always a great artist."
And he wasn't the only one to think so, as some of De Niro, Sr.'s works were even bought
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But he also warned his son about the struggles of a creative life.
As the younger De Niro revealed,
"He always used to say to me, 'great artists are recognized many, many years after they're
gone.'"
"I just want to see him get his due.
That's my responsibility."
De Niro's parents divorced when he was young, and over the years, he realized how much his
father loved him and what he was struggling with.
After his father's passing, De Niro inherited his journals, and he could only bring himself
to read the parts that would be used in an art history book about him.
In one excerpt, De Niro Sr. wrote,
"If God doesn't want me to be homosexual (about which I have so much guilt), he will find
a woman whom I will love and who will love me.
But I really don't want my homosexuality cured."
When Vanity Fair profiled De Niro in 1987, he declined to talk to them.
He did, however, give them permission to talk to some of his friends and the people he'd
worked with, including director Ulu Grosbard.
Grosbard had some words of wisdom to share, as he advised,
"Do not ever bring up the subject of Taxi Driver with Robert.
He gets extremely upset."
When John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, he'd been
inspired by Taxi Driver and De Niro's costar Jodie Foster.
The assassination attempt actually happened on the same day that the Oscars were scheduled
for that year, although the ceremony was postponed for a day.
De Niro ended up winning an Oscar that year for his performance in Raging Bull, but the
only thing journalists wanted to know were his thoughts about the assassination attempt.
But he had nothing to say, as he insisted,
"I don't want to discuss the matter now.
Look, I said what I wanted to say [at the Oscars].
You're all very nice, but that's it."
"You talkin' to me?
You talkin' to me?"
Late comedian John Belushi was a longtime friend of Robert De Niro, who was known to
frequent one of Belushi's favorite hangouts in Los Angeles, the Chateau Marmont.
On the night that Belushi died of a drug overdose in 1982, De Niro was staying nearby and seeing
some local sights with fellow actor Harry Dean Stanton.
They tried to get Belushi to join them, but he declined.
The comedian was preoccupied with a visitor named Cathy Smith.
De Niro never liked Smith, so he bailed.
And then the next morning, he learned that Belushi had passed away.
As recounted in the book De Niro: A Life, it's been suggested that Belushi's experimentation
with heroin was an attempt to emulate his friend.
De Niro had a reputation for preparing for roles wholeheartedly, and Belushi was getting
ready to play a rock star.
De Niro spoke at a grand jury inquest into Belushi's death, but publicly stayed silent
on the matter.
Robert De Niro is known for going to extremes in the leadup to his movies, though audiences
generally don't get to see this intense behind-the-scenes work.
For example, during production of The Godfather Part II, he decided to head to Sicily to immerse
himself in the culture and learn the entire language.
As recounted in De Niro: A Life, he became so fluent so quickly that he actually helped
re-write the film's Sicilian-language dialogue to include some of the nuances that he'd picked
up.
No less impressive is the fact that he learned how to play the saxophone for New York, New
York, even though the music was dubbed for the film.
And to prep for Taxi Driver, he legitimately obtained a cab driver's license.
Even harder than all that was surely De Niro's regimen of gaining about 60 pounds for 1980's
Raging Bull.
The movie stopped filming for four months while he did that, but it sounds like it wasn't
exactly a pleasant experience.
As he recalled,
"I began to realize what a fat man goes through.
You get rashes on your legs.
Your legs scrape together.
You feel your weight on your heels when you stand up.
It was like going to a foreign land."
But there was, perhaps, one even worse experience: for 1991's Cape Fear, he saw a dentist to
have his teeth ruined, and then he had them remade after the production ended.
"Not so easy, is it, tough guy, right?"
Robert De Niro developed his reputation as one of the most beloved actors of his generation
thanks to his work in weighty dramas.
So it was certainly understandable that his jump into full-on comedy with 1999's Analyze
This may have been met with some skepticism.
Fortunately, we can look to the man himself for answers about that pivot, as he's been
much more open about his professional decisions than he is about his personal life.
As he revealed to Forbes in 2023,
"With Analyze This, I thought it would be interesting and fun to do."
He had a read-through with his co-star Billy Crystal, and that's all it took for him to
commit to the part.
He also noted,
"Then I started getting offers like for Meet The Parents.
[...] I don't know how, but I wound up committing to that, and then that whole thing started."
"I have nipples, Greg.
Could you milk me?"
