SONNY BOY

Winning reminiscences by a reluctant movie star.

Pacino, it seems, would rather be known for interpreting Shakespeare than for playing Michael Corleone in the Godfather films, but of course it’s the latter that brought him much of his fame. The debt to the Bard is great, though: As a young man growing up in the tenements of New York, where his childhood friends would die of drug abuse, he walked the streets and declaimed: “If the hour was late and you heard the sound of someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me, training myself on the great Shakespeare soliloquies.” In time, good luck smiled on him: He roomed with another young actor named Marty Sheen, “one of the best people I’d ever know,” earned roles in which he portrayed tough but sensitive young men in films like The Panic in Needle Park and Dog Day Afternoon, and became a star thanks to The Godfather. Pacino’s notes on acting can be mysterious (“The thing about acting is, you don’t really do it and yet it’s real. That’s the phenomenon”), but, considered in light of his work, they mostly make sense. What’s more, he reads deeply into his characters, nowhere more so than the Shakespearean ones, as when he writes of the much-maligned Shylock, “He feels a righteousness because of what was done to him. He’s not a Iago, not a Richard III, or any of the other villains of Shakespeare. There is a touch of the hero in him. He is a survivor.” So, clearly, is Pacino, and we’re fortunate to have this report from a long life on stage and screen.

Fans of Pacino—and students of the actor’s craft—will delight in this gracefully told memoir.