Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro was married to actress Diahnne Abbott from 1976 until their divorce in 1988. He later married actress Grace Hightower in 1997, and they separated in 2018. De Niro and Abbott have a son, Raphael, and he adopted Abbott's daughter, Drena.

De Niro also has twins Julian and Airyn with former partner Toukie Smith, and children Elliot and Helen with Grace Hightower. In 2023, he welcomed his seventh child, a daughter named Gia, with Tiffany Chen.

Robert Anthony De Niro was raised by his mother, painter Virginia Admiral, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and Little Italy neighborhoods. His father, painter Robert De Niro Sr., lived nearby and remained close to him during his childhood. De Niro began acting classes at age 10 and made his school stage debut as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

He left high school at 16 to pursue acting and studied at HB Studio, the Stella Adler Conservatory, and the Actors Studio. His first film was Brian De Palma's The Wedding Party, filmed in 1963 and released in 1969. He gained wider recognition for Bang the Drum Slowly in 1973, followed by a volatile performance as Johnny Boy in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.

De Niro's first film with Martin Scorsese was Mean Streets. Their subsequent collaborations included Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Cape Fear, GoodFellas, Casino, and The Irishman. The partnership became central to De Niro's reputation for playing psychologically intense and often violent characters.

For Taxi Driver, De Niro spent time driving a taxi in New York and studied the mannerisms of taxi drivers. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, after gaining more than 50 pounds for the role and learning to box. He later received Oscar nominations for Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Awakenings, Cape Fear, and Killers of the Flower Moon.

Francis Ford Coppola cast De Niro as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II after seeing his performance in Mean Streets. De Niro spoke mainly in Sicilian dialects and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the first male actor to win an Oscar for an Italian-language performance. He and Marlon Brando became the first pair of actors to win Academy Awards for portraying the same fictional character.

His other major dramatic roles include 1900, The Last Tycoon, The Deer Hunter, Once Upon a Time in America, The Mission, The Untouchables, Heat, Casino, Jackie Brown, and Joker. He also developed a successful comic persona through Midnight Run, Analyze This, Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers, Little Fockers, and The Intern.

De Niro continued appearing in film, television, and comedy, including the HBO film The Wizard of Lies, in which he portrayed Bernie Madoff. He played Robert Mueller in several episodes of Saturday Night Live, appeared in Silver Linings Playbook, and reunited with Scorsese in The Irishman.

His later credits include Amsterdam, Killers of the Flower Moon, About My Father, Ezra, Nada, and the miniseries Zero Day. In The Alto Knights, he played both gangsters Frank Costello and Vito Genovese.

De Niro made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale in 1993, a Mafia drama set in the 1960s. He later directed The Good Shepherd in 2006, a spy drama about the origins of the CIA and the personal compromises made by one of its agents.

His honors include two Academy Awards, the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honors, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. He received the Honorary Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025.

In 1989, De Niro and producer Jane Rosenthal founded TriBeCa Productions, a film and television production company. The partnership also led to the creation of the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002.

De Niro has also worked as a producer on projects including The Irishman, The Wizard of Lies, When They See Us, About a Boy, and The Good Shepherd.