Comedian Rob Riggle, one of De Niro's costars in 2020's The War with Grandpa, told CinemaBlend
that he could absolutely attest to De Niro's acting abilities extending to comedy, and
that it was even harder than drama.
As Riggle put it,
"De Niro doesn't get enough credit for his comedy chops.
He knows what's funny and he knows why it's funny, so he knows how to play that.
He's not afraid to look foolish.
If you're not willing to look foolish, that's a hard sell."
In a 2020 interview with Yahoo!, De Niro was asked if he had any intention to retire any
time soon, to which he replied,
"I always say, the next thing is grandfathers, then great-grandfathers, then great-great-great
grandfathers, so who knows.
I'll go as long as I can."
If an actor still loves what he's doing even as he's getting up in the years, then he of
course should be able to continue to work for as long as he can.
But according to De Niro's attorneys, this particular situation is actually a little
more complicated.
In 2021, Page Six reported that those lawyers were in court arguing that their client was
being forced to keep working in order to pay his divorce settlement.
He and his second wife Grace Hightower split in 2018.
His lawyers argued that he couldn't keep working to keep up with the payments, while Hightower's
lawyers claimed that he had unfairly cut her monthly allowance from $375,000 to $100,000.
One of De Niro's lawyers, Caroline Krauss, explained to reporters,
"While he loves his craft, he should not be forced to work at this prodigious pace because
he has to.
When does it stop?
When does he get the opportunity to not take every project that comes along, and not work
six-day weeks, 12-hour days, so he can keep pace with Ms. Hightower's thirst for Stella
McCartney?"
In 2022, a woman named Shanice Aviles was arrested on charges of breaking into Robert
De Niro's New York City property.
As it happens, the NYPD had been keeping tabs on Aviles for some time.
After she was allegedly seen trying to get into a series of buildings in the area, law
enforcement followed her into De Niro's townhouse, where she was arrested.
She was then accused of stealing Christmas presents.
One of De Niro's daughters had been staying with him at the time of the break-in, and
he confirmed to reporters that they were both fine.
Aviles later claimed that she'd been set up.
She told the New York Post that she wanted to apologize to De Niro and that she loved
his movies.
A judge was less than understanding, though, and she was initially held on $40,000 bail.
In May 2023, De Niro was chatting with ET Canada to promote his new film About My Father.
When he was asked what kind of dad he was to his own six children, he revealed that
he actually had seven kids now.
"Seven?!
Oh my goodness, congratulations!"
De Niro's newest child is named Gia Virginia, and her mother is De Niro's girlfriend, Tiffany
Chen.
His About My Father co-star Sebastian Maniscalco also had no clue there was a baby on the way.
As he admitted to Extra in May 2023,
"I was informed today that he had the baby.
I didn't know, leading up to this, that he was going to have a baby, but yeah, God bless
him!"
Gia Virginia's siblings are her adopted sister Drena, brother Raphael, twin brothers Julian
and Aaron, brother Elliot, and sister Helen.
When ET Canada asked De Niro if he considers himself a cool dad, he responded,
"I don't think that I'm a cool father [...] I'm okay.
My kids disagree with me at times, but they're respectful [...] And my youngest now, that'll
be more to come."
"You know, it's uh, it's what it is."
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are both Hollywood icons who rose to fame around the same time.
When The Guardian spoke to both of them around the release of 2019's The Irishman, Pacino
revealed,
"We're really close.
We don't see each other very much, but when we do, we found we shared certain things.
In a way, I think we've helped each other throughout life."
Pacino and De Niro were both in "The Godfather Part II," but not in any scenes together.
Despite appearing in similar movies and working with a lot of the same people for much of
their careers, De Niro and Pacino never actually appeared on screen together until 1995's Heat,
in which their characters famously square off in a diner.
A rumored tale is that at the time, they hated each other so much that director Michael Mann
needed to shoot them separately and splice the scenes together.
But is there any truth to this legend?
None whatsoever, according to a 2016 interview with Pacino, De Niro, and Mann that was moderated
by Christopher Nolan.
As Mann recalled,
"It started with consummate respect for the great artists that these two guys are [...] I
knew the little, tiny, organic details would be different from take to take.
So what I wanted to do was shoot with two cameras."
The actors were positioned over the shoulder to create a sort of call-and-answer scene,
and that's all there is to it.
It was a simple filmmaking decision to have them appear in alternating shots.
There was no feud, nor any demands to be shot separately, just a directing choice that led
to a fantastical rumor